Stay of Execution

How Not To Improve Communications

1) Decide you should create a group listserv.  Don't ask permission.  Add a group of people to it, because you're certain they will appreciate it.  You know how valuable this newfangled tool can be. 

2) Send the first email to the group, announcing the existence of the listserv.  Make this announcement email very, very long -- about 700 words is good --  and bury the technical information about the listserv (how to unsubscribe, for example, or the distinction between replying to individuals and replying to everyone in the group) deep in the body. 

3) Name the listserv something presumptive and possibly slightly offensive to some of people you decided to include as members.

4) Sit back and watch the fun as neophyte users reply, again and again, all day long, saying things like "sign me up for the list!" or "I think we should name it something else" or "great idea!" filling up the boxes of untold strangers with a deluge of unwanted email.

This just happened to me, when the forward-looking Maine Bar Association decided to create a Young Lawyers listserv.  Although they named it "Young Lawyers," I think they meant "lawyers recently admitted to the Maine Bar."  They didn't actually tell us what the criteria for inclusion was.  They didn't tell us much.  (What they did tell us, a huge bunch of people didn't read.)  They did tell us that this effort would "improve communications."  I eagerly await the promised improvement.      

Being Female

I was watching a couple of friends of mine yesterday, aged approximately 6 and 8.  The 6 year old girl is very girly, and has been as long as I've known her (a couple of years).  When I arrived she was wearing a purple T shirt with sparkly hearts on it, and pink sandals.  She was holding a "Brat" which is a kind of teenaged version of Barbie (except for the genius marketing innovation that Brats travel in packs -- collect them all!) and our first activity was to undress and re-dress the Brat. Later she was drawing pictures of mermaids.  Lots of mermaids.  An unexpected twist was that she had developed a morbid streak since I'd seen her last, so some of the mermaids were vampire mermaids, with magic hair that could grab other mermaids, squeeze them, and empty their blood into cups.  Yikes!  Anyway, as she drew her pictures, notwithstanding the addition of the vampires, witches, and zombies, I noticed that all of the characters were female.  There were babies, and flowers, and lots of attention to the hair.  I thought, 'This little girl is preoccupied with the concept of being female.  Where does all this girliness come from?'

I am not very feminine a lot of the time.  I'm a late-blooming girl. I'm still a stranger to a lot of the parts of me that are traditionally seen as "feminine" traits (e.g. intuition, love of beauty, sensitivity, receptiveness, vanity, changeability), and when they show up I'm not always very kind or welcoming or accepting of them.  Although I'm learning to, gradually, I don't innately trust their strength.  As a result of not playing around with these parts of myself I am only now figuring out things like how to put on makeup, or how to dress myself.  Not that those external manifestations are what it means to be feminine, but I think maybe distrusting the feminine traits suppressed my curiosity about the girly accessory parts.  So yesterday watching this girl playing I guess I felt a little envious.  She's thinking about it about 25 years earlier than I started to.  I felt behind.  How am I going to figure out my femininity?  I'm too old to play with Brats. 

I know a man who became a woman.  I had lots of questions when the man I knew started down the path of becoming a woman, but the one that never crossed my mind was, "Why would a man want to be a woman?"  Today I was talking to a man who used to be a woman, and after our conversation all I could think was, "Why would a woman want to be a man?"  I can't imagine it.  Which I guess means I'm more connected to being female than I realized.  It's deep, perhaps impossible to articulate.

Update: Long Distance Relationships Still Difficult

It's been 18 days since I've seen him.  A few more ahead.  But who's counting? 

Dear World,

I have been thinking about weblogs again.  You know how social I am, organizing parties and setting people up and forming committees and having conference calls and inventing games and playing with social software and planning conferences.  I love that role.  I love introducing people to one another.  I love witty banter and inside jokes.  I love lively chitchat and storytelling and going around the room asking questions that get people to talk.  So how come I don't do all this stuff in the comment section of my weblog?  How come I don't do everything I can to make it a little party going on in there? 

In response to a post a while ago, several readers chimed in and said that they'd like to see me in the comments more.  I've been thinking a lot about that, and I've been doing some of it (in fact, in the comments to this post, I get gently but firmly raked over the coals by some parents for giving my teenage cousin and his friends beers, and the ensuing discussion has given me lots to think about).  But something about it feels strange to me, and I've been wondering why.

The reason, World, is that I've uncovered a perhaps shameful bias I have about weblogs.  I don't WANT them to be a conversation. 

Being And Time

Today I am going to buy the Stambaugh translation of Heidegger's Being and Time, so that I can read along and lurk with the Unfogged book group.  I'd always planned to postpone reading philosophy until my retirement, when I'm hoping I'll have developed some fortitude and patience.  Right now for all my good intentions I'm kind of like Alice in Wonderland, finding little use for books that don't have characters, scenes, illustrations, or dialogue.  And I'll confess to being terribly intimidated by the cleverness of the Unfogged crowd -- they stimulate the worst part of my own intellect-worshipping tendencies.  But at core they strike me as a likeable and articulate bunch.  And I've learned through my own book group how valuable it is to read something along with others, and to compare and exchange views, impressions, and sticky points.  And I love the idea of a blog book group, and am curious about the social and intellectual dynamics of this kind of shared experience.  I can read 12 pages by Tuesday, can't I?  Sure I can.    

