Stay of Execution

Atlantic Coast Champs

I'm headed to Marblehead to race in the Atlantic Coast championships on a boat with no name. We'll be trying to think of a name to register as on the way down there. It's going to be a fun and probably frustrating weekend -- the wind looks like it will be light and shifty, the crew hasn't sailed together before, all though three of us are experienced and opinionated, and the fleet will be full of world-class, rock star sailors.

Stay of Execution Book Report: She's Not There

A couple of days ago I finished She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. It's a memoir about the author's transition, at about age 40, from James Finney Boylan to Jennifer Finney Boylan. The story itself holds an inherent fascination, perhaps particularly to me because a few years ago a sailor I'd known my whole life as Steve became Stephanie.

There are a couple of features about this book that elevate it from being merely a curiosity piece. The author is an English professor and fiction writer, so the voice, as James and Jenny, is articulate, human, and funny. There is a lot of confidence, social grace, and laughter in James' life -- he's something of a golden boy, it seems -- and Jenny claims these as her birthright, even through the doubt and fear of the gender transition. The second thing that's remarkable about the book is the presence of Richard Russo in it, as a character. Russo is the author's best friend, so he's there as a character in the memoir, and when the author confesses his secret, that he's transgendered and is considering becoming a woman, Russo is unusually articulate, reflective, and honest. That presence helps the book a lot, I think -- we see email exchanges between the author and Russo, and we hear conversations in which Russo challenges James, or confesses difficulty understanding or accepting that "Jenny" is the same person inside as his best friend James. Russo says to the author, "Look, you're acting like this is the most wonderful thing for you, that you're finally getting a freedom you've longed for your whole life. But we liked you the way you were, and we can't help feeling like we are losing someone we loved." The presence of these exchanges in the narrative are important, because even as Jenny acknowledges the pain and difficulty she's causing her friends and family, she is exuberant and relieved at the gift she's giving herself. Russo also adds an afterword, talking about the experience from his perspective. He describes the memoir as a remarkable love story, which it is. James' wife stays with him even as he becomes a she, and she effectively loses her husband and gains something she never chose. Can you imagine? After reading the book, you can begin to imagine a love that powerful, accepting, and gentle.

My mom just called me up, and we were discussing the book (we're in the same book group, and it's this month's selection). My mom kept talking about the author as "he" while I tend to think of her as "she." I think that's because the book opened up in the present tense, and introduces us to the author as a woman, then goes back and retraces her life as a boy and a man who felt trapped in the wrong body.

When the person I know changed genders it was pretty deeply unsettling. You think someone's identity and their gender are inseparable; it's almost impossible to think someone who wants to change their body can be the same person, with the same personality, as the one you've known. I read most of True Selves, a book about the whole phenomenon of transgendered people. It helped me get my head around it a little better. Stephanie recommended Trans-sister Radio as a better book about what it feels like to go through it, but I've not yet read that one.

Tell Me Something Good

Did you see anything beautiful today?

I'm feeling a little bit blue. Cheer me up, if you can spare any extra light.

Moving Target

I am going away to Marblehead this weekend, sailing in an Etchells regatta against the big cheeses of the sailing world. I'm excited about it. I'm not bringing the Hooked On Tonics, in its woefully slow state, but am instead crewing for the fleet hotshot on his shiny, new, well-tended Etchells.

Because this is a big race, the Atlantic Coast Championships, there are some official rules. They check your boat to make sure it conforms within some pretty tight tolerances to the class rules. They weigh the boat, they measure the sails and the equipment, they weigh the crew. Yep, that's right. As a crew, we can't weigh more than 285 kg, all together. I think that turns out to be something like 628 lbs.

So I thought we were all set, the three of us, well under the weight limit. But our skipper decided that we were, in fact, so far under the weight limit that we should add a fourth person. He went and found a teeny tiny woman to be our fourth, which put us right at the weight limit, according to the weights we'd all estimated ourselves to be.

But of course, my estimate was a guesstimate, as was the foredeck guy's. I dragged out the musty dusty scale in my basement last Tuesday and it told me I weighed six pounds more than my guesstimate. Uh oh. The foredeck guy weighed himself and came in four pounds above his guesstimate. The teeny tiny woman hasn't confirmed her weight, but if she was guesstimating too low we're even deeper in trouble.

Today I went to the skipper's office (he's a doctor) and jumped on his scale, and was pleased to see myself almost seven pounds lower than my musty dusty scale told me I was. That might mean I'm right at my guesstimate, or it might mean that my erratic dieting this past week has had some effect, or it might mean that his office scale is off.

