Men Are Like Rats

I’ve just realized that my troubles in dating are due to one deeply rooted belief of mine: men are like rats.

Now before you write me off as another over-angry feminist, let me explain the analogy. Men are like rats. They’re cute, they’re cuddly, they’re fun to play with, and if you watch for a while, they do the darnedest things. Most are quite furry and pettable, though there are hairless varieties for those who prefer them. If they’ve been petted and cuddled enough in their lives, they can be quite tame and affectionate. I love it when they play with my hair. And, alas, they die if you sneeze on them. They’re heartbreakingly fragile. Just when you’ve really gotten attached to one, he up and dies.

Yes, I really like rats. Three years ago, my dear friend Ron, a lifelong rat aficionado, introduced me to his pets, Wolfram, Graham, and Maximillian, three ratty brothers. (Rats are very social creatures, and prefer to live in groups.) I quickly learned to love them. I also learned from Ron that the rats bred to be tamable, personable pets are descended from lab rats, and therein lies their problem: Researchers need pure strains of very similar rats for reproducible test results, and thus their rats are so inbred that any nasty diseases hiding in their genetic code get to pop up all of the time. Pet rats are particularly prone to cancers and one otherwise rare form of pneumonia. Every pet rat who manages to avoid cats, hawks, and other accidents dies of cancer or pneumonia before he is three years old.

Ron and Françoise, his best friend for twenty years and roommate at the time, knew this when they got Wolfram, Graham, and Max. The brothers were the eighth, ninth, and tenth pet rats they’d had during their adult lives. Still, when Graham and Max died of pneumonia eleven days apart, Ron held Wolfram much closer, petting him, coddling him, and jumping at any sign of illness. He told me he knew that it would be most painful when this last rat died, and there’d be no distracting himself with worry for another rat’s comfort. Four months later, when Wolfram gasped his last pneumoniac breath in Ron’s hands, Ron called Françoise to tell her the news. Then, still cradling the furry little body in his hands, he called me for consolation. Next time, he declared, he will get a pet rabbit. Of course he doesn’t love them the way he loves rats, but rabbits are cute enough, and most importantly, they live three times as long.

I feel the same way about people. My best and wisest friend, Rachel, put my problem into clear focus a few days ago when, once again, I was complaining that I only seem to like men who aren’t interested in having a close relationship with me. “Do you think,” asked Rachel, “that you’re avoiding getting close to a man because your dad convinced you that they’re all just going to die on you?”

Well, yes, of course that’s my problem! I’ve known that, to some degree, for a long time. The first major man in my life, my father, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 48. I had just turned 15. What shocked me most was how easily death snuck up on him. At 5’11” and nearly 200 pounds, my father did not look at all delicate. Even to a 15-year-old, he didn’t seem like an old man. He hadn’t had time to slow down. I realized soon after his death, and got into a habit of reminding myself, that when the newspaper says, “He died of natural causes,” a heart attack is what they mean. Looking back up my family tree, I saw that heart attacks had killed every man on both sides, and that they die younger with every generation. My brother noticed, too. Years ago, when he was working full-time as an accountant while attending law school at night and volunteering on political campaigns on weekends, one of our cousins asked him why he was so driven. My brother replied, “Look at our history. Our grandpa was 62 when he died of a heart attack. My dad was 48. I’m 25 years old. At this rate, I could go at any moment. I have to get as much done as I can right now.”

Hearing this, I was supremely grateful to be a woman. No, we’re not immortal either, and heart disease is the biggest killer of women in the United States, too, but statistically, women live significantly longer. In his book Millionaire Women Next Door, economist Thomas Stanley advised women to learn how to handle all of their finances, no matter how helpful their husbands may be, because statistics show that three out of four married women will outlive their husbands. In my particular family tree, the difference between men and women is even more obvious: My father’s Aunt Maisie is 92 this year, living with a border collie for companionship, and in good health. Her sister, Marie, has just turned 82. My grandmother on my mother’s side just stopped breathing one day at the age of 83. The best theory her doctors could come up with was that she got bored and gave up. And yes, my father’s mother died at only 56, but she died of cervical cancer, which is now easily caught and very treatable if found early. If I can keep up with my annual pap smears, it appears that I might live forever.

