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I wrote this note to the mysterious mistaken secret admirer (on the back is a picture of a sad looking bulldog). I drew and decorated a simple map of the neighborhood with a dotted line leading from my house to young Emma's house. I clipped the love note we got here the other day to the two and have taped them onto my front porch where I hope they will be seen by any furtive heartsick surveillance. 
My friend Bruce and I theoretically should talk about sailing, but instead we've been talking about music. It turns out we have overlapping tastes. He just introduced me to the music of a dobro player named Jerry Douglas, and I've been listening to one of his albums for the last couple of days, mesmerized.
(Actually, to be technical, I've been listening to a cassette tape. Remember those? Listening to it reminds me of some of what I've lost converting to digital music; there is definitely a diminishment in sound quality when you compress something into mp3, and listening to this analog recording I find all this richness in the string sounds, the texture of the instruments that somehow deepens the sound. You get melody on mp3, but there's something flat about it. I'd forgotten until I started listening to this cassette tape.)
Bruce also reminded me about a guitarist I listened to years ago, a guy named Michael Hedges. It's great to remember how much I like the acoustic richness of stringed instruments: well-played guitar, mandolin, dobro, cello, upright bass. It's like running into an old friend you haven't seen for years, or rereading a favorite book and finding yourself surprised to rediscover the parts you've forgotten.
Remember the "secrret admirer" note I got a while back? There was another one, tucked into the mailbox, yesterday. Alas, it contains very damaging evidence that I am not the intended recipient.
I don't know who Isaac or Emma are. There's a young blonde girl up on Neighbor's street a couple of blocks away who is named Emma. I'm not sure how Isaac could think she lives at my house. My housemate's name could possibly be stretched to sound something like "Emma" but that's a long shot.
I think we'll need to leave a note for Isaac telling him he's got the wrong house. Maybe I'll include a map to Emma's house. I'll keep you posted.
The Happy Feminist wrote about her experience of people reacting to her ambition with distaste. I'm very interested in that take because I've thought a lot about ambition. I've had the opposite experience.
I'm not ambitious.
What's interesting about saying that is the reaction I get from people. It's equivalent to the reaction that I would get if I said, "I'm not pretty." You're not allowed to say it. People respond as though I'm insulting myself. They want to comfort me and reassure me that I'm okay.
I don't think it's a loaded statement. I don't think I'm putting myself down when I say that I'm not ambitious. But it's really strange to see how people contort the word to try to rearrange it. "Oh, of course that's not true! You ARE ambitious, I know it. You just measure it differently. You're ambitious in a different way than most people. You're not traditionally ambitious, but you're definitely ambitious. You're MORE ambitious than people who care just about their career."
The definition of "ambitious" is "having a strong desire for success or achievement." We traditionally use it to mean a focus on professional milestones and a particular level of power or influence in a career. That's the meaning I'm using it in when I say I'm not very ambitious. It seems to me to be a statement of fact. I don't measure my success or my self-esteem that way. My sense of self doesn't come from my job title. I like work, and I set goals, and I like to earn the respect of my colleagues, and I don't like to be bad at things. I think I'm pretty talented, pretty smart, pretty capable. I like the feeling of influencing people, although I think I do that best in social and informal settings, through personal storytelling and one-on-one contact. But I'm not motivated by a strong desire for success or achievement. And I don't feel like I'm being socially unacceptable by saying I'm not ambitious.
And yet somehow it makes people very uncomfortable. People act like I'm debasing myself to say it. I think you can be ambitious without being talented, or happy. And I think you can be talented, and happy, without being particularly ambitious. I certainly have goals and targets I set for myself. But they're not the primary way I measure the quality of my experience. I think this is unusual, especially for someone who has had a lot of encouragement in a fairly elite educational system. It's my peers who go through the strangest contortions to stretch the word "ambition" to apply to the way I'm choosing to live my life. I'm happy without the label, though. But unlike the Happy Feminist I find that people don't want to let me shed it.
I want to read a biography of Ben Franklin. Is there one that's really good?
Also, I might be ready to read some Aristotle. Where should I start?
We're all snobs, I guess. And I know we're all hypocrites. So I don't know why I get so steamed by other people's snobbery. I do, though. I hold it against them, even if it doesn't affect me much. My own snobbery I call "discernment." But in other people it seems so ugly and blind. I need to be better about eradicating my own ridiculous rules and categories about other people before I begrudge other people theirs. But I'm not that advanced yet, so I'm going to gripe.
A woman friend of Neighbor's, who was at the shower yesterday, loves her dearly. It's a sweet, fierce love, and Neighbor revels in it. But a side effect of this woman's love is a strong interest in Neighbor's friends and relations -- a protective scrutiny, a self-appointed task of evaluating whether these other hangers-on are worthy of Neighbor's special attention. It's pretty transparent and maddening to both 517 and I. Maybe it's more maddening because she doesn't seem to think very highly of either of us, and if she talks to us at all it's to run us through a conversational obstacle course designed to test our merits in the areas she cares about. She does not feign interest in any topics outside of this scope.
