Stay of Execution

All Requests: Are You Taking Any Classes?

I'm not taking any classes at the college this semester.  I thought about taking one of the biology or neuroscience classes, to learn about plants or birds or how our brains develop.  But instead in the time I'm not spending focusing on being a better coach I'm going to write some magazine articles, do home repair, and make a long-distance relationship work.  I think I'll have my hands full. 

All Requests: Being a Girly Girl

L. wants a post about "the subject of making a deliberate choice to be more well-groomed/attractive, and how that affects your interactions with the world around you." 

I think this will be a constant tug-of-war with me.  I'm a little bit vain, and I'm learning how to make myself prettier by paying attention to how I dress.  I know a little mascara and eyeliner and a good haircut make a big difference.   But I'm not very vain.  I'm just not that pretty, and have grown up always being good friends with extremely beautiful women, so I'm accustomed to being "the smart one" or a cute funny sidekick, and not the person who grabs your eyes from across the room.  That's an okay role for me.  So it doesn't often occur to me to spend a lot of time trying to beautify.  It's kind of a late-ish development, and I'm prone to forgetting it.  And I'm always outdoors, messing with things, so I've always got bruises and cuts and often dirt under my fingernails, and a pair of flip flops and a fleece vest and my hair pulled back into a pony tail generally make a lot of sense.

During all the fuss around the wedding I was in a public role.  I wasn't concerned so much about looking beautiful as about looking confident and pulled-together, but it made me pay attention to my appearance with a higher level of scrutiny than I usually do.  There were lots of out-of-town friends, people I knew from when Neighbor and I were in college together or from other various youthful adventures in our lives.  And so there were more occasions than usual when people said to me, "You look beautiful."  I'll tell you, it's nice to hear.  I resolved to find more chances to tell people they look great.  That compliment, when sincere, can make someone's day. 

One of the wedding guests was a friend of Neighbor's from college.  She's a science writer and an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but she doesn't partake in anything girly.  She's just starting to consider that it might be worthwhile.  We talked about femininity on the Saturday before the wedding as I painted my toenails a deep blue-purple.  (She sat beside me, painting each fingernail a different color, then removing the color with a cotton ball.)  She's more afraid of all the trappings of girliness than I am, and we talked about how it can be fun to dress up, to beautify, to spend time on your appearance.  "It's everything I don't want to be," she said: shallow, surface-focused, not straightforward, about disguise and trickery.  "But it's fun," I said, and she paused for a while, and then said, "Yes.  That's confusing."  I've gotten over my conflicts about wanting to be pretty.  I don't think it's a moral weakness.  But I don't know how much time to give to it and I'm not naturally skilled with makeup or even clothes so my efforts vary.  It's usually an afterthought. 

Neighbor had her eyelashes dyed for the wedding and I was very impressed with the results.  I've been fixating on that as my next beauty experiment.  And I've lately been receiving the Title 9 catalog, and when I flip through it I find myself aspiring someday to be a model for them.  Those women are beautiful partly because of the interesting lives they lead.  I'm never going to be a breathtaking femme fatale; I know women who are, and they're lovely, and so different from me in physique and temperament that it's like apples and oranges. 

All Requests: What Writing Assignments Do You Like?

Funny you should ask.  I'm headed down to the Cape for a writing assignment right now, to learn about these boats and the people who sail them.  Another upcoming writing assignment is about microbreweries and the scene and culture of beer aficionados. 

I'm figuring out what kind of writer I want to be, so I don't really know the answer.  I like to visit people and places, and talk to them, and find out what they love, and tell people about it.  In a perfect world, people would pay me to do that, in writing.  Discovering people's passions, why they do what they do, how they construct their lives -- that's really fun for me.  Taking in the details and the feel of something, and trying to convey it to someone else: I love that.  I'm not a scientist or an expert in much.  I don't want to cover politics or breaking news.  I want to learn about the world and people and smells and sights in it, and show it to people who weren't there having the same conversation or the same experience. 

Anyway, I'm off to the Cape to see some people who love a peculiar kind of sailboat.  What I want to know is why people get attached to a particular kind of sailboat.  Is it the boat itself, and if so, is it the functionality, or the aesthetics?  Is it the community of other people who sail it?  Is it the history and tradition?  How do such things get started?  How do they ebb and flow?  I have lots of questions.  I'll be offline for a while. 

All Requests: Knowing What To Do

Courtney asks for a post on the subject: How do you know where you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to be doing?

