Live and learn

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Dee-Rob

What a week it’s been for the old ego. Here I am a bit more ragged and a bit more paranoid and a bit more raw and sensitive and wounded and pathetic. And, here I am stronger and smarter and perfectly fine.

It all began on a day when I consented to not just listen to others but to go out of my way to solicit their opinions about me, myself and I. An idea born from the bowels of hell, doubtless, or at least from the sewers and muck and mire of man’s meager experiences.

They call it a 360 review. It’s the workplace, salt mine, hell zone, productivity, performance management equivalent of “Do I look fat in these jeans?” You line up a jury of your peers and your not peers and a professional, who voluntarily does that kind of thing for money, interviews them. The questions seem to range from, “Management doesn’t think she sucks, but what do you say?” to “”Seriously, tell me something you hate about her.”

Maybe there were some constructive things in there. I lost sight when the report turned personal.

Here’s what really got to me, though. I didn’t learn anything. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. But I did remember all of the emotions of being a kid, all of the stupid struggle almost anyone with any soul at all remembers.

The report said that the people surveyed thought I was smart, creative, quirky, funny, a good writer and interesting. Yeah, on some days, I manage OK. The report also revealed that some people don’t understand me, and I bug the shit out of some.

Wow. Revelatory. I find myself growing already.

The bitch is, at the suggestion of my manager, and in an open-minded moment of intellectual weakness when it sounded like a valuable experience, I asked exactly those people who I don’t really get along with to participate in my personal witch hunt.

Here’s a fucking bulletin: there are reasons we don’t get along and they ain’t all related to my being a flawed human being.

The same people who don’t like me at the age of 48, are the ones who in junior high told me I was weird. The girl who wanted to marry and stay in our town and have babies and just be normal, subtext unlike me, is now a woman in my office with the perfect nuclear family in a suburban home who works part time for the extra cash to ensure a model life. She doesn’t hesitate to point out to me today my flaws, just like her doppelgänger back then.

My whole life I’ve wondered why folks with the most boring lives are the ones who proselytize others to be like them the hardest.

Every conversation with her reminds me of my junior high crush crush on Greg Maharis. In addition to being cute and well-dressed, he smoked cigarettes and exuded cool. He also looked past my awkward, uncomfortable, unfeminine, uncoordinated, inelegant, ungainly teenage self, and we had some great conversations. Other, prettier girls in my class couldn’t comprehend why he talked to me at all.

Two of my junior high triumphs were via Greg. In another class, when some twat started making fun of me and doing what junior high girls do, he stood up for me and declared me “cool.” My friends who were there and had overheard the conversation in hushed silence assured me of the moment’s epic nature. Then, on a fateful spring evening he crossed the abyss of the gym floor separating guys from gals and asked me to dance.

My suburban colleague in my grownup world today is all of those girls who never understood why Greg would talk to weird me.

The other people who don’t get me today are the competitive ones who didn’t get me then. My whole dorky life, I had an easier time talking to the adults around me. Apart from my close friends, my peers weren’t thinking or reading or interested in the same shit as me. Other kids didn’t read the newspaper, for example, except to cut out items for a current events assignments.

I found myself in conversation with teachers and Blue Bird troop leaders and moms. I like hearing other viewpoints and stories. In adulthood, one of my good friends was almost slack jawed as her own mother told me the alternative, risqué version of her family’s journey from Hungary. A version she had never, ever heard.

Apparently, in today’s modern office I’m a self-promoting douche who curries favors with the higher ups by horrors of horrors, engaging in conversation.

Funny how none of the people deriding me for talking with our president gave a shit that I’m also friends with my buddy who runs the facility. Uppity I very well may be, but I’m equal opportunity in my talking with interesting people. It’s not self-promotion if people like talking with you and seeking you out.

I’m older by a week and wiser not at all. My journey of self discovery told me what I already know.

And for whichever narrow mind labeled me as “immature” and hopes that I grow out of my traits — Sorry, dude, it’s only going to get worse. I refuse to “act my age,” dress like you, stay quite, act appropriate or conform to what world order you deem correct. My job is to to fuck up your order. The older I get the louder I get.

Me, my friends and my tribe, we’re the crazy ones. The disrupters. Artists and dreamers. Our fun is to speak out of turn.

