Stay of Execution

15 Things: #15 You're Never Alone If You Follow Sports

During the course of writing this weblog, I've learned 15 Things.  Well, I've learned more than that, and some of the 15 Things I haven't really learned. 

The last of my 15 Things is this: you're never alone if you follow sports.  I think I have to amend that one, though.  You're never alone if you follow sports, and you don't have a TV at home.  If you have a TV at home, you might be alone if you follow sports.  The never alone part has something to do with sports bars.  Now that there is an enormous TV with cable in The Annex, right around the corner, it is sometimes tempting to go watch UNC hoops over there.  (Why UNC?  See here.)  And that is an entirely different experience than watching it at Rivalries, with Matty the bartender remembering what I like to drink and Big Ted yelling at the TV and sometimes Frankie showing up to talk statistics.  I don't really want to watch sports alone, even if it's right around the corner, and even if the TV is big. 

Even when those guys aren't there someone always strikes up a conversation with me.  Maybe it's because I'm a chick, alone in a sports bar.  Maybe people aren't as friendly to men.  But even when I'm not talking to Matty or Ted or Frankie, someone wants to talk.  Once it was a handsome pilot.  Once it was a handsome bartender, in Chicago, who was nice to me even though I was rooting against Illinois.  Yes, those two were trying to pick me up.  But that's not always the case.  A couple of weeks ago it was the guys at the next table, watching football on a different screen.  Sometimes it's people rooting for the other team, and we have a little back-and-forth. 

This wasn't true when I started going to watch the games.  I didn't know how to sit at a bar, alone, without feeling self-conscious.  I didn't know how to make friendly conversation.  I didn't know very much about basketball.  I was too embarrassed to ask basic questions.  Now I do it all the time.  People are nice.  People want to talk. 

And sports gives you a nice universe of shared experience.  It's accessible to everybody.  You have it in common.  It's not complicated.  You can build a bond with people without getting personal.  There are very few things like this.  It is not fraught with any kind of accidental peril, no landmines like asking someone what they do (oops, just laid off, now what do I say?) or about their family (wife just diagnosed with cancer, ack) or any of that stuff.  You can talk about the hot new freshman and whether he's like Sean May or not so much, and about how their defensive game has improved over the year. 

I used to think these kind of conversations were false.  But I don't think so anymore.  You build trust over time, and through shared experience.  This is one way.  And you can fly across the country and still find someone to sit next to and watch a game with.  If you do not watch sports, you should.  There's a whole world of people you'll have access to.  Don't be such an intellectual snoot. 

Of course, my interest in watching sports is entirely limited to college basketball.  I understand there is some kind of football sporting event happening today.  Couldn't care less.  And those people who get excited about baseball?  Please.  How boring.  I am considering developing an interest in hockey, because I like the hockey coaches at the college and would like to be at least moderately fluent in the language of their game.  But I can never see the puck.  I have to squint at the TV.  It all moves too fast.  And the players are brutes.  So college basketball is the only sport worth watching.  But it really is worth watching.  Just so you don't root for Duke. 

15 Things: #14 It's Not About Being Perfect

This might be the hardest of the 15 Things I've come to realize.  It's not about being perfect.  I think I'm finally beginning to get it, but it's not natural for me.  My instinct is still to cover up and hide my imperfections (a doomed task, an impossible one, but also a self-defeating one).  My instinct is still to show the ways I'm strong, and hide the ways I'm weak.  My instinct is still to impress people into loving me, as if that's how it works.   

But of course that's not how it works.  I know that in my head and I know it in my heart -- that's certainly not how I come to love the people I love --  and somehow I'm starting to get it in the reptile brain, whatever place it is that gives me those social instincts and fears. 