Years ago, at the J/24 North American championships, four of the five crew members had arrived and we were weighing and measuring in the boat and all of our equipment before the skipper arrived. We kept weighing ourselves and guessing what the skipper would weigh. We estimated that we were over the weight limit. So over the course of twenty-four hours, four of us lost 13 lbs. We didn't eat, we drank diuretics, we put on heavy sweatshirts and ran in the summer heat. One guy lost 8 of the 13 lbs on a long and unhealthy run. He jumped on the official scale, told the measurer to write down his weight, and shortly after, collapsed in the back of our van in a fetal position, dry heaving.

I don't think it will come to that for this event, but one difference between this event and that one is that the sailing instructions permit the race committee to randomly weigh 15% of the boats before any day's racing, and the boats that don't comply on that day won't get to race. Which means, at least theoretically, that it's not sufficient to lose a bunch of water weight for the purposes of making the weigh in.

Pampered

David Foster Wallace wrote a pretty interesting essay a while back called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." He goes on a cruise ship for a week, a luxury five-star deal, and writes about the experience in sometimes excruciating detail for Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly or something. It's very entertaining if you can take DFW's style, which at the time I read it I really dug.

But besides being funny I found the article pretty insightful. He writes about the cruise ship brochure's promise that "you will be pampered in every way," and the deliberate selling point of having a week where every need or want is anticipated. He notes that "Pampers" and "pampered" are pretty closely connected and thinks about the infantilization of the customer in an environment deliberately controlled and constructed around removing all responsibilities and anticipating every need to eat, sleep, and play. He thinks a little about the marketing of such a fantasy, the place that fantasy holds in our psyche, and what living it does to a person. He writes about what happens to him on the cruise -- as he gets used to the experience of having thick, fluffy towels handed to him when he arrives on a deck to sit beside a pool, or having his room cleaned and straightened each time he leaves for more than half an hour, his perception of needs and wants adjusts accordingly. So he finds fault with small things -- the fruit basket, for example. He grows cranky and restless and irritable in a place that is as flawlessly deliciously relaxing as any he's been.

I just read a book that I liked a lot called How To Want What You Have. It's the same kind of idea as what David Foster Wallace was writing about, the gist of the article How Not To Buy Happiness, and from what I gather the idea behind The Progress Paradox. Basically, that our wants are insatiable and instinctive and the sense that if only we could have just a little bit more, or adjust things to our liking a little bit, we'd finally be happy. Which of course never happens. We're doomed to be a little bit infantile, we're built to want and to long for things. What I like about How To Want What You Have is that his tone in the book is pretty straightforward -- neither too spiritual or new agey, nor too slanted toward science and evolutionary psychology. He's thoughtful and pragmatic and writes about the cognitive and behavioral habits that help live a sensitive, compassionate, attentive life full of gratitude and joy, even when doing so is swimming upstream against our hard-wired and most infantile yearnings for more more more.

(This post takes the place of an earlier post I started to draft that I recognized was written in that infantile voice, dissatisfied and longing, restless for something just a little more than what I have right now. It's really hard to avoid being pulled around by these yearnings.)

Wet Brown Life

I was driving home last night and something in the road moved, maybe a piece of paper or a leaf, and for the tiniest moment I thought it might be a toad jumping in front of the car. Which made me think of a drive I used to do, seven or eight years ago, and one summer where it seemed that every night I was driving along a drizzly or misty road and there were dozens or hundreds of tiny toads everywhere, jumping in the road, in the grass, all around. It almost made me cry because I knew I couldn't help but hit some of them.

One memorable night, in fact, I swerved to avoid a toad, spun out my old Volvo, and went off the road. My body was full of terrified adrenaline, my heart was beating, but the car and I were unharmed. I drove shaking straight to the door of a man I didn't yet realize I was falling in love with. It wasn't the man I was living with at the time.

Anyway, I thought of all of this, of living in the country where my drives home would involve toads, everywhere, as I drove through low-lying marshy areas where the evening mist was forming. There were turtles, too, during spring and summer. Sometimes I would stop to help them along. And foxes, moose, wild turkeys. I still see all of these critters now and then, but it's remarkable now in a way it wasn't then. Oh, who am I kidding. It was always remarkable. But it was more frequent then. I thought of how long its been since I've seen a frog or a toad trying to cross the road. I don't have to go far to paths where I still get glimpses of toads (and when I do I always stop to pick them up). But they don't live here in the suburbs; they're not a part of my commute.