517 and I egg one another on in a half-joking hostility toward The Snob. This vexes Neighbor, who loves her, and who wants us to love her, too. We talk about her at dinner from time to time. My official stance is that I can tell The Snob loves Neighbor very much, and I know they have a rich friendship, and I'm glad that she takes such an interest in Neighbor. She's smart, interesting, talented. But part of me is still steamed. It's offensive to be screened so overtly. Do I jump through her hoops to gain her approval so that we can move past the screening stage? I probably should, but the adolescent in me doesn't want to play her game, and keeps the parts I think she'd most approve of deliberately out of view. And it offends me on behalf of Neighbor. What kind of friend would have so little deference to a friend's judgment? How can she really respect Neighbor if she seems to think her friends and relations are of dubious merit unless they make it through her filters?
I make nice and stay out of the way, and then grumble with 517 privately. This doesn't seem like the ideal solution.
This morning I woke up hungover, and a little sheepish about my night last night. And once I was up I checked in with a friend who is very sad, and spent some time talking about the current crisis in his life. And then I realized I was running behind, and scurried myself into the shower and a pretty skirt and headed off to the restaurant, late. On my way there I hoped some of my lieutenants would have arrived and sorted through flowers and nametags, but on the drive the flower person called me, lost, looking for directions. "Also," she said, "I have jars but no flowers." Okay, so I'm arriving alone, not early, with no decorations. Yikes.
When I was looking for a place to park I saw the mother in law and her sister standing outside of the venue, waiting for someone. Ack. I had to slink past with my boxes and decorations and rush up the stairs to get the room ready. We were on the patio and the cloudy sky threatened to rain at any moment.
So I was afraid it would be a terrible shower. I wrote out the nametags, some people brought presents even though it wasn't meant to be a present-y sort of shower, so I had to figure out what to do that wouldn't offend the present-bringers or marginalize the non-present-bringers.
And ladies started to trickle in and hover and buzz, as ladies do. I was too scattered to make much small talk but the magic began to happen as I put a couple of people in charge. My mom showed up with two lovely vases of flowers from her garden -- perfect. Susan B. went around gathering recipes that people had brought. Susan D. passed out index cards and asked people to write down how they had met the bride-to-be. Britney took over the name tags. Beth organized the boxes of art supplies. Pretty soon we gathered and passed out the index cards and people had to mingle to discover who had met the bride-to-be in seventh grade, and who had met her at her cousin's wedding, and who met her at their office. I put in a decoy card, a fake way someone had met the bride-to-be, and had the bride herself go around trying to figure out who had the fake ("I met the bride in a hospital emergency room...."). People were mixing and mingling, while the waiters took drink orders.
And then we sat down to our tables and while we were waiting to order brunch we passed out art supplies to each table and everyone decorated their recipes with stickers and crayons and ribbons and glitter and colored pencils. People made collages and besides their own recipes they made "recipe for a happy marriage" and pretty poems. After lunch the bride sat on a stool in the center of the room and held up each recipe and pointed out who it was from. They were a beautiful array of bright colors, all in different handwriting, all with very different decorations. There were stuffed shells and west african peanut stews and black raspberry beet brownies and apple dapple cake and chop suey and baked beans and a recipe made with seaweed you can gather on the coast of Maine (including a pressing of seaweed on a page). I slid the decorated recipes into a plastic sleeves of a binder and we passed around a cover page that we all signed like a yearbook. The book came out as this colorful hodgepodge of family and friends, a funny and playful and heartfelt mix of flavor and color. Britney volunteered to make copies of the recipe book to share with everyone at the shower and it felt like a wonderful afternoon. The present bringers didn't seem concerned that their boxes were on the table, because they were really invested in the recipes they had brought and decorated. The non-present bringers felt like equal participants, and everyone was genuinely curious about what everyone else had contributed. It felt authentic and friendly and warm.
I ventured out to the wilds of the next town over tonight, for music that didn't turn out to be that good. On the way home my companion drove fast and I tipped my head back against the seat and stuck my arm out the passenger window and watched the dark roadside scenery unfurl. I noticed the flashes of fireflies in the long grass. The sky has been hazy and still and humid all week and the thick summer air tickled the hairs on my arm as we zoomed along. I haven't seen fireflies yet this summer and seeing them opened a vault in my head. It made me remember a place where the road divides a field on the way out to Cousin's Island, and a night in June long ago when I sat with my cousins under the stars, surrounded by hundreds of fireflies and the salty smell of the ocean. It made me remember the sensation of a firefly walking on my left hand, blinking its green phosphorous light and holding me mesmerized by the magic I had so close to me. I remember standing perfectly still, my finger tickling, hoping it wouldn't fly away, and the inevitable moment when it unfolded its wings and disappeared.
I've been thinking uncharitable thoughts, as well as covetous, lustful, selfish, and impatient ones. This weblog is too public a place to give voice to any of those, though. So let's just pretend I never think them.
Instead, here are some of the things I've been doing lately, that for some reason I don't feel like writing about:
I've been taking the dog to obedience class.
I've been working on recording and editing podcasts.
I've been selecting photos and writing text for a website.
I've been on a blind date.
I've been drinking gin and tonics on a rooftop deck.
I've been planning a wedding shower.
I've been taking my car for expensive repairs. The car is a lemon, alas.
I've been boating.
I've been taking the dog on long walks.
I've been working on the garden with my mom.
I've been reading Mere Christianity, before I fall asleep. Book review when I finish.
I've been to a neighborhood picnic.
I've been watching a dramatic thunderstorm.
I've been furling someone's jib.
I have NOT been exercising, much. I have NOT been writing, much. I have NOT been sailing, much. Need to change all three of these things.
