Author Archives: admin

Remembering a dream I had

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Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.

Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.

The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.

Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.

Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.

Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.

I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.

To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.

I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.

Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.

In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.

My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.

Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.

People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.

Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.

Spreading the word

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I just lost a 3/4 written attempt to update thanks, not, to the WordPress iPad app. Fuck you to those who gave me a false security in computer code.

Other than that, I started the day on Facebook and ended up reading this interesting ‘blog post from Barry Crimmins.

Now Barry and I go way back, although he wouldn’t know it or likely remember me. During the first war for oil, waged by the first President George Bush, the Herbert Walker one, I watched Barry at an anti-war rally. It was actually an ill-fated date, in which after the day of protest my would be suitor opted for the pulchritude of my apolitical roommate over our shared political affinity.

Barry was also the force majeure behind comedy at Cambridge’s Ding Ho restaurant, a legendary show that laid the groundwork for the Comedy Studio, my home away from home when Cambridge was my home. I got to work with Barry a couple of times there and afterwards shoot the shit about comedy, politics and upstate New York, where he grew up and I got a college degree.

I’ve always liked his writing. His call for his own excommunication and people to turn their backs on a church whose leadership was at the very least complicit in not stopping child molestation struck a particular chord.

I feel fortunate that not only was I allowed to be a lapsed Catholic, arguably I was raised anti-church. Condemning the bad behavior of priests and the hierarchy that protects itself at all costs is second nature to me.

One thing that Barry’s essay has me reconsidering is my attitude toward the parishioners. I’ve always taken a wide berth in questioning the religious choices of others as none of my business. But I think he is correct in asking people to reconsider supporting an institution with a fetid history and the corruption to let the worst of human behavior continue and, until very recently, unchecked.

To understand my attitude to the church, you have to know my mother.

Two essential things, I think, set Pat apart in my memories: (1) as a mother of five and a schoolteacher, she was a ferocious defender of kids, and (2) she had little patience with phonies and hypocrites. Combine the two, and no doubt if she hadn’t walked away from the church years before, she would have been on cathedral steps with signs and shouts for justice the minute the first molestation scandals broke.

She died condemning the archdiocese of Boston for not outing the pedophiles in it’s ranks and treating them as the felons they are.

Pat’s break with church started well before the scandals, and as the youngest in our family I got the easiest ride where Sunday mass was concerned. Unlike some of my siblings, I never sat in parochial school or had to prove I attended mass by producing from my pocket a copy of the weekly church bulletin. All of my holy sacraments were performed in intimate gatherings among friends in family homes.

I think it started when my dad died. No, i think it started before. As an adult, I once asked my mother if she had anything critical to say about him, because what little she did speak of him was hushed and glowing praise. She smiled and told me that if anything he was “too religious.”

Apart from occasionally wanting to sleep in on Sunday, I think she never bought into the unassailable nature of the men who ran the church and the notion that those mere mortals should be worshipped too. Ironically, she married a man who left the seminary after he enlisted during World War 2.

I learned the word “chippy” from her, as the only noun I ever heard her use for women she remembered from her childhood. It was reserved for the women who accompanied the priests visiting her family’s seaside cottage each summer. As the niece of the coastal area’s Monsignor, she got to see a vacationing side of the men who came to visit him.

Maybe it was one of those memories kids have that aren’t totally accurate, and maybe some of the priests she met were good men who keep their vows. It colored her belief in the leaders, I suspect, though, even if she stuck with the church for many more years.

Later, when she became a widow, her disappointment in the established order of the church further crumbled, when without a man beside her she became an outsider. I don’t know the details of what and when and who exactly, but she remained bitter about her newfound status and unchristian treatment.

As a kid, I was lucky. When the local parish became unbearably reactionary and stodgy in the face of the turmoil of the 70s, a group of families rented space (from Protestants) and arranged for their own folk masses (newfangled service with guitars and pita bread, instead of organs and communion wafers). A round robin was formed where each week a different family or two worked on the theme and arranged for the communion gifts. A Jesuit from Boston College High School drove to the suburbs to say the mass.

Among our neighbors, in an offbeat, mildly revolutionary act, I think Pat found some of the religion and sense of community she craved. Where our parish church was pro-Vietnam and anti-women wearing slacks, this group leaned proudly left and may have been the most sincere Catholics I have ever met. I still remember the fervor and powerful grip of Mr. Boyce’s three-fingered handshake during the sign of peace. The prayers called out and the collection for a sister community in the Ozarks or Appalachia were heartfelt.