I Don't Know Whether To Be Happy Or Sad

Hanging out with my pregnant best friend, talk turned naturally to college basketball and the NBA draft picks.  Because I'm living under a rock here, I hadn't heard what happened.  Ooh, I don't want to know -- tell me tell me, oh no, oh no, I don't want to know.  Okay, no, tell me.  Who did they take from the Tar Heels?  I screwed up my eyes and crossed my fingers and she told me.  Marvin Williams, gone.  Felton, gone.  May, gone.  McCants, gone.  Ouch.  Manuel and Jawad Williams and Scott graduated.  Ouch.  I couldn't think of a player we have left.  Noel?  Can't remember if this was his junior or senior year.

We did win the championships this year, so I can't blame the boys.  And I am so glad Felton and May will still be playing on the same team.  And I'm proud that Felton was the #5 draft pick.  He's my favorite.  But I went and looked at the roster and it's a bunch of names I don't know.  Yikes. 

Law Rap

Oh my goodness.  Verbal one-upsmanship, law talk, Supreme court mockery, rap rhyming, and Dr. Seuss.  It can all be found in this rapid-fire, too-clever comment thread at Unfogged.  Enjoy.  If you're lyrically on fire, maybe you can play, too. 

What You Worship

Via PJM, I just read the transcript of David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon. Even if you think he's irritating, which I do about half the time, this is worth reading.   

Here's the part I really liked:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.  Everybody worships.  The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.  It's the truth.  Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already.  It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.  The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious.  They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're   doing.

I've had a series of conversations lately about this, in connection with my own professional reflections, about which maybe I'll write more later.  I didn't think I worshipped my intellect, but I was beginning to.  I think it's hard to be a lawyer without a certain amount of intellect -worshipping.  I didn't think I worshipped money or power, but walking away from a path that promised those things has been harder than I wish it were. 

But the point David Foster Wallace makes is so important.  We get to choose, each day, what to worship.  It's good to recognize that we have that choice.  And it's good to consider whether choosing something that will eat us alive makes any sense at all.

A Small, Good Thing

I got a call yesterday, and a follow up email today, from a magazine editor, offering me money for a piece I sent.  I accepted the offer.  If all goes well, they may just publish it.  So that made my day.  I'd been feeling sort of hopeless and despondent about my writing aspirations, so it came at a good time.

Another small good thing is that my best friend is in town.  Well, actually, in New Hampshire.  But that's close enough.  I'm going to see her tonight.  Since she's almost five months pregnant, I've been thinking almost exclusively about seeing her belly.  Last night on the phone I had to stop myself and say, "um, Autumn, of course I'm also looking forward to seeing you."  And then I went back to asking questions about her belly. 

Looking At The Water

If you're a sailor, you look at the water every time you go by it, automatically, and so you know things that other people don't know.  You know if it's high tide or low tide.  You know if it's windy and which direction the breeze is coming from.  Often, you know if that's the real breeze or if it's going to shift.  I make these small observations and calculations a few times a day, in my head. 

My first look at the water is at the end of my street.  The view is partly blocked by a fence but I can see whether it's high or low tide, and in the summer that's a data point I half-keep track of.  If I'm driving north to where my boat is, I go over a bridge, and there I can see a lot more.  Is the tide coming or going?  What's the wind doing?  From that bridge, I can get an impression of the wind strength.  To tell how windy it is you look at the surface of the water, and see how ripply it is.  From a lifetime of looking at ripples on the water I can tell you a lot of things.  I can see wind moving across the water and can count down, in seconds, when the wind will strengthen or slacken in a spot.   You can tell wind strength from a lot of other things, too, of course -- the way leaves and branches move on trees, and the way smoke drifts after rising from a smokestack, and how a flag streams back from a flagpole.  But my baseline observation point is the ripples on the water. 

If I'm going south, to the grocery store or into town, I go over a different bridge and there I see a lot more: I have a smokestack and a flag I can look at, and I can see the East End anchorage and look at the way the boats are pointed there.  I'm not as close to the ripples on the water, but I can see them, and if the tide is high in Back Cove I can watch that to see how steady or puffy the wind is. 

Last night I went to go sailing and as I drove north I saw that it wasn't too windy, and that a fog bank had crept in and was lurking behind Mackworth Island, hiding Diamond Island and nosing its way toward The Brothers.  By the time I got to the club, I saw that the wind had come around to the east, and the fog bank had swallowed Clapboard Island.  I brought the boat to the dock and as I tied up the fog had made its way to the end of the fairway.  I put the sails on and went up the dock to borrow some tools for a repair I wanted to make, and when I got down on the dock I could see only three or four boats in the anchorage.  The easterly breeze was nice and strong, pushing cold clammy foggy air into the shore.  We ended up not racing, because you just couldn't see anything, so we sat at the dock and worked on our boat, eating pretzels and drinking beer.