What's it about, if not about being perfect?  I think it's about being genuine.  Being yourself.  Being open.  Showing up.  Trying hard.  Picking yourself up when you fall down.  Admitting it when you're sad.  Letting people see you working on things, lumping along as best you can.  Making people feel like part of your life.  The word accessories comes to mind, in both senses.  The bad way is including people like the bag that matches your shoes that matches your scarf, to compose an externally perfect life.  That's not how to include people in your life.  It's the other kind of accessory, an accessory to a crime, that I was thinking about -- including people in a scheme that may or may not work, letting them in behind the curtain, trusting them to help you, asking for loyalty and admitting your crazy desperate hopes.   Making people an accessory to your life, the risks and the rewards, that's what it's about. 

My dog is my best teacher, still, about love and living.  She's not perfect: she's got one eye and three legs.  She farts like a champion.  She barks insistently at nothing and sleeps too much and thinks almost anything on the ground with an odor to it should be tasted and probably eaten.  She's mostly obedient but sometimes she roams or dawdles.  She sleeps on the sofa when she thinks she can get away with it, although she knows this is forbidden.  Lately she even forgets to look guilty or contrite about it.  She licks the sweat off my legs when I've come back from a run and am stretching, with a patient insistence.  She drools when watching me fill her dog dish.  She chews sticks into wood pulp, scattering the chips in a messy pattern all around and making her mouth bleed.  She's unsteady on her lone back leg in rocks and in deep snow, and I sometimes have to pick her up and help her climb a ledge or scramble down a steep spot.  I don't think the AKC guys would be excited about her. 

But even typing these things I am smiling because they don't seem like bad things.  I love her so much, not despite these imperfections but because of them.  I love how she doesn't seem to care at all about her weaknesses.  She gallops along anyway, and if she needs help climbing a steep spot she lets me help her, gives me a lick, and keeps running.  I love listening to her snore.  I like how comfortable she can be, and how she lets me see her dreaming.  She loves to kiss me and if I'm nearby she'll walk over and lick whatever skin is available.  Her ears are soft and warm and smell sweet and doggy.  She thinks I am the center of the universe, and when she's chewing a stick into shreds she'll occasionally get up and parade near me to be sure I've noticed her accomplishment, then settle back to the task.  She's an old dog now, and nonplussed, but she still doesn't take me for granted, and she climbs her way up a flight of stairs -- slow, painstaking progress for a three-legged dog -- just to lie down at my feet when I'm at my desk.  I love how much she needs me.  I love watching her explore when I take her to a new place.  She makes my world feel fresher, because so much of it is still a mystery to her. 

Loyalty, playfulness, curiosity, affection, and an absence of shame and pretense.  This is what I think it's about.  It's not about being perfect.  Imperfection is inevitable.  But you can find so much to love in this imperfect world.  A graying dog sleeping at your elbow, her even low breath like a heartbeat of the morning, and from time to time a terrible fart to make you exclaim in disbelief, and wake her.   She looks up at you, thumps her tail, and goes back to sleep.  That's what it's about. 

15 Things: # 13 Redux

Okay so I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, prompted by this whole "Am I an Alpha Dog and if so is it a bad thing?" question.

And one of the things I've had to face is that I am extremely, overwhelmingly impatient, and I am very uncomfortable with ambiguity.  So this whole crock of "Things Happen In Their Own Time" as a life lesson I can sit here and preach about is just that -- a crock.  It is a lesson I need to learn, not one that I can say much about.

Here's how my impatience manifests.  Suppose we're all going to go out to breakfast -- you, and me, and maybe Turboglacier and 517 and Housemate.  And we know the day and now we've got to figure out the place.  I don't care, you don't care, nobody cares all that much.  A normal situation includes some kind of, "Where do you want to meet for breakfast," "hmm, I don't know, what do you feel like eating?" "Gee, I could go anywhere -- is there a place you really like?" back and forth conversation.  I hate those.  I find them tedious and wasteful and stupid and I almost unconsciously work to avoid them at almost any cost.  So even when I don't particularly care, I tend to try to cut off those conversations by just naming a place.  I am very flexible, but I am also pretty decisive and pretty self-aware.  If you ask me what I want to eat or what I feel like doing, it'll take me about 10 seconds to consider it and then I'll give you an answer.  "This is where I feel like eating, actually."  I tend to expect that anyone else I talk to operates the same way.  If I suggest something that you don't like, I assume you'll say so, and will make a counteroffer.  And so again and again in social situations I dominate even when I'd prefer not to, just because I step forward into the void and by doing that I don't let quieter voices have a chance to emerge.  People rarely override my preference.  I wish they would, more.  That's something I need to recognize.  The back-and-forth "I-don't-know, where-do-you-feel-like-eating" conversation isn't just dead space and wasted time.  It's important social signalling.  It signals, "I'm flexible.  I care about what you want.  I want to collaborate with you on a decision that will be mutually satisfying."   I also need to recognize that other people, faced with someone who speaks up like I do, assume my preference is a very strong one, and will accomodate it.  Sometimes when I am decisive it's because I care a lot.  But a lot of times it's just because I figure that someone's got to lead, or else we'll get stuck in an endless loop of "I-don't-know, what-do-you-feel-like?"