I will never be able to explain to you why a good friend insisted on wearing girls patterned socks with the uniform of a bailiff, a court officer of the Massachusetts State House, and face getting reprimanded. You can’t understand the friends who walked away from solid jobs for love and for travel and adventure. It’s beyond your understanding that what you label as a “normal” life leaves many of us cold or scared shitless.

We don’t want what you have. And you can’t have what we want.

And, here’s the part that I think you can’t stand. People like me. They like my friends and our kind just fine. They seek us out, promote us, thank us and befriend us. They also hate us, fire us and shun us in equal measure. Same as they do for the regular folks, like you, also in equal measure.

But, we have a lot more fun.

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M. and an Impala

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Dee-Rob
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What the hell am I?

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Dee-Rob

In a timely coincidence, this image has been making the meme rounds in Facebook and whatnot:

 

I don’t know the exact source of this version of the list, but it comes from this article by Linda Kreger Silverman.

It’s timely because I just got the results back from a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Happy to say this time around it was paid for by work, but I’m still all working and employed and shit. Unlike the last official “personality assessment” on my permanent record this one was all warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, turns out I have a personality. Of sorts.

Here’s the timely of the timely part — heretofore, I tested as INTP. I totally have thought of myself as a giant, big old, introverted “I.” I love being alone. I love processing shit my own way in my own time. Better a couple. of great friends than a crowd, yada, fucking, yada.

Then, round about a decade ago, probably longer, I decided to come out of shyness with a vengeance. Now I totally dig that Carl Jung wasn’t saying introversion is the same as shyness, but I never got “my energy,” as the pop psych crowd would have it, from crowds. Holding back seemed like a fine response to life.

Only thing was, I had journals and private writings. I had words I wanted to say, thoughts rattling in the brain pan. The older I got the more I realized that the world was going ahead without me.

Like a terrible version of the crazy that was G. Gordon Liddy overcoming fear by eating a rat and tying himself to a tree in a lightning store, I took an adult ed class in stand up comedy. To overcome a fear of public speaking, to bring my writing public, to speak out, to shake my own personal status quo, to step up and out, I thought going on stage would be a good idea.

I almost puked and shat myself the final night of class, when we stood behind a mike at an actual comedy club. I didn’t try again for two years, when I screwed up the courage and took another class.

Ultimately, I whacked away at it for a while and got comfortable(ish) on stage. Comfortable enough to combine most sane people’s two biggest fears, getting naked and standing alone on stage with nothing but my jokes. The butterflies and/or gurgling fear of evacuating my bowels stopped.

I have no scientific proof, but I feel like I took the skills acquired on stage to other settings. The stage and writing cliche is that I found my voice.

Turns out that voice had other things to say besides jokes. When I moved west and interviewed for a job, I was outspoken and direct and more outwardly reaching than I remember being back east. Whatever made me get in stage sunk in and stuck

So the other day, I fired up the interwebs in my workplace and took the Myers Briggs dealio on account of some professional coaching I’m doing. Well, I’m not coaching. I’m subjecting myself to a little coaching action on account of wanting to be a better person and cog and all.

Lo and fucking behold, my trusty reliable “I” is now and extroverted “E.” This time around the test says I’m ENTP.

I don’t know how the hell it happened, but I turned into somebody else.

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Playing with stop motion animation

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Dee-Rob

Little, plastic animals from the zoo…

 

Lion puppets from our pass through Hong Kong

 

 

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If I never been born

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Dee-Rob

I totally missed my usual Ides of March tribute to my dear, old Pat. If she had seen this March’s birthday, she would have been 83. She’s never that far from my thoughts, Pat, mostly when I’m doing something wacky.

Recently she’s been in my thoughts, because while we never specifically talked about birth control–hell I’m still waiting for someone to take me aside and explain the facts of life–I think she’d have much to say about Rick Santorum, the Catholic church and the country’s “progressive” conversations on contraception that will ensure we move back to circa 1956.

Seriously, the national dialog has backslid into a parallel universe where medicine hasn’t changed and women are just gals waiting on husbands to save them from spinsterhood or sluttiness.