In any case, women are a much hardier group than men. Like Ron going from rats to rabbits, I wish I could switch my preferences and settle down with a nice, healthy, long-lived woman, but apparently that really isn’t a conscious choice. Though I see beautiful, bright, healthy women everywhere, I still find myself drawn to men. I fear that my only choices are to live alone or to get used to going to funerals.

Now that Rachel has pointed out how extreme my fear is, I see it seeping into my day-to-day life. Out for drinks with Ron and a few of his buddies, I catch myself, in the middle of a laugh, looking around the table and imagining how each man there is going to meet his early end. Mark has cut back on rock climbing because he sprained his wrist in a mountain-biking crash. Last winter, he wrenched his shoulder when he tried a back flip while snowboarding and fell while he was upside-down. I see him falling on his head, though whether from a rock or a snowdrift, I cannot guess. Aaron has become devoted to yoga in the most driven, macho style available. He has chosen Bikram yoga, characterized by super-humidified, super-heated studios and poses done in rapid succession. On top of that, he’s put himself on an extreme low-fat diet that makes even Ron, a vegetarian, worry. I picture Aaron worn down by malnutrition, if heatstroke doesn’t get him first.

And then I look at Ron, one of my closest friends and favorite men. Ron has traveled the world, gotten sick off of the water in Morocco, nearly drowned while snorkeling in Costa Rica, gone skydiving and rock climbing and river rafting, and has a certificate on his office wall declaring that, on a trip to South Africa, he has touched a live cheetah. Still, I imagine he’ll meet his end right in his own back yard. Ron was once knocked unconscious by a car door blown back in a strong wind. He was knocked out again by a rude movie theater patron who, on her way out of the theater, shoved the door open too quickly while he was coming in. He sustained a mild concussion and a nasty cut on his nose when he leaned too far forward while closing the back hatch of his station wagon. I cannot imagine what freak accident will finally kill Ron, but it will certainly be an interesting one, and it could come at any moment.

I suppose, looking at my friends, that I should add “machismo” to my list of likely killers of men, right under “heart disease.” The main point I’ve absorbed, though, is that, much as I like men, I will most likely have to watch many of them die, and so, the closer I get to any of them, the more pain I’m signing up for. Rachel clarified my problem, but I don’t know an easy solution. My fear that the men I love are far too mortal is not an irrational neurosis. It is a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence available to me. My only hope for happiness, it seems, is to become so enlightened that, like the best Buddhists, I can accept that death is always a heartbeat (or lack thereof) away, and come to be calm about that fact. I’m not hopeful that I’ll ever be that strong, but lacking other solutions, I’ve dusted off my meditation bench and started to flip through books, looking for the right spiritual path to start toddling down.

But then Ron points out by accident that enlightenment might sneak up on us as surely as death does. He still declares that he’s heartbroken over his rats, and won’t get any of his own for a long, long time. Visiting his house, I find him happily setting up a sleeping cage in his living room, and hiding electrical wires to “rat-proof” a play area on the floor. It turns out that Françoise, a stronger woman than I on many accounts, has moved out of Ron’s house to live with her beloved boyfriend. As a couple, they’ve decided to get a group of pet rats. She’s just called Ron for help: The youngest rat is much smaller than the other three, and the big ones are beating him up terribly. He needs another place to stay until he’s finished growing up and is big enough to compete. Would Ron like to keep him for a few months?

Of course he would! Rabbits make more logical sense, but Ron is a born rat-lover. He’s happiest with a rat in his life, even though he knows that he’s going to have to nurse him through hard times and finally watch him die. When the right one comes along, Ron just can’t help but take him in.