So that's one way in which my impatience is sending the wrong signal.  I speak up just to avoid a conversation that I think of as wasted, but when I do so it appears that I want to take charge, that I have a strong opinion, that I don't want to collaborate, that I'm not all that flexible.  None of those things are true about me, I don't think, at a meaningful level.  But I see how the signal I'm sending can be interpreted that way.  All because of a fear of the void, of the process of making collaborative decisions, of a waste of time.  Time for a reexamination of why those conversations make me so crazy.  They're not that bad.  I've got to get more comfortable seeing what emerges if I don't step forward and take charge out of habit.

On a grander level, I do the same thing in relationships.  I can take my own pulse pretty quickly and figure out what I feel.  I imagine that other people can, too.  So waffling, or ambiguity, or indecision, makes me crazy.  I force a decision, just to avoid hanging out in the open, unnamed space.  Usually that means I leave, and then I add the relationships to the column I count as rejections of me.  I don't think the impatience or avoidance of ambiguity here is motivated by the same thing as the where-should-we-go-to-breakfast alpha dog signalling.  That's an attempt to avoid tedium.  In relationships, I think it's an attempt to avoid the pain of uncertainty.  In both cases, though, I step into what I see as a void, and I act under the assumption that other people are just like me: just as decisive, just as comfortable being vocal, just as quick to identify and process what they want.  If I know, they must know, and if we both know, there's no reason for ambiguity or waiting.  Again and again I cut things off because I can't stand ambiguity.  I'm not going to audition for you, I've said.  You have all the information you need.  If you still don't know how you feel about me, that sucks.  I'm out of here.

Things happen in their own time.  This is an aspiration for me.  There is richness in ambiguity and in the undecided.  There is information about people and process that comes from the where-do-you-feel-like-having-breakfast conversation.  Not everyone is like me, ready to decide everything right away.  Maybe I'm not even like that, but have gotten into the habit of acting like it.  You have to let silence settle if you want to hear the quieter sounds, if you want to make room for things that grow slowly.  Wait and see.  That's going to be my project in 2006.   Wait and see. 

15 Things: #13 Things Happen In Their Own Time

First, let's review the 15 Things feature.  In celebration of my 1500th post back last March, I vowed to do a series of posts on 15 Things I've Learned since beginning the weblog.  The first job was to figure out what the 15 Things were.  Then, over time, I've done posts on each of the lessons, up to this one, #13. 

The 15 Things I decided on are:
#1  Time flies.
#2  I like risk.
#3  I am not my job.
#4  I make friends.
#5  I am a writer.
#6  People are kind.
#7  Things go wrong.
#8  I bounce back.
#9  Goals are fun. (I cheated a little bit and counted this post instead of crafting a special one.)
#10 I reach people.
#11 Being brave is better.
#12 The harder you look, the more beauty you can see.
#13 Things happen in their own time.
#14  It's not about being perfect.
#15  You'll never be lonely if you follow sports.

Okay.  That was the brief review.  Now, I'll post on # 13: Things happen in their own time.  Unfortunately, I don't think I've truly learned lesson #13.  If I had, I wouldn't be so damn impatient.  Warning for the squeamish: there's talk about pregnancy and cervixes in the post below. 

