Stay of Execution

2005: Taking Stock

I tend to go into quiet mode around this time of year every year.  For one, I get a cold almost like clockwork sometime between my birthday and the new year. which reins me in and gives me reason for quiet contemplation.  For another, I turn a year older, and think about that.  Then there's the calendar.  And, with the holidays, I see people who I don't necessarily see the rest of the year, and have those kind of big where-are-you-in-your-life-now conversations that have a larger scope than ordinary silly over-drinks talk. 

This year, I am part of this new Board of Directors group, and we have a goal-setting meeting on the 4th.  We drew names out of a hat and I'll be one of the first people who will present my goals to the group and seek input and brainstorming and help in the areas I feel blocked in.  So I've been thinking about how to use that resource, and what I'll want to say to that group. 

I'm doing a lot of this reflection the old fashioned way, in my journals or on big paper with pens and colored paper.  I'm going to make a big collage, I think.  So I'm not sure how much of this self-assessment I'll restate here. 

But I discovered a neat resource online, apparently connected with a book.  I've heard of the author, Martin Seligman -- his work was featured in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, if I recall correctly, and I wrote his name down intending to read some of his stuff.  But this website, Authentichappiness.org has a bunch of surveys that let you take stock of a variety of things: are you happy right now?  Are you optimistic?  What are your personal strengths?  According to this, my 5 signature strengths are: curiosity and interest in the world, social intelligence, creativity, ingenuity and originality, forgiveness and mercy, and zest, enthusiasm, & energy.  I haven't yet taken stock of how happy or optimistic I am, but I intend to.  (If I turn out to be less happy than I think I am, will I become despondent?) 

Hope you have a safe night tonight.  See you next year.

Hello Fabulous

I got one of those blow dryers that looks like a curling iron/brush, where the air comes out of the core piece and you wrap your hair around it.  Holy smokes.  I have great hair.  I need to figure out how to use it well, but yikes.  This may be the beginning of a new era. 

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. 

Boot & Buckle

Went country line dancing at a bar on the outskirts of town tonight.  A mixed crowd of ordinary looking bar patrons, rednecks, lesbians, and hipsters, all cheek by jowl stepping forward step back quarter turn right shimmy left shimmy right strut right strut left forward back forward back step ball-change etc.  I was abjectly bad and very delighted by the whole thing.  I was eyeing the best guy dancer, a bearded guy with long hair, wearing black jeans, a purple tie-dye shirt with a picture of a leopard on it, a purple hat with some feathers and beads hanging from it.  He had the moves.  The second best dancer was a guy in jeans and a denim shirt with some kind of logo stitched on the breast, and a black hat with metallic grommets on it.  The third best dancer looked like an accountant, wearing round glasses, loafers and jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, tucked into a belt, with short salt-and-pepper hair.

A short round woman in a turquoise tunic was teaching the dances.  She walked around the room with a wireless headset microphone, calling out the moves and pointing at people.  "Even Steve can do this dance, it's so easy!" she'd say.  "Fake it till you make it!"  A heavyset man with a goatee in a black shirt and black hat repeated this mantra to me encouragingly while I fumbled my way through the final dance, a complex number with a confusing shuffle in the middle that threw me off each repetition.  I had good people on all sides of me to imitate and still couldn't make it work. 

In between lessons, I leaned over the railing on the stairs, grinning and gaping at the dancers who knew the songs and the moves by heart.  Confidence on the dance floor is a wonderful thing.   A young woman with an intricate tattoo on her back, wearing a black velvet tank top and fabulous orange shimmery pants, befriended me.  "I've only been doing this a couple of months," she confessed, in an accent that sounded Scandinavian.  "There are lessons on Sundays, where you learn the harder dances.  I can finally do the tush push really well.  7 to 10 PM and it only costs $3.00."  When she saw me leaving she came over and gave me a hug.  "Will I see you on Sundays?"  I told her she would definitely see me.  I don't know how often I'll line dance, but I want to be able to dabble sometimes without being utterly incompetent.  It was really fun, in the rare moments when I had the flow.  People were friendly.  People watching was entertaining.  I'll be back. 