For some reason, I flashed back over 30 years to a classic Pat moment of logic clashing with the status quo.

I’ve written before about a certain friend I had back from junior high to high school past college into adult life. For ease of reference, I’ll call her Sally Mae. Now old Sally Mae caused a great deal of friction between my mater and me. Pat never liked her, and I didnt really understand until I got all growed up and had problems of my own with her.

One of the ironic aspects of Sally Mae’s and my friendship was how her mother always thought of me as a bad influence. I was a special kind of bad influence as far as school kids go. I got pretty good grades in the highest level classes. At the time I didn’t swear or drink, and my biggest hobby was reading.

Still and all, Sally Mae’s Ma didn’t trust me. She didn’t cotton to my book learning. In retrospect, I also think she thought my vocabulary was kind of uppity, which was maybe understandable given that my 12-year-old self knew more words than her. She bristled like a wet cat one of the first times I was in their house and asked where there books were. I had never been in a house without any book shelves.

Non sequitur alert: I just thought of a downside of dating in the age of tablet computers. How the hell can you just someone new if their bookshelf is virtual? You’d never have the early warning of standing in an apartment and coming upon an entire collection of Ayn Rand.

In addition to distrusting my precocious self, Sally Mae’s Ma was suspicious of my mother, because she worked and by necessity left us alone some of the time. Not for very long, mind you, since Pat was a school teacher precisely because it let her be home when her kids were.

Like a few people in our town, I think Sally Mae’s mother would have been more comfortable if instead of raising us kids to be smart and take care of ourselves, Pat just found another husband and settled herself down.

Now when I look back at that time in my life, I realize that my mother probably didn’t dislike Sally Mae as much as our fights might have indicated otherwise. Nope, I think she just knew that the family of my bestest best friend was more conservative, more bigoted and more narrow than anyone I had known to date. And by god or by nagging, she had to try to protect me from my choice in friends.

All of this relates to the current state of women’s choice and contraception through one particular day, a day in which my mother came home from the grocery store spitting with rage. Pat was apoplectic. Purple with anger. All kinds of heated. She could barely sputter out the reason.

Pat had run into Sally Mae’s mother at the store. Over the aisles of canned goods and produce they had an interesting tête-a-tête.

Now getting back to my being a bad influence and my whole family being suspect, the ironic twist is how much trouble Sally Mae and her brothers were able to attract. Their mother worried about the evils in the outside world, but overlooked the demons under her roof. For example, her darling daughter used me as a foil to hide that at 15/16 she was dating a 20+ hippie with his own apartment and van. Her special friend was a friend of her oldest brother.

Today, at the age of 48, my oldest brother still wouldn’t let me date one of his friends, let alone spend the night at his apartment or drive around in his van.

At 19 one brother in Sally Mae’s family got his girlfriend pregnant.

A mother of three boys herself, Pat, in the grocery store aisles bumped into Sally Mae’s mom and offered her sympathy for the trouble in which the kids had found themselves. I wish I had a transcript of what went down after that, but I know Pat came home enraged.

What I do know is that Sally Mae’s mother brushed aside any notion of trouble and started talking about the upcoming wedding. And, Pat, logical, unconventional, and now I realize radical Pat, told her that they shouldn’t ruin their lives. They shouldn’t marry so young, because they “had to.” The kids had choices and as the adult, Sally Mae’s mother should know that and help them make the right choice.

Words were exchanged. Much more than that, I don’t know. I’m almost certain my mother’s sanity and morals were both brought into question.

The wedding happened. So did the inevitable divorce.

Thanks to my mother’s politics, or practicality, Sally Mae’s mother took a closer watch of me. Nonetheless, her daughter lost her virginity years before I did. (Cruelly and sadly, Sally Mae told stories about me, implying to our friends that I had done all of the things that were in fact her secrets. Who knows what she told her mother.)

Now, 30 years later or so, it’s stunning to me that this conversation is still happening. Instead of more choices, we have the same or less. And narrow-minded people still get away with calling women sluts.

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The story I meant to tell

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Dee-Rob

Arghhh. I just began some navel-gazing, introspective, intellectual vomit. Then I remember that I might be the only person who ever reads this page, and I didn’t want to read that kind of boring shit.