For me, it was fun. Where my older brothers and sister were brought up in the formal church, I had my First Holy Communion in a purple dress in my friend Janice’s living room. Penance, or what the cool kids now call Reconciliation, was eye-to-eye with a priest in the Morrissey’s den, cleared of toys and games for the solemn occasion.

It couldn’t last. Shortly after sanctioning the group and threatening to tell Rome, the church called us all back and brought in a hip, young priest who was meant to be more in touch with the community. He wasn’t. My mother stopped going just in time to allow me to refuse Confirmation, the sacrament where I would reaffirm my faith and be seen as an adult by the church.

I remain unconfirmed and unrepentant.

In young adulthood, I became more aware of Pat’s enmity to the church in general and priests specifically. I think my favorite episode came in the aftermath of my cousin’s Holy Communion. A schoolteacher to her last, over coffee and cake, she took exception to the age appropriateness of the priest’s asking a group of seven year olds to describe when they had last felt the savior’s presence in their lives.

The argument on early childhood development versus the lord was epic and ended in an exasperated priest telling her to seek psychiatric and spiritual counseling.

I’ve told the story before of how I learned from my aunt that my mother was pro-choice. If not for the arrogance of ao Catholic doctor at a well-established Catholic hospital booking a legal and routine D and C without asking my mother or explaining why, beyond his decision she shouldn’t have more children, I would never have been born into the hands of a Jewish obstetrician at a city hospital. Thank you, Pat, for exercising your right to choose and refusing that blessed abortion.

Late in life, she talked about Pope John Paul II and how his church was involved with the Nazis. She felt that by virtue of Jewish people being eradicated from Poland there was no way the Catholics couldn’t have known what was going on or downright sympathized with the Nazis. Her head would have exploded when former Hitler youth, Pope Benedict XVI grabbed his throne.

So, today, I sit reading about the church’s marketing campaign to have us lost sheep “come home.” I’ve read what Barry has written, and I appreciate the gift Pat gave me of not taking any of it at face value. I’m comfortably agnostic with atheist leanings, and I try to walk a secular human path of decency.

I have dear friends who believe, and maybe they are right to believe in Jesus, his teachings, the Virgin Mary, and a supreme deity. I honestly don’t know, and i suspect will never have the conviction in my lack of faith like Dawkins or Hitchens.

However, the acts of man, the church with it’s money and corrupt self preservation, I do not believe in them. No manner of explanation or prayer would ever convince me other than it is completely evil to allow a young kid to get raped. Letting it happen again, and again, and again is unconscionable.

Not writing and writing

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I guess it’s summertime and I’m busy going on adventures, like whitewater rafting, walking to the beach and barbecue. And, of course, there is my most recurring adventure, sitting on the couch and getting fat.

I’ve had some ideas for things to write here. I could write about the full on anxiety and trembling I felt whitewater rafting when the full force of my first experience on the Nile came back and I started feeling irrationally and overwhelming phobic. I could write about Dr.Laura and how I learned about her epic fail from a chat with a homeless dude named Larry in Berkeley.

I could write about my experience concocting an evening outing for work that turned into my own little amusing performance art piece in which with a little help from some friends I brought a crowd with some uptight and overeducated folks to a veritable hippie street party. I could write about the mundane, or maybe the way in which I still feel like an abused spouse in the workplace, even as I only get positive reinforcement in this job.

Or, I could do what I’ve been doing and not write.

For over a year, I’ve been naval gazing and hang wringing and other body part manipulating in a pretty unspectacular, boring cave of writer’s block. Someone asked me seriously, genuinely, strongly why do I write, or more why do I feel compelled to write. Further, he told me I didn’t have to write and I certainly didn’t have to validate myself through self-flagellation at a keyboard.

It struck home, and I haven’t gotten full on unstuck. Combine that with the sinking feeling that the books I loved as a little girl are a technology with a cloudy future. Being an author was never an easy row to hoe, now with the state of publishing it seems worse than dirt farming.

This week, or more last week, though, I was reminded by life one of the reasons I do want to write. Not to be all cliched and philosophical at the same time, but sharing stories is kind of what it’s always been about humanity wise.

A good friend, someone who I feel would have been a great friend had I not fled Boston, lost her mom. For the past year or so, she’s been keeping house and cooking meals and taking care of her mother however she needed. She emailed me a few days before when her mom was in a bad state after a stroke and then a series of strokes. The inevitable happened on Thursday.