And me, I just have a thing for men. Someday, against my best judgment, I’m sure I’ll find one sleeping in my living room again.

Culture Shock

Call me Prooferbert.

I’ve just started a four-month long assignment as a temporary proofreader, checking holiday advertising for one of America’s largest sporting goods retailers, and I am scared. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been immersed in corporate American culture. I sit in my cubicle within a maze of other, identical cubicles, within a building that requires a computer-chipped ID card to get one through any of the doors, within an enormously expansive concrete parking lot that also demands the flash of a card to get one’s car in or out. I keep reminding myself that I am only a temp here, and so this place is only a temporary part of my life. I tell myself that I can live inside a Dilbert cartoon for four months without losing my trademark quirkiness. It’s not like I’m planning to make a habit of it. I will stay here to proofread the holiday sale ads, and then I will celebrate Christmas by leaving my cubicle forever and settling down, with the freedom afforded by all of the money I will have saved up, to follow my dream of living in a very loose schedule, learning to make a living copyediting books and writing magazine articles. “Eyes on the prize,” I keep telling myself. “Delayed gratification is the hallmark of adulthood. Delayed gratification is the best kind there is.”

I feel like writing love letters to my sloppy, freewheeling, freelance self, the one who stays up late reading books, sleeps until nine, doesn’t care what her hair looks like, and volunteers for every arts organization event she can find because she has the time to do so. “We will be together again in January,” I would say. “Only thinking of your beauty keeps my soul alive. Wait for me, my love.”

Yes, I’m being melodramatic, and life in the standard giant corporations’ offices has grown far more authentic and casual in the past two decades, since the days when everyone wore suits to work and the novel American Psycho took place. Still, this place scares me.

I long for my last full-time job, at a company in Boulder, where we published books and audio programs on yoga, meditation, Jungian psychology, and other spiritual topics. I had to leave my job there, as it had expanded to the point where they really needed a calm, assertive manager, and I am none of those things.

Still, though I didn’t fit the position, I surely fit the culture, or rather, it fit me. Instead of a cubicle, I worked in a large, open room with two other people; it was like sharing a childhood bedroom with two brothers. There was no dress code. Those who met with clients dressed up on the days they met with them, not because a company rule told them to, but because they realized that it might impress the clients. Otherwise, we wore jeans, shorts, hiking boots, no shoes at all—whatever we felt like wearing on any given day. Friendly dogs roamed the halls. (There were rules banning unfriendly dogs and dogs who tended to pee on the carpet.) We had a full kitchen where people didn’t just reheat, but actually cooked lunches, the meat-eaters and the vegans, the Atkins diet devotees and those who’d determined they were allergic to wheat all coexisting in open harmony. The guy who rarely made eye contact was not passed over for hiring or sent to a seminar on assertiveness. He was just declared to be a “5”—his Enneagram personality type—and enjoyed because we need all types to balance us out. I once overheard a coworker declare, “Well, the company manual told us to bring our authentic selves to work, and sometimes my authentic self says ‘fuck’!”

I am afraid that, in my current office culture, I might forget who my authentic self is. Today I am wearing a spandex-infused polo shirt from Target and cheap, no-wrinkle polyester pants because jeans are only allowed on Fridays. I’m sure the company intends this to be a treat, but in practice, this means jeans are required on Fridays. I have even less power to choose my own appearance on that “relaxed” day. Strangely, anything else made of denim is allowed. The receptionist at the front desk wears a 16-inch jean skirt that clings to her behind. Surely whatever human being within the company wrote these rules—I imagine it’s some executive-level human resources expert, working so far away in this maze of an office building that I will never meet her—thought she was creating a comfortable professional environment, preventing people from scaring each other by wearing any old thing.