So I scratched the dandruff off my head and remembered the thing I meant to write about a month or so ago. God, no wonder I feeling like I’m getting older, I keep letting time slip by me.

To whit, the story. There’s one great thing I love about traveling, and maybe it could be true the next town over, but it’s definitely true when you are far away, no one’s talking your language and every thing feels strange, foreign if you will. It’s when your brain sort of gets into the place where your normal routines just don’t apply, and your willingness to do anything is expanded canyon wide.

The best travel stories are the ones in which the teller knows for a brief flicker the rules weren’t for him, but invincibility was.

Obviously, I have one of those stories.

Penang is an island state of the coast of the mainland of Malaysia. Not far off the coast, mind you, there’s a bridge. Parts of the area are as over overdeveloped as a place that’s been trod as part of a trade route since the 15th century can be. But other parts are wilder with narrow winding roads and hills green with rain forest-y overgrowth.

Thanks to the narrow, winding roads, and maybe a island vibe of not entirely giving a fuck, the locals are repudiated throughout the country as the worst drivers around. The local paper’s stories of traffic gore kind of bear out that reputation. Alongside the usual vehicles, there are swarms and swarms of folks on tiny motorcycles, slightly more roadworthy than scooters, warning in and out of the traffic havoc.

It probably means something that both M. and I come from places that have renowned bad drivers. At least his home state doesn’t have the equivalent of Massholes, like mine.

Anyway, whenever I’m there, between looking the wrong way when crossing the road, on account of that driving on the left thing, and the nutty drivers, I figure I might get picked off in the streets.

On the other hand, we’re in vacation mode. Nothing can touch us.

Near our hotel there was a network of women handing out flyers for a manicure, pedicure, reflexology, massage, whatever you want we got kind of place. Actually, it was four places, and there was one woman who we kept seeing in front of a different place every day. Turns out she owned all four places, and, while to the tourists they might have seemed like different places, for her they were part of a continuum.

One day, walking across the street from one of the places with time in our hands, an older woman called to us the usual sales pitch. We called back does she take credit cards, because we had no cash. She said, “yes.”

One thing I’ve figured out from traveling. — if you are in a tourist area and seem agreeable to spending cash, a good chunk of the time the proprietor of a business or her staff will agree with you. There is time enough to sort out the negativity, and from the outside they just want you in the door. “Sorry, cash only,” doesn’t get you in the door.

Tricked again, we entered the cash only business. And the old woman who brought us in was an affable problem solver. She turned right to M. and told him not to worry he should start on his foot massage, she would simply take his ‘wife’ on the back of her motorcycle, and we’d go to the ATM. She called it her “moto,” and given that she was approaching or had surpassed 60, I actually didn’t realize what she meant at first.

With a borrowed helmet on my head, I sweatily clutched her matronly love handles and headed down the road. Even though I couldn’t completely understand her Chinese accented words over the roar of the engine, I gathered that she was going to take a couple of back roads to keep us out of traffic.

Check. I’m on the back of a motorcycle, driven by a stranger on some back alleys of an urban area on and Asian island.

In retrospect that could have gone awry.

I laughed when I came back and told someone the story. She reacted, “Oh my god, there could have been people waiting down the alley or outside the ATM.” For all I knew, it could have been a ruse to mug a tourist.

That had never occurred to me. I was thoroughly in the travel headspace where you go with the flow and everything works out. Here I am to testify.

I wonder if my demise will be in a foreign back alley some day. I have to admit, I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.

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Crabbin'

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Dee-Rob
Crab, listen now and listen good. You’re going down.  Me, my pole, my snare and sheer will are coming after you.
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Trying to get back on the horse, or some other cliche

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Dee-Rob

I’ve been mildly and definitely unhealthily obsessed with one person recently. Mostly because she’s an idiot, or boring, or possibly worst of all, both.  
 
I like to play a game in my head — would you rather be stupid or boring? I’ve always wanted to be stupid. Many people might say I have undoubtedly succeeded in that goal.  
 
Imagine the happiness of always living up to people’s expectations, given that they don’t expect much. But, boring, dull, plodding, conventional, plain, run-of-the-mill? Where’s the fun in that?  
  