Well, that's a great question.  I wrote about this a long time ago, when this blog had no readers.  (And, when I was still practicing bankruptcy law -- a course from which I have rather decisively veered.) I cringe a little at the way the post roams around, but I think there's still wisdom in it.  I'll paraphrase so you don't need to go back and re-read if you don't want to. 

I saw a demonstration once about teaching complex concepts with simple rules, and it has become a powerful metaphor for me.  Imagine that you are a little battery-powered Lego car, and you have to get from where you are now to where you're supposed to be, but you don't know the coordinates of where you are now or where you are supposed to be.  You can't draw out a map or follow it.  Plus, it's dark and bumpy.

The car can still get where it's supposed to go if you add two things.  Assume that there's a light source at your destination.  And assume the car has a light sensor on it.  The only instructions you need are these: if the light is getting brighter, go straight.  If the light is getting dimmer, turn. 

You'll get to the destination just fine, and the adjustments you'll make will get smaller and smaller as you approach your destination. 

So what you need to do is pretty simple (but really, really hard).  1) You need to trust that your destination is a light source for you.  If you talk to people who love what they are doing, I think you will see this light.  2) You need to polish up your own light sensor, so you can listen to what it is telling you.  This is pretty hard to do.  It's maybe the hardest thing in the world to do.  Books like "What Color Is Your Parachute" ask you good questions, and help you listen to what you already know.  Noticing what you love, and how you feel when you're really immersed in something you love -- those things are your light sensor.  Being able to answer the question: if you had a really great day, what was it that happened, what difference did you make in the world, for it to feel like a really great day?  This is your light sensor.  Get used to paying attention to it.  Practice being brave and following it.  3) Ignore everything else.  People will tell you they have a map or tell you they know a shortcut to your destination.  I don't think they do.  And this part, step 3, is the very hardest one of all. 

All Requests: Relationship Rules

You people, you lovely people.  I'm always surprised when I get "Dear Abby" type questions on request day, about your career or your love life.  I don't know how to make it more apparent that I am fumbling along on some unpredictible mix of gut instinct, a pull towards what I know, and the occasional wild unjustified risk.  So far, the recipe hasn't yielded impressive results, although this afternoon it was hard to imagine a happier life. 

All this by way of prefacing the next request, from LW:

**Here's the request: What “relationship rules” that apply to “normal” relationships also apply to dating a lawyer who works 7 days a week (but leaves the CrackBerry turned off and in the car when we’re together)?  Is there a secret to dealing with the CPA/Lawyer – twice divorced? What “normal” relationship rules can be tossed out the window? Other than knowing he's short on time and constantly thinking of work, what else do I need to know in order to progress the relationship?**

I obviously can't answer this.  I can't answer this in the specifics of your case, and I can't answer it generally.  So I'm punting and answering a question you didn't ask, about what "normal" relationship rules can or should be tossed out the window in general. 

Requests: Three Easy Ones

1) How's the hunt for a new mast coming?  The hunt for a new mast was tabled when the car broke and the wedding happened.  I'm picking it up now.  (That means I'm close to solving my carlessness, and, of course, the wedding is over).  The sailing season is hitting with administrivia and college student energy all at once, and I have a trip down to MA to research an article this weekend, but project mast is back on top come Monday.  I've got some leads and some estimates, so it's not true that the project has been entirely tabled.  But it hasn't had my full attention for a couple of weeks.

2) Are you still involved with LexThink?  Nope.  Dennis and Matt live near one another, and had ideas about the project's scope that were a little different from mine.  No wild divergences, but it was tough to collaborate on a vision entirely by conference call.  And I realized that I was pulled more towards the water and towards writing than to some kind of consulting role for lawyers.  I check in with them from time to time, but I'm out.  I love the Open Space concept and think they're very creative and bright guys, with a gift for starting interesting conversations.  I learned a lot from our collaboration. 

3) Do you recommend moving to Portland?  Yes!  It's a great place to live.  And, these days, the whole city seems to be for sale.  There were a few years there where you just couldn't buy a place.  During that time I got in the habit of noticing realtor signs if they were around and stowing them away in my head to recommend to friends who were looking.  That habit's still with me, and I keep seeing cute places for sale all over town.  You can't get good Mexican food here.  You need to take a trip somewhere south in February or March.  And if you want to get into showbiz, this ain't your best city.  But with those caveats, I recommend the place. 