Now, on the side of the country I left, she’s gone through the busy flurry of wakes and a funeral and having folks back to the house and making food and eating and storing food. No doubt, she’s functioning on autopilot and in the coming months she’ll feel intensely the change in the universe from not having to worry any more about her mother’s fragility and missing the place where her mother used to be.

I have the kernel of the idea about my mother, Pat, and me, and a few shallow chapters on my ‘puter, because story telling keeps us sane and keeps us knowing we aren’t alone. Not only would I get to exercise my demons by writing them down, but just maybe a reader would dig it and breath a little easier.

I can’t do anything to help my friend out but talk on the phone. I told her about my small smoking binge for the months that followed Pat’s funeral. It felt OK when she, having quit years ago, told me she and her brothers had been having a smoke on the stoop. For both of us, I think, there’s something cathartic in knowing someone else did the exact same thing.

The other day, I took a day off of work for no reason and with no plan. Ultimately, I wandered the aisles of Target and Daiso, a Japanese store with housewares and junk. It was relaxing to have absolutely no agenda. I came home with new underpants and various things for the house.

I laughed out loud in one department of a department store. A middle-aged woman and an older woman, crooked from osteoporosis, stood side by side in front of a shelf if empty bins. The older woman was examining a little plastic storage bin, carefully considering the possible purchase. The other woman, who really could only have been her daughter, questioned why she could possibly need it.

“You never can have enough storage, you know.”

The retort was quick and exasperated, “Yes, you can. Especially when you have no where to put it.”

I smiled a friendly head nod, as I passed by them in the aisle.

The dialog and its tone were so familiar, so comfortable. Among friends and strangers, I’m sensitive to all of the daughters and all of the mothers living through the last phase of their relationships. It’s a tough rite of passage, frustrating and rewarding.

On top of losing my mother, there are also a thousand ways in which I remember the Pat I did know and have in my life. I almost wrote on Twitter the other day that I can’t pass doll house furniture without quashing the urge to pick something up for her.

I wish now I could get some of her inspired and surprising creativity.

For example, I know she could help with another thing I could write about–a friend with breast cancer. She’s an unlikely friend, in that we’re not contemporaries (in fact she’s the same age as my uncle) and lives in Washington, DC. Still and all, we are long-distance coworkers who have swapped stories and realized some kinship, including strong-charactered mothers, and sharp, wicked senses of humor that have caused almost as much trouble as laughter.

As the contemporary of my aunt and uncle and from the generation about which Gail Collins writes, she’s straight up first generation feminist and solidly liberal. The pink ribbons, pink everything else and what Barbara Ehrenreich bitches about for its infantilism leaves her flat.

As does the notion that she should be a docile and placid patient, as opposed to the pugnacious fighter in her soul. I pity the poor oncologist or radiologist who doesn’t take the time to explain enough.

I want to send her something, especially post surgery and going into her second chemotherapy treatment, when she’s talking wig shopping and whether to go down to the army base for a $10 head shave from the barber there (apparently that’s a real option). If Pat were here, we could brainstorm. No doubt she’d come up with an off-the-wall scheme or some bizarre conglomeration of bargains and nonsense. Maybe she’d loan her a hat.

At gift-giving moments like this one, I always imagine the crazy, ragtag, assembled over weeks gift basket, which in my memories was colossally large, that Pat put together for a retiring colleague.

She didn’t leave behind blueprints for how to do such projects proud. I need those skills and those plans now, with one friend sick and another grieving.

At the same time, I need to remember all of the fights and frustration, big and small, with Pat or with life, including all of the many indignities she described as holding her back in life. If I remember the thousand things that made her great and the thousand things that made her troubled, i might have a story. I definitely would have a reason to not become complacent,

My life ain’t bad, But, somewhere there is still a gnawing. Maybe the words will escape some day, late to help my friends, but in time for some one else.

I fancy myself a raconteur

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Today, I helped add a little more awkwardness to the world.

One of the many funtabulous, swell things I’ve gotten to do over and over and over again in my daily, pay-checking earning toils is interview people who also want to toil. Lots and lots of jobseekers out there in the world, and coast to coast I’ve had to make with the questions and conversations.