15 Things: Look Closer -- It's Beautiful

This idea of posting 15 Things I've learned has become a bit of an albatross around my neck.  I came up with the list but haven't been good about staying on top of the posts for each of the lessons. A long time ago I wrote that I'd learned that the harder you look, the more beauty you can see.    

I used to play a game when I was a kid that I called "find the bugs."  Well, it wasn't a game, exactly, and I didn't really call it anything.  It was just something I did.  In fact, I've never told anyone about it until right now.  I discovered that if you were sitting somewhere, in the grass or in the woods or even on the curb of a suburban neighborhoood, and you looked around, you could usually see some bugs crawling around.  That was where you began.  Then the game was to stay sitting there, and see how many more bugs you could find. 

At first you just sit there thinking, "But I see all the bugs already!"  And you sit there thinking it's a stupid game and that if you want to see any bugs or anything else worth looking at you'll have to get up and go over there by that rock, where something more interesting must be happening, and then suddenly you see this bug on the leaf right there.  And it's a bug that you hadn't seen because it blended in with the leaf but it's been there all along and as you look at it you start to wonder why you didn't see it, because now it's so obvious.  And you're inspecting that now-obvious bug, peering in close at it, and you see these tiny tiny red spiders, three or four of them, little pinpricks almost, running around on the leaf. They're small, but they're pretty clear, and the way they trace their little patterns around on the leaf is mysterious and kind of funny.  You watch them and wonder what they're thinking, and how they know where to go, and why they're red, and what they eat.  And as you're focusing in on that leaf thinking, wow, there are some bugs here after all, something on a blade of grass catches your eye and it's a praying mantis, right there, right next to you, moving languidly up the stalk.  There are little spit bugs, too, hiding in their clouds of white bubbles.  How was it that you didn't see them a minute ago? 

15 Things: Being Brave is Better

I started this 15 Things thread a few months ago, to reflect on the things I've learned since I started writing this weblog.  In retrospect, I was climbing out of a hole back then.  I had a bad winter, dark and depressing.  Part of the reason winter was hard was because I was afraid.  I was alone and afraid of being single, afraid of my own loneliness.  I had a health issue that scared me more than I wanted to admit, an ominous presence in my consciousness every day.  And I was afraid to let go of the law, and its promise of a secure, respectable, profitable profession.  I was pretty sure I didn't want to practice again, but I wanted to keep that as a safe fallback option, so I felt I had to walk a careful line, in case I wanted to go back.  It felt dangerous to admit the truth: that I'm creative and that I need to spend a fair amount of time outdoors.  At times in the winter I was hanging on with a brittle smile and a too-loud laugh, just trying to hold it all together.  I wished away my instincts and my fears and my longings, trying to pretend they weren't part of me.

I keep learning this lesson, but it's a hard one.  It's so much easier to admit who you are, admit what you're scared of and tackle it, than to cork it up.  Why does it feel so much harder?  I don't know.   

I do know that this is the life I have.  I might as well try to fix things that are broken, to get things that I want, to make things happen.  There will be time later to revert to a safe course if this doesn't work.  I'm trying to admit what I know and what I don't know, what I want and what I know to be a trap for me.  I'm trying to take risks even when I'm scared.  I'm trying to be more fluid, to let myself respond more.  It feels really good.  The more I do it the easier it gets. 

Over the past couple of months some acquaintances have exclaimed, "You look radiant!  You look so healthy."  It has happened three or four times, with different people, or I wouldn't remark on it.    Something shows, I guess.  I feel happy and healthy, comfortable with myself.  I have things to do -- lots of goals --  but I don't feel so much like I have things to prove.  I don't think I realized the extent to which I was chasing external goals for a long time.  Seems strange that this is what I should be writing under the heading of "Being Brave," but it feels like one of the bravest things I've done is walked away from the practice of law, in order to discover how to be myself. 