All Requests: Tell Me About Your Housemate

Right off the bat, we have a troublesome request.  My housemate is great -- she's a friend, supersmart, great to bounce ideas and questions off of, and a good person to live with.  If I have any gripes it's that she spends too much time at her sweetie's place, and not enough around here. 

But she's a public figure in this small state, and she's got political ambitions.  So you'll get no personality analysis, no funny anecdotes about silly things we've done or discussed.  And if I'm talking about something we've done together as friends, I generally won't identify her as my housemate.  She'll tell the people she wants to tell; I'm not going to put it up here for Google. 

That's part of my larger philosophy about this blog.  It's mine; it's a place to tell my own stories.  It's not a place to depict other people.  I guess I can't avoid giving you a sense of some of the people who are interwoven in my life.  But I want to be careful about doing that.  I never want the people in my life to worry about whether I'm going to write about something we do or talk about together.  It's why I won't say much about coaching.  I'm okay with embarrassing myself, but not with exposing anything about other people. 

We all get to decide how we present ourselves to the world.  I'm trying to be pretty transparent.  (And it's hard.)  This blog is part of that project, for me.  It's not a place for gossip or analysis or even just description of other people.  Will I screw it up?  Heck yes.  But never intentionally. 

All Request Day

It's been practically all summer since I've taken requests.  Is there something you'd like me to post about?  If so, please leave me a note or send me an email and I'll tackle it, as honestly as I can.  Remember I make no promises of being wise or profound.  I will be straightforward.  That's all I've got.

I know I fell down on the job and left some requests hanging the last time.  Ping me to remind me to tackle them, or I might overlook them again. 

All Requests: What I Think About Anti-Depressants

An anonymous commenter asks for my opinion on antidepressants.  I think they're a good thing, generally.  I didn't always, and I don't fully understand them, so it's not an unreserved endorsement.  Reading Listening To Prozac left me with plenty of questions about temperament, mood, identity, and how and whether those can be altered by antidepressants. 

But I've watched someone I love get sucked under by depression.  I know that her depressed self wasn't her "true self."  And now that she's on antidepressants, her "true self" is back.  We could get all semantic about what the "true self" means.  I used to think a lot about that, and imagine that people on antidepressants were somehow "cheating" and taking happy pills to avoid coping with things that the rest of us just had to deal with.  But watching it happen to someone I know is like watching someone drown.  The onset of the apathy and despair, the helpless sadness, it just wasn't the person I knew before the onset of depression and it didn't connect to the circumstances of her life. I finally understood the chemical imbalance explanation of depression.  On medication, my dear friend is back.  It doesn't mean she doesn't get sad.  It just means she's not drowning anymore.

Over the last month I've been closer to depression than I usually get.  I think it's a function of going from a very hectic, overwhelmingly busy schedule with the sailing team to open, unstructured time.  The other coaches I talk to tell me the seasonality of the work is a very hard thing to adjust to.  It is for me.  I know how to fight depression for myself: make sure to exercise, don't let yourself oversleep, set goals and find people to hold me accountable, shake up my social life, don't retreat from the people I love, go outside, do things for other people.  That's my recipe.  Still, sometimes are harder than others, and a couple of weeks ago were pretty hard.  Maybe the rain had something to do with it.  This week has been easier -- I've been outside more, I'm absorbed with a project, I've met some new people, I feel like it's easy to be happy again, without monitoring myself.  Maybe it's the coffee. 

All Requests: Dogs In The Workplace

Bill wonders what my views are about dogs in the workplace. 

I think it's pretty sensible to ban dogs from the workplace.  There are too many annoying and unpredictable dogs.  There are too many people who have legitimate anti-dog sentiments -- fear, allergies, distaste.  It doesn't seem right to give sentimental dog-loving employees the right to impose a disruptive and distracting factor on an environment that their co-workers can't choose to leave.  People who own dogs invariably think they are cute and loveable even if they are stinky, hyper, and annoying.  You can't leave it up to the dog owners to make a judgment about what their co-workers will like, or the place would be full of terriers and poodles and pugs.  So I think no-dogs-at-work policies are okay. 

But in a small workplace, where it's possible to know whether people who work there like dogs or not, and where the boss and all the employees can get to know the temperament of the dog who's there, I think it's great to permit dogs.  I love going to boatyards or shops or clothing stores or offices where there's a friendly dog who waddles wagging up to greet me, or who ignores me, sleeping in the shade.  It's an extra bonus; it makes me comfortable, it makes me want to stay and talk longer.  When I'm in places like that I assume the employees are happier.  It tells me a business is friendly, sensible, and flexible.