Years ago I got to hear my all time favorite answer ever given to the cliched “Why are you interested in leaving your current position for this job?” The woman being interviewed explained that after the cops had come to her house for the third time for a domestic quarrel complaint they advised her she needed to make some changes. She continued that her current job was so stressful and intense she was forced to work late and would come home exhausted to an angry husband who would fight with her about working late. Hello escalation.

Job interview tip #1: Don’t mention the near arrest.

In all of the interviewing I’ve done or had done to me, I’ve kind of sorted some things. All bristling with management tips and experience I’ve mostly learned interviews suck, but they suck a little less if you have a conversation.

It’s not a conversation, really, but you can try. The problem is the format. Whether it’s television late night, the back of a gossip magazine or a dank interrogation room, the old Q&A is a clumsy o way to keep things moving. I put job interviews alongside interrogations. I’m not into water boarding and like to keep the torture minimal, so if I can get the ball rolling conversationally it seems more humane.

I’ve found, too, that if you can keep someone talking and they get comfortable they say the damnedest things. The violent chick who didn’t get the job that might save her from the police calls piped up after we put her at ease. The dude who once told me he was a “lesbian,” he was kidding, and talked up hanging out with me once he started was way too at a ease. As wAs the young woman who saw my old office and announced her first step in her new job would be to clean it up.

Another fave was the woman who part way through a doubled up interview with my director, a medical doctor, went into excruciating detail about the fun she had watching a new polar bear get loaded into the Stone Zoo. In our meeting afterwards, my director confessed that she stopped listening herself at some point and instead started watching the interviewee’s involuntary tics and tried to guess which psycho-pharmaceutical was responsible.

California hasn’t been as ripe with the forehead smacking interviews. Between the kind of jobs with which I’ve been currently involved and the proximity to a university of some repute, the over the top is more of the insufferable variety.

Today, though, was special, because the conversation I looked for, I pine for, I try so very hard to instigate never quite gelled. It wasn’t my show to emcee, and I let others take the lead. Holy smokes, I didn’t realize job interviews could be so painful. I couldn’t sit still and grasped for some reins to start steering partway into one.

OK, I knew they are almost always painful. These were first, bad date ugly. Stilted would be the discussion.

I learned two things. One, I’m actually not bad at interviewing, I should never ceded the lead. Two, if you never put the person a tad at ease, you get almost no information. I really got to write out a self-help how to book on my wisdom, damnit.

There's a reason they all died there, I think

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I think there’s a reason so many celebrities are found toes up in hotel rooms. Janis, John Belushi, David Carradine. Is there any space on earth as weirdly distant and alien than a hotel room somewhere in the universe.

I’m currently sitting in a bed about 75 miles due south on the scenic coastal highway from my own bed. The occasion is signing up for a workshop for work. Apart from meeting fatigue, waking up extra early to drive that 75 miles and it being the end of the day, I’m just feeling bone tired from being all by my lonesome in that wall-crawling, restless, fidget way hotels bring on in me.

I want to be home. I’m not sure I’m designed to actually learn and think in a conference room. Maybe that sentence should be full stop I’m not designed to learn.

It was actually an interesting day, where I got to see how organizations can walk through getting to a message and a plan for getting it out there into the ether. Communicating and all in important circles. There was even an ex-governor in the room.

Sadly, I’m more voyeur than real playa this time around, and it’s going to be a tough slog in my row-hoeing workday world to use what I learned.

I got back to my room and paced. I took a shower out of boredom. I deep conditioned my hair, because I had an abundance of conditioner and time. I inventoried my miniature toiletries.u

On a regular Wednesday night, I’d check email, scan some news and various websites and maybe write right here. Telly on in the background.

It’s the same here. But it’s not the same.

Here, on the same coast I can hear from my house, faraway from M. whose snoring I can’t hear right now, I’m thinking of hotel rooms and dead famous people. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I’m just as far away from an errant speedball, deadly bump of coke or bag of heroin.

(Of course, such a level of drug use is beyond me, just as elusive as the celebrity I don’t enjoy.)

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm an optimist

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In my life of toiling for a paycheck, things have been heating up organizationally speaking. There’s been some talk of some departments combining, and, therefore, implied slight changes to the status quo. Mostly the status quo is going to hold, as it generally does.

But, I’ve been in the thick of conversations about making plans, and making meetings about making plans, and having conversations about making plans. Mostly, it’s been conversations. I realized something in all of that talking for the sake of talking. I may not be the cynical, pessimistic asshole I think I always thought I was. Nope, my glass is actually half full.