And all of a sudden last night I remembered a poem about an old man trying to save the toads crossing the road. I must have read it in high school, and all I remembered was the gist of it, an image and a fragment of words: "hands full of wet brown life." Thanks to Google I found it here. I don't think I thought much of the poem when I read it in high school, and I don't remember thinking of it on those summer nights when my heart was breaking and all I wanted to do was stop my own car and bring the toads safely to the side of the road. But I was glad to remember it last night.

Question for Cooks

What would you suggest doing with the two enormous (at least 30 lbs each) Hubbard squashes in the garden? 

Imagination

I read Angela's Ashes several years ago. If you haven't read it, it's a worthwhile memoir about growing up poor in Ireland. There was a part of the book where the starving brothers somehow come into some money that they get to their mother for food. McCourt describes the amazing, wonderful pleasure of eating a soft-boiled egg -- how luxurious the flavor and texture and golden richness of the yolk was, with a little salt and some bread.

I remember that after reading that passage I went and cooked myself an egg and as I ate it I thought of some starving Irish boys eating it with reverence and hunger and delight. It was truly delicious, nourishing, miraculous. And ever since then I've managed to sustain this sense of magical wonder about eggs. They've remained one of my favorite foods; if I had to pick just one thing to eat forever I think it would be eggs. But what's cool is the lasting effect of that book on me -- it made something mundane and commonplace into something I still feel gratitude for. I get to eat an egg almost any time I want. I am so lucky, and for years I never noticed.....

Your Fresh Breath Goes On and On....

I was cutting a vase full of nasturtiums yesterday morning in the garden when I noticed I had the Big Red chewing gum jingle in my head, somewhat aggressively. That is a serious jingle. On occasions I've had it in my head and started singing it out loud, and without exception the people around tend to jump right in and sing along. Everyone knows that jingle, it seems. Consider it my gift to you this morning. That Big Red freshness lasts right through it. Your fresh breath goes on and on -- while you chew it! Say goodbye a little longer, make it last a little longer....

Forgiveness

David Weinberger wrote yesterday about Yom Kippur and forgiveness, and the difference between human rules of living and computers' rules of living. What he touches on in the post is something I've been thinking a lot about these days: the tension between Justice and Mercy.

It's a simple ethical dilemma, similar to the tension between Truth and Loyalty (do you rat on your best friend?), part of the curriculum of The Institute for Global Ethics' ethical fitness seminars, and something I first began to think about in an organized way when I read Rush Kidder's book How Good People Make Tough Choices. I thought a lot about Justice and Mercy in my first year of law school, when I was trying to get my head around the difference between torts and crimes and what bad acts will bring the apparatus of the state down against a perpetrator (crimes), and which ones won't (lies), and which ones will, but only if a private party complains (torts).

I've found myself talking to folks about my career these past couple of months, and when I talk about the legal work I was doing for the past two and a half years I found myself using the framework of Justice and Mercy to explain why I find bankruptcy law so fascinating. By Justice I mean a system where bad acts have consequences that are predictable and even-handedly applied, and that exact a reasonable punishment from the actor, and perhaps make recompense to the harmed party. By Mercy I mean a system that allows for differences in individual circumstances and adjusts penalties accordingly, that tries to promulgate no further suffering, that ultimately forgives the bad actor and wipes the slate clean. Both Justice and Mercy are good, and they are in tension. I'm sure commenters will quibble with my semantics here, but you can't really have both Justice and Mercy at the same time. Justice is blind, it doesn't care how sorry you are. Mercy does. Forgiveness is not the same as punishment. Mercy is a situation where a harsh penalty is spared a wrongdoer. We need both Justice and Mercy, even though we can't have both at once. I think our legal system tries to codify justice, while building in room for mercy (the jury system, for example, or prosecutorial discretion).

Anyway, I liked doing bankruptcy work precisely because of the inherent tension in it. Bankruptcy is where Justice meets Mercy, codified in the Bankruptcy Code. The Code tries to make rules for a just kind of mercy. Everywhere else in the law, you've got to honor your contracts, and if you don't, a plaintiff can bring the mechanism of the state to bear to enforce the contracts. In bankruptcy, this dynamic is turned on its head. A debtor doesn't have to honor all its contracts, or pay debts in full. There is forgiveness of a kind. And the Code is full of rules about when and how that forgiveness can be earned, and when it must be withheld. It's a fascinating world.