An Ounce of Prevention

I recently learned that a colleague of mine has throat cancer.  It sounds fairly dire.  I was on the web reading about the disease and was struck by the page on coping skills.  I thought, "these things sound like pretty sensible life instructions," not just coping skills for cancer.  Only the first, "know what to expect" seems cancer-specific.  And with not much tailoring, I think that's a life instruction.  Ask hard questions.  Find out whatever you can.  Don't avoid the truth.  Face things. 

Anyway, I printed it out, and now it's hanging on my wall.  Why wait until you're diagnosed with cancer? 

If You Need Me, I'll Be Reading

I'm sort of in a bad way, book wise.  Between being on this committee to select a first year book for the college, my book group, the Prettier Than Napoleon book group, and the Christmas/birthday books I couldn't resist adding to my "read immediately" pile, I've got to finish the following books by the end of January:

Bleak House by Dickens (about 700 pages left, and although I like it I have no idea what's going on)
All Souls -- Michael Patrick MacDonald
The Shame of a Nation -- Jonathan Kozol
Mountains Beyond Mountains -- Tracy Kidder
Worlds Apart -- Cynthia Duncan
Blindness -- Jose Saramago
Bad Behavior -- Mary Gaitskill
Lost in Place -- Mark Salzman

I'd like to read the rest of Margot Livesay's books before I start taking a seminar from her in late January, but that probably won't happen.  I also probably won't get unstuck from where I've stalled in Sam Harris's book. 

How am I going to finish all of these books and also gorge myself on Sex and the City episodes on DVD??

All Requests: Private Journals and Real-Name Blogging

A reader emails to ask about writing real personal things on a blog you keep under your own name, as opposed to a private journal.  I have been giving this some rather intense consideration lately.  This weblog was never anonymous, but it always used to be relatively separate from my 'real life.'  It was an experiment in technology, a place to have conversation with early adopters, a world that seemed unlikely to intersect with my daily life very much.  Although I never kept it a secret, I didn't know many people who read blogs, let alone my blog.  Now, that has totally changed, and it's kind of weird.  Now it's more like a character in my life, with a life of its own. 

All Requests: Moving to New England

By email, a reader requests a post about how to convince someone "grown soft from the California sunshine to move to cold, snowy New England?" 

Hmmm.  That's a tough question.  Why are you trying to convince somebody else to move, is what I want to know?

I've actually never understood people who can be easily convinced to move.  I have a sense of home and roots that is deep and feels instinctive.  This is home.  There are a few other places that tempt me from time to time.  But this landscape, the people, the shape and size of the town, the waterways and the islands, the layers of memory I have here as my daily companions, all make this the only place I can really imagine living.   

Upon searching, I find that I've already answered this request, in a way.  So instead I'll write about the pitfalls of living here, so you can give your California friend fair warning.

Question

Why do I find Sex And The City so compelling?  I have lately discovered it and am totally, embarrassingly hooked. 

Assume that I don't admire the characters or relate to their lives, and am not a fashionista.   What is it?

Letters I'll Never Send: To The Guy Who Didn't Call

Dear [_________],

      I saw you last night, and I think you saw me.  I was sitting with my family, laughing and drinking some red wine, when I looked down over the balcony and saw you there, standing, putting on your coat.  For a moment I couldn't concentrate on what my cousin was saying.  I watched you.  I wondered if you'd seen me come in and walk past your table.  I wondered who you were there with.  Your family, I expect.  A girlfriend?  Who knows.   It's been a long time.

      I kept watching you.  You were wearing a blue shirt, some kind of checked pattern.  From above I can see the way your hair is receding.  I hadn't noticed that before.  I prepared myself to give you a smile and a wave, but you didn't look up and I pulled my eyes back to my table.  Just as I turned back to the conversation I could see you glance up at me, out of my peripheral vision.  A moment later I looked back at you but you were looking away, and again I caught you looking up at me at the instant I was turning my head away.  So funny, these missed glances.