What a horrible realization, self-awareness-wise. I’m actually a beam of sunshine in a cloudy world. OK, maybe not, but there are a lot of folks who are definitely more of a downer than I try to be. Either that or the great mass of folks just enjoy bitching and moaning. Actually, I think that part is definitely true.

This week, I sat in a meeting full of brainstorming-goodness-looking-to-the-future-change-management happy, happy office stuff. At one point in a small group someone who won’t be here in the future (notice given, replacement starting) who wasn’t in the job during a particular time of some change, opined at length about how this person didn’t think we should go through that all again. Come again, you weren’t here, you won’t be here and you’re worried about something that no one said would happen and never actually happened the way you believe? Got it.

It all felt like a great big communal squandering of opportunity.

Enough about them, this post is all about me.

Now, I’ve been fucked over by jobs in the past, and I will be fucked over in the future, I expect. I’ve been battered, bruised, hurt and variously promoted, demoted and fired. Through it all, though, mostly I’ve been employed in some capacity and have had reason to hope that some kind of green would still make it into my bank account. Knock wood and all, given the shit economy, but I haven’t been on food stamps yet.

Neither have any of my co-workers. Actually, I don’t even think any of my co-workers have been fired or faced with layoffs. Pretty much to a person, I think employment has been a bit more velvety smooth than the national average. Leastwise, I haven’t heard too many good stories to suggest otherwise.

What I realized is these folks with a level of comfort and privilege are waiting for the hammer more than I am. Maybe because I’ve been kept down by “the man” at least enough to not exactly have a boot heel on my throat but a thumb under which I’ve been kept, I have perspective. I have a experience predicting where the pain will be, so I don’t waste time imagining where it probably won’t be.

For example, I’m optimistic that they won’t go searching for a giant turd of new leadership. Why? Because I’ve seen giant turds, and the conditions that lead to their hire. I’m not seeing those signs, right now. It all got me impatient with other people bringing the room down with those particular misgivings. I don’t understand pessimism without evidence, I guess.

Of course, in a few months time, who knows. Maybe I’ll be writing up a song of how I guessed so badly and wishing Nancy Pelosi had signed the country up for more weeks of unemployment pay.

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Living smoothly

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The other day, I imagined myself writing in this space to vent about the resumes I have to read at work and advise on what not to do. I didn’t get around to it.

In truth, my resume, job applying advice is very brief — show empathy.

If your prospective employer asks for your name in the subject line of your email, include your goddamn name. When your naming your attached documents, it’s no longer relevant if the names make sense on YOUR computer, they need to make sense on someone else’s. Somewhere in the kit and kaboodle, provide some kind of clue as to why your applying. I ain’t got the time to mine for your gold.

That’s about it. Oh, and save the crazy for after you get the job. Although, folks where I work are kind of digging your advertisement of the goodness of your homemade jam, we may not be laughing with you.

In my personal case, the job has a glamorously worldwide sounding name. It’s not, it’s paperwork locally for the most part. But, good god y’all everyone who has imagined travel or lived abroad thinks that’s enough to establish global bona fides. Do some research about the job, people.

All of the above is preamble to what I want to write about now, social network anger. I got a dose and realized that a whole lot of people are talking but not listening.

Admittedly, in a less than charitable mood, I Twittered and Facebooked about a job applicant that stated his desire to work among folks of “various socioeconomic backgrounds.” I was amused not just by the thought of someone hoping to rub shoulders in the workplace with the strata of American society, but the fact of the matter that where I work is pretty much no melting pot.

In response, I got an earful from a socially networked “friend,” actual close relative, about his own experience with the paperwork of job applications. Truly, I didn’t get it. It was a conversational hijack with a sweeping generalization that wasn’t matching my own experience or current reality.

It was clearly social networking equaling two simultaneous monologs masquerading as dialog. Somewhere I was told we should agree to disagree, but for that to happen we would have had to have been speaking about the same thing.

Of course, the comedian in me was miffed that my punchline was hijacked by a non sequitur.

I’ve noticed that kind of “conversation” happens a lot online.

M.’s coworker ended up blocking people in her Facebook circle, rather than continue to participate in the non-dialog. In her case, she sometimes throws out affirmations and whatnot from her personal New Age-y perspective. Quite possibly not one’s cup of tea, but harmless enough and her belief system.

She got tired of “friends” criticizing her posts or proselytizing their own beliefs.