15 Things: I Reach People

I'm skipping the 15 Things post on "Goals Are Fun" that technically should be next because I think what I have learned about training for goals was addressed pretty well in this post.  And because I was going through my blog email recently (I'm a terrible email correspondent, by the way) and it made me want to tackle the lesson: I Reach People. 

Since I've been blogging, I've learned that I can reach people.  It is the most gratifying thing about the blog for me.  I like to reach people in person, too, to create an environment that feels safe and meaningful, where I can speak the truth and so can they.  But I also like the feeling that this blog lets me reach people, people who I might not ever meet.   I can't begin to tell you what that feels like. 

Some excerpts from emails I've gotten since I've been doing this:

15 Things: I Bounce Back

I haven't forgotten about the 15 Things posts I started up a few months ago, about the things I've learned since I started this blog.  (Nor have I abandoned all-request days; just taking a little break.)  The last post I did in this category was Things Go Wrong.  That lesson would be a lousy one if it weren't accompanied by this one: I bounce back. 

I was asked by a friend the other day if I considered myself a 'tough cookie.'  I didn't know what to say.  I'm not particularly tough: I feel things.  I'm not barricaded against the world.  But when I fall and scrape my knees I tend to get up pretty quickly and feel good again before too long.  My natural state is happy, optimistic, forgiving.  If I get sad or hurt I know it won't last too long.  Does that make me tough?

One of the books I read this fall was How To Want What You Have.   I'd read this kind of thing elsewhere but this book reminded me of something I've come to believe: basically, right now I am about as happy as I'm going to be.  Of course I want things, lots and lots and lots of things, and I imagine they will make me happier.  I want more money and a sense of safety.  I want to fall in love and have a family.  I want to feel professionally accomplished.  I want to be a leader in my community.  I want my yard to be less of a mess.  I want to be in better shape.  Blah, blah, blah.  And of course I'm anxious about things: I'm not doing a good enough job on this project, I wish I understood that better, I haven't been attentive enough or persuasive enough or helpful or kind or generous enough in various arenas of my life.  But the point is, although these drives and goals are linked to external things, the underlying feelings aren't.  So even if I attain lots more money, a perfect bod, the acclaim of the people I most respect, and marry the prince of Spain, I'll probably feel about the same as I do right now.  Excitement from good things wears off, as does the pain of bad things.  If you can unhook from those big achievements and setbacks, and appreciate the daily constants that fill up your life, I think you can bounce back from most things.

I'm inclined to be happy in this world.  I like the smell of it, especially here in early June, when I can smell my first roses opening, coming in the window over the chemical scent of the purple toenail polish I just put on and my steaming mug of Earl Grey tea.  I like the sound of it -- the birds and the low gurgle of my refrigerator and my dog's deep breath as she lies twitching in her sleep.  I like the kindness of the people in my life, and the surprise of a friendly stranger talking to me in a coffee shop who turns out to be writing a book about the maritime history of the world.  I like the mystery of the tomato seedling that showed up uninvited in one of my houseplant pots and now has taken over, big and lush, with two small green fruits already showing and three dozen flowers.   

15 Things: Things Go Wrong

So over the past 18 months I've learned that Things Go Wrong. 

You will love someone and think it's going great and get dumped without understanding why.  You will set a goal and not be able to meet it because you got food poisoning.  You will crash your car.  Your dog will get hurt when you're not there to comfort her, and then she'll lose her leg.  Your grandfather will die.  The job you love will stop being a job you love and start being a job you have to leave.  The job you really really really want will turn out not to be available after all, after you've gone out on a limb to get it.  Your healthy body will stop working right.  You won't have any money.   You will get a flat tire.  The boy you like will stop calling you.  You'll get depressed.  Your roof will leak.  Your hot water heater will break.  An organization that used to inspire you will get poisoned by internal politics and toxic personalities.  You will feel out of sync with your friends, who are getting married and having babies and getting promoted and winning awards and otherwise flourishing.  Your neighbors will resent you because of your overgrown hedges.  Your car will have a warning light on the dashboard that you can't ignore. 

It's going to happen, all of that and worse.  You're going to be disappointed.  Might as well plan for it. 