My obsession has extorted me to act more “normal.” Apart from having my itty bitty feelings hurt, seriously, I did, I kind of just wanted to punch her. It’s a curse, I think, that mainstream folks who meet me feel compelled to give me solid advice like be more normal. Apart from missing the obvious note that I don’t have any desire to be like them, they want me in their camp.  
 
Why? I can’t imagine. I’d truly be a shitty foot soldier in their regimental army.  
 
I had an epiphany brought on this week not just by the woman over whom I obsess, but an equal character who was giving M. unsolicited advice. The aha moment was that a lot of people around our age suck. They suck in a very specific, very boring way.  
  
Here’s the breakdown. 20 year olds, your average young adult set, know how to have fun. Pretty much, drinking, fucking, eating when theyre hungry, getting their first apartments, hanging out, learning how shit works. They are annoying as fuck, because they think they have a lot of answers that they in fact don’t, but they got the fun part down or at least know how to try new things.  
 
Early, mid-30 somethings are maybe a sweet spot. The douchebaggery of 20+ has mellowed, but the going out on a Thursday night, because that’s when the weekend starts, or renting a vacation cabin with relative strangers is still doable. Plus, by then with a tad more security and disposable income, there are many more fun things to do.  
  
And, the seniors, so fucking many of them now are partying it up like life really does begin at 60. I know someone who got her first tattoo at 65. Other folks are taking college classes, traveling, selling the family homestead to keep it light and flexible. I’ve had some great conversations that basically have the subtext of fuck it, I’m old, it’s now or never and let the assholes judge.  
 
What’s missing in that chronology are my peers — lets say maybe hovering around 40 on up to 50 something. Sweet Jesus on a Popsicle stick, we, as a demographic, suck.  
 
The object of my obsession fits neatly in the group. She has a list of foods longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s dick plus another 7 feet that she can’t eat. They are fattening, bad for you, too inorganic, stomach upsetting, have too many ingredients, weird, unknown, new, contain alcohol, cholesterol, fat, sugar, chemical additives, and are gassy, bloated, rich, poor, and just out and out bad. The only thing safe is salad – no dressing – and a cracker washed down with water no ice. Followed by a sliver so narrow of dark chocolate that more calories are burnt in the shaving of the morsel than gained in the eating. Further calories are burnt in the endless recriminations and self-flagellation for tempting the fat fates with such a taste.  
 
I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about someone else’s food hang ups, but by god I wish those people so obsessed would shut the fuck up about it. You know what I don’t need when I’m grabbing an afternoon Diet Coke and M&Ms? Someone reminding me I’m going to die.  
  
 
Better yet, maybe with the bloat and the chemicals, I’m actually puffed up enough like a marshamallow that I’m not as wrinkled as the sour pusses of my peers. Chemical preservatives keep me young. That and the blood of virgins.  
 
I guess the whole point is, why are the miserable, dull folks in the world trying to enlist? They should all stay home and frown over a careful, tepid broiled chicken breast. It leaves more for me and my kind to enjoy 
 

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Maybe it was a mid-life crisis

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Dee-Rob

Ahhh, the weekend of the fourth of July. So full of memories for me. There were childhood summers at the beach, bonfires and fireworks.

In more recent memory, there was what stands as my favorite work story to date — the epic saga of is she crazy or ain’t she, and might she really ever stab anyone? It was a warm July 2 or 3, much like the one I am enjoying today, in which I agreed to haul my ass up to Marblehead, MA, a lovely, well-heeled town by the sea, and meet with a psychologist to take a psych test to determine what I already knew — I’m neither violent nor crazy.

It was a lovely chat we had, the therapist and I, about writing and comedy, Lenny Bruce, shivs and non-conformity. Then, I quietly answered questions on a worksheet meant to elicit my mental state. I didn’t need a therapist, but turns out the kick in the ass (or the kick out the door) by my employer was just what I needed.

About nine months after the “layoff” as I politely refer to my termination, as sanctioned by the lawyers and paperwork, I pointed my old Beetle convertible west. And, seven years after the trip to Marblehead, here I am about as west as you can get relaxing by another ocean.