I totally can’t relate to her naysayers. In my own feeds, I have plenty of folks who don’t believe what I believe. In particular, thanks to comedy, there’s a good amount of 12 steppers. No way can I imagine shitting on someone else’s call to a higher power.

Pretty much, I keep my snarky counterpoint to those contacts encouraging provocation or political dialog. Otherwise, I guess I live the cliche, if you ain’t go something nice to say, shut the fuck up. (Or the comedic corollary, I at least try for something funny.)

Speaking of comedy, I follow a few Twitter feeds of comedians of various levels of fame or success. Some of them go for one-liners, quick, witty observations and other humorous notes. Others keep it much less purposely funny or a bit more personal.

What amazes me is how repetitive the slamming is. For quite a few of them, it would seem especially the ones who share a bit of the personal, there’s a steady-ish stream of “fans” deciding how unfunny they are.

If you’re fan enough to find some comic and start following what they write, why the insults? I really, really, really don’t understand liking someone enough to seek them out, but being contemptuous enough to shit on them.

Life is short and all that.

It used to be that Internet arguments among Usenet readers with a shared interest in common would devolve into anonymous shouting matches and ad hominem attacks. I think I understand the underlying passion and anonymous safety of a good, old-fashioned flamewar.

I almost understand the trickery and prank sensibility that is trolling.

Angry posting among “friends” is another animal. One I don’t comprehend. In social networking either you know people or feel some kind of connection. How did that devolve into contrarianism?

It’s like all of the shifty dark part of the net is taking over the good junk. Makes me kind of nostalgic for a good Usenet argument and Godwin’s Law.

In the end, I just can’t sustain the anger. Maybe it’s as M. claims, we’re doing alright and life is fine and others can’t see it.

Yesterday was sunshine in Napa with four friends. We tried reserves, and Pinots and cabs. We sampled Francis Ford Coppola’s Rubicon, which at $145 a bottle was damn smooth and tasty. The afternoon was lunch and more wine,

M. and I ended the day by wandering SF at night. Finally, in lieu of dinner we shared a banana split at the chocolatier’s that lends it’s name to Ghiardelli Square and headed home.

Maybe he’s onto something with this happiness thing.

Very little from very high

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I wrote the following in the middle of the stratosphere on Tuesday night. Alas, no wifi on the plane, and i only just remembered to hit publish now.

******************************

As I grabbed my iPad and headed cross country, I promised myself I would write a little. Here I am, at the veritable end of my journey, writing just a little.

I just don’t have the writing mojo I used to have or thought I used to have or used to think I had. Sadly, reuniting with writerly friends did nothing to spur me on to feats of literary limping, as is my usual style.

To be fair, the friend who is part drinking buddy, part platonic soulmate who generally makes me feel more than I am and better for having tried than not to have done at all, was quite busy. You gotta forgive a guy for not indulging in deep, penetrating faux-intellectual self indulgence and midnight literary aspirations when he’s mid-nuptials.

On a complete side note, this wedding, his wedding to the soulmate who, I think, he really needs, was an end to an era. Many many many units of time and various locations ago, we somewhat boozily, single without romantic prospects and unsure if we wanted the entanglements of another relationship, promised ourselves to each other, provided the planets aligned and deemed it so.

The main condition was that he would have to hit 40, which, a decade my younger, is still years off for him, and by arithmetic I would be a ripe old 50. We would both have to be single without others on deck or in the wings or any other metaphoric closeness.

Of course, being as I moved across the whole of the United States to be with another guy, I arguably fired the first salvo in the dissolution of our pact. Not to mention, we’ve been as good as married for the past six years or so, cohabiting and all, albeit without the legal paperwork.

(Here’s another completely parenthetical, non sequitur diversion. I just had my bodily fluids churn and various muscles clench in fear in the middle of the stratosphere in the middle of this jet in the middle of a flight. I have never heard my name over the loud speaker, and I have never been asked to ring my call button. Until now.

Once I got over my instinctual panic for some kind of horrible announcement, I gave myself a quick frisk and realized my pocket was now unbuttoned. Yup, a new privilege of American Express membership. My name can be read off the card as it sits on the floor of the toilet of an airplane.)

It was a fun wedding especially in that I got to see some folks I rather like. But, I do admit, I’m not a fan of the wedding in general. I don’t know what is missing somewhere in my cerebral cortex, because I simultaneously understand and respect the ceremony, and I don’t.