That means you need reserves.  You need savings, you need health insurance, you need the goodwill of friends and family and acquaintances and strangers, you need extra time.  You need optimism and self-forgiveness.  When the time comes, you're going to need to fall back on all of this.  I was short on most of these things except, miraculously, the goodwill of other people and my own optimism.  I have more capacity for self-forgiveness than at any other time period in my life, and boy is that nice, but I'm still a little bit stingy with it.  Savings, mmmm, not so much anymore.  Gotta rebuild those, though I'm not sure how.  Decent health insurance is in the works.   

15 Things: People Are Kind

I haven't written a 15 Things post in a while.  If you're just joining us, I decided to identify 15 things I've learned since I started this blog about 18 months ago.  When I sit down to write posts about the 15 things I blurted out, I have a hard time.  Because it's not that I didn't know these 15 things before.  And some of them keep slipping away, elusive bastards, so perhaps I haven't really learned them all that well yet. But mostly, the 15 things I've identified feel like life lessons I've finally started to trust.  And this one might be the best one of all:  People are kind.

Having a blog for me is a bunch of things.  It's writing practice.  It's a new way to make friends.  And it's my journal and my confidant.  Which means you guys, my readers, are my confidants.  Which is pretty strange, since mostly we haven't met, and you're sitting out there across the wires in a place I've never visited, living a life I wouldn't recognize, worrying about people and things I've never imagined.  It's kind of strange to trust you with all the feelings I haven't sorted out, and all the little fragments or special moments that I notice that make me happy or wistful or lonesome or inspired.  When I sit down to write I still have a careful voice sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear and telling me, "You can't say that.  Do you know how that makes you sound?  Everyone will know that you are [dorky/ childish/ naiive/ selfish/ dreamy/ scattered/ snobby/ ignorant/ unpolished/ idealistic/ silly/ provincial /etc.].  Do you know that you will be found on Google by everyone in the world you wish to impress in your life and they will see right through your facade and reject you and cast you out forever?" 

But this is the best part.  I have learned how to ignore that voice, most of the time.  "Thanks for looking out for me," I say.  "I'm glad you're concerned.  I'll definitely read it over before I hit publish."  And I do read what I've written over, and sometimes I don't publish.  Sometimes what I want to say is motivated by pettiness or malice; I'm tired and ungenerous.  Sometimes it is directed to a person who I want to talk to but haven't figured out how, and so I've written a sideways post to communicate a private message that doesn't really belong here.  Sometimes it's a secret I want to tell but I can't.  Sometimes it's something I want to write about, feelings about a person or a situation, but I am not ready to reveal in real life.  Those times I listen to the voice and say, publishing this is not a good idea.  But there are other posts that trigger my nervous editor voice that I do publish in spite of my fears.  Those are posts that show who I really am, half-formed and scared and clumsy and hopeful and impractical and sensitive and undisciplined and peculiar.  And the voice tells me not to publish those posts because if I do everyone will KNOW all the ways I don't have it all together. 

In the past 18 months I've learned to ignore the voice when it says that.  I'm not afraid any more that if people knew the real me, if I really let people see the truth about me, I'll be rejected.  It's just not going to happen.  Because people are kind.  They really are.  The more I relax into that, the more I see it reinforced.  It gets easier and easier to take risks.  People want to be kind. 

Is there more to say about this?  I don't know.  Of course there are people who aren't kind but when I've looked at them, carefully, they are people who are afraid or are threatened.  I don't think my honesty threatens anyone.  So I don't need to be afraid of the unkindness that arises from bitterness or fear.  It hasn't happened so far.  And of course there are people who aren't kind because they're wrapped up in their own worlds -- who are indifferent and shut off.  But that's okay; I don't need to reach everyone, and I'm not writing this stuff to get attention.  And I have been surprised at how vulnerability seems to penetrate indifference.  People will help you if you let them.  They will comfort you if you reveal your sadness.  They will remind you that you aren't alone.  We aren't alone, it turns out.  We're surrounded by kind people who want to know us, and to be known.