Meanwhile, I still have friends and family back east, who I miss, of course. A group of them with whom I try to reunite (is that what reunion means?) when I’m back for the occasional Christmas, had an impromptu gathering at our chosen restaurant. By the wonders of technology that barely existed when we first became friends, we chatted on cell phones, restaurant east to highway-driving west. Turns out I had interrupted what Steve referred to as avoiding what Socrates implied was a worthless life. In Braintree that night, my friends and contemporaries were drinking wine and talking about where their lives had led and what should happen next.

The best part was that as they passed the phone around, two different friends told me to check in with one of the others. Each was worried about the other needing to figure out some fun in our middle-aged lives.

Around the same time period, a friend I had met through comedy approximately a thousand year’s ago back in Massachusetts at a place called “Angie’s Clams” started a blog. The blog, called “The Year of Living Joyously,” is about her own experiment in rethinking her life (now in L.A.). I’m not the least bit down with the Abraham-Hicks stuff, it causes my skeptical meter to channel off the charts, but I can dig the desire to shake up the status quo.

All of this stuff got me thinking about myself. Really, just about anything could trigger me thinking about myself. That’s how I roll.

Where, though, would I be, what would I be doing if I stayed back in Cambridge in my old condo? Would I have gotten another job much like the one I had? Would I have done something else? Would my liver have survived the no-doubt late nights at comedy clubs with cigarettes and beer?

It’s unknowable.

What I do know is that I left. I came to California without a job. Then I got one, a cushy one. I came to California unsure about the guy who I spent months with on the telephone, but we decided to give co-habitation a try. Now, we own a cute, airy ranch near the beach together. In absolute truth, I think, the risk-benefit skewed way, way out of my comfort zone. I did it anyway.

In my self-examined life, taking that flyer, packing up the car with clothes and driving away was just what I needed. Or maybe I just needed to make myself do something so extreme that every nerve ached and every fiber of irrational fear and anxiety shivered.

Today, I’ve met people who may as well be from another country or planet, and I appreciate their outlook in a way I never expected.

Sure, California has a deserved rep for shallowness, wine and hot tubs. I have no doubt at all that the empty phrase “Have a nice day” first was uttered in this neighborhood. I think it’s the temperate weather that causes a special kind of vacuousness.

At the same time, however, people here know how to enjoy things more than I ever encountered in the East. I can’t think of one person I know now that doesn’t have at least one, if not a dozen, outside interests that they actively pursue. It’s exemplified for me in the president of my actual job’s signing up for our softball team. He’s not just the president, he’s not just an intellectual far, far, far more than an athlete, he’s a dude who is literally retirement age by all definitions. But, the man ain’t afraid of doing something just for fun or getting tagged out at third.

If I had stayed in Massachusetts, even if I stayed working among academics, I never would have cracked a beer on a picnic table at a suburban park with a former dean of a major university just as they turned the lights out for the night. That I know.

I wouldn’t own two wetsuits and a skateboard (admittedly, I suck and can’t ride it, especially on our undeveloped town’s shitty roads). I wouldn’t pick fresh lemons from our backyard whenever I need a splash of citrus. I wouldn’t wake up to M.’s having made fresh coffee and smilingly serving breakfast in bed. Maybe I never would have tried Dungeness crab or co-hosted a Chinese New Year’s party in which we served a full roasted pig, ugly head and all.

Nothing is perfect, and I still kick myself almost each and every day for not writing more or doing more with writing. Work is still a necessary grind to keep the bills at bay. I still wrap myself up with worry and doubt, especially of the insecure, self-doubt variety. I’m hauling some extra tonnage and for the first time in my life my stomach rolls over my waistband. (I’ve always been big-boned, as they euphemistically say, built low to the ground like a fire plug. Blessed I was, though, with a flat stomach, which I TRULY miss both bitterly and wistfully.)

If I had never left Cambridge, all of the above would likely still be true. The difference would be road trips to Napa, boogie boarding, amazing food, conversations I didn’t know I would have and a relationship that seems like it’s going to stay. It was a risk worth taking.

(And, if M. ever reads this entry, yes, I’ll stop “blaming you for dragging me west,” as you called it. But, if a major earthquake hits, all bets are off.)

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Doing my part

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Dee-Rob

For the six people who my visit, check out my friends and help the viral video cause:


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