Why the need for ritual and public promises? I totally get being with someone, and increasingly I now understand the legal rights marriage bestows. Hell, wedding rings even make sense to me, even though I resent their history of marking chicks as chattel.

I have performed publicly. I have performed publicly in a state of undress. I have performed publicly in a few U.S. states and one foreign country. Yet, the idea of standing up there and telling a crowd or even just a smattering of folks what they already know–namely that I planning on sticking with M.–is incompressibly frightening to me. Like stage fright with a soupçon of agoraphobia.

My friends did it twice, once in her home town and then again in his. I think I’d be weakly cowering in the corner if I ever have to do that.

Of course, my eldest brother outed my being the weak link to my uncle. As many might assume, he had thought it was M. who was the holdout. I think it’s a little bit of both of us ducking the party more than the commitment.

Romantically, on phones separated by 3,000 miles, M. suggested that maybe we’d have to do it if only to put the familial nagging on both sides and across two continents to rest.

Is nagging a valid reason? Probably as good as any, like my desire to have M. enforce a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, when my body has started to have enough of this world, or M.’s to have me chuck his ashes into the sea.

Then there’s the nice part of our togetherness and all. Who better to stay with than the one with whom you’ve made a happy life?

Meanwhile, while I pondered all of that, I got to see parts of my family and relics of my old surroundings. I’m not calling my family relics, we’re all getting older, but not that old.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to see the chunk of family or friends that are stressful. That’s another worry about a wedding. I imagine there is no elegant way to leave out people who’ve seen you as a bare ass naked baby, even if you would like to write on an invitation “only show up if you plan on not being too crazy or a total dick.”

I’m pretty sure Emily Post and Ms. Manners wouldn’t even waste the ink explaining why that ain’t done.

Then, there’s a whole other group of folks that I wouldn’t be able to send an invite to that read, “stay home and enjoy your own life, nothing to see here” to avoid their making a fuss or having to find an outfit or driving or getting a babysitter or having to leave the house at all on my account.

I have thrown good parties in the past and have made myself the center attention, but weddings seem so compulsory. They should be just as optional and more fun than when I used to let people get drunk on my back deck before watching July 4 fireworks from the Cambridge side of the River Charles. Has anyone ever felt that way about attending a wedding?

Better to keep it small. If only I can convince M. (and a passel of other people) that two might just be enough.

Coming home?

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I don’t have a house here. The places I have lived are now occupied by strangers, sold to the highest bidder. Still and all, I was Massachusetts born and bred.

And, now I’m back again. I’m lying in my nephew’s bed, a bed in which I have never slept. He’s away at school, just to clear up that we’re not the sort of family you see in newspapers, shaking your head and wondering how does that ever, ever happen. No, my nephew is safe, and I lack the predatory spirit.

I’ve never been in this bed, because punk ass little sister that I am, when I moved out of state I returned usually with M. in tow. My big sister got this room, while encoupled or ensconced as M. and I are, we got the bigger room, the veritable suite where my older nephew sleeps.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. I think it’s because I am in a bed and a room in which I’ve never lain my head. Definitely not the familiar surroundings you hear the cliches drop as “home.” I am with family and very comfortable and grateful for their hospitality; it just ain’t home.

As if to greet me, Logan Airport had a special surprise as I landed in the old, hometown airport. I swear to fucking god on high and all of the saints and spirits, that I saw the meanest boy I ever dated on the escalators.

For a split second, I thought about shouting his name, in order to watch him turn his head in my direction. Then, as I rose up on my escalator and he sunk metaphorically and literally downward on his, I could flip him off. Perhaps a double-handed, two middle fingers raised salute with a lot of wagging and emphatic gesturing.

I opted for dignity and not ever engaging with him again and silently rode up the moving stairs.

I sometimes feel badly that I actually, without kidnapping or water boarding, dated him for so long. It’s hard to explain the mental illness to the very nice, polar opposite man and life I have now. There should be an acronym like “AA” for explaining a stage in a woman’s life when her ultimate choice was a bad one.

The acronym would also help provide the evidence that the hatred I feel is unusual but sane. I reserve it for one person. I’m pretty sure any other guy I dated I would have greeting across the escalators civilly. Hell, I later helped one get a job and then was a good colleague at work.

Best of all of seeing this ghost the moment I landed “home?” He was looking overweight, dumpy and old. A look wholly incompatible with the sun, lemon trees, boogie boarding, enjoyment having life I have now with M.