In practice, these strict but incomplete rules make each of us look a lot less interesting and a little less human. All of us look into our closets each morning (or, as time-management professionals suggest, the night before), see what looks best to us, what most expresses how we feel at that moment, and then subject the poor shirt or pants or pair of shoes to a list of rules: No jeans. Pants must hit below the knee—this is the official difference between “pants” and the forbidden “shorts.” Flip-flop sandals are, inexplicably, allowed, though my beloved Teva sport sandals are not. Then each of us sighs and selects something less exciting, something that doesn’t break any rules. After a while, we start to impose more rules: All of the men seem to have the same haircut, clipped close to their heads and gelled into place. The belt I crocheted out of fake suede isn’t expressly forbidden, but it doesn’t look right with anything that fits the dress code. My most comfortable socks look silly with “acceptable” shoes. I worry about what my higher-ups will think of the shawl I knitted out of the hand-dyed yarn whose colors remind me of the St. Lawrence River.

I miss my old job. I miss wearing pigtails in my hair and eating vegan chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. I miss the little white dog who used to snooze in the corner of my office all afternoon. I miss the guy who used to play guitars with me in the kitchen at lunch—his fuzzy beard and his hair, longer and curlier than mine, flowing over his shoulders or tied in a messy ponytail. I miss spending breaks playing Frisbee with my office brothers in the dandelion-infested front yard.

But to my surprise, as the days pass and I get to know my coworkers better, I discover that they do still have personalities under their khakis, polo shirts, and cookie cutter hair. People still talk about where they’re from, what they did on the weekend, and what kind of music they like best. I see stuffed animals on desks, and pictures of small children and dogs pinned up on cubicle walls. Apparently, one’s authentic self is more difficult to leave behind than I’d first thought. It seeps through around the rules, becoming more creative in its quietness. I try pushing the boundaries. I put up my A Series of Unfortunate Events wall calendar, and nobody complains. My stuffed Dogbert doll becomes my “in/out” sign: the rest of the copy team knows that, if he is sitting on top of my monitor, looking down on my chair, I am in the office and will be right back. If he’s sitting on the desk, in front of the keyboard and with one paw on the mouse, I am out for the day and Dogbert is taking over the world via Internet.

As I sit outside on my lunch break, getting my polyester Old Navy Essential Trousers damp as I sit on a tiny patch of grass in the shade of one anemic sapling at the edge of the parking lot, a young man walks by. He is wearing the regulation polo shirt and khakis, with brown shoes and belt that would make my vegetarian friends cry. His hair is cut and gelled into a tidy imitation of Ward Cleaver. And yet, under his arm, he is carrying a Frisbee! Where does he play? With whom? When? Can I play, too? Is there grass there, and are there real trees? I restrain myself from tackling him and barraging him with these questions.

There may be hope for this place yet.

August 8

August 8 is my one of my favorite days of the year. It is the birthday of not one, but two of my favorite people, and I love birthdays!

Most people I talk with—most over the age of 12, anyway—do not share my enthusiasm. I’ve heard the usual arguments: Many folks point out that age doesn’t really tell much about a person’s maturity or wisdom, or even life expectancy. They say that counting years on an arbitrarily human-made calendar is just silly when you take a closer look—why is it such a big deal if I am “31” today, but I was “only 30” yesterday? And finally, many complain, ticking off each year of one’s life often feels more like a countdown to death than a cause for celebration.

They have valid points. I love birthdays still. For me, it is not the counting of years that makes birthdays special. It’s that each person’s birthday is an annual reminder of the amazing, extremely unlikely fact that this individual was born at all, and the even more impressive fact that he or she has continued to stay alive for so long. Every birthday is a reason to look at someone you love and realize how grateful you are that they are exactly who they are, and that you have the honor of knowing them. I tend to refer to my own birthday, January 27, as Anita Day, and on that day, I expect all of my friends to acknowledge the quirky uniqueness that is me. In fact, I get quite depressed if my birthday goes unheralded. This is it! This is the one great day when everyone is reminded to really look at me and stand in awe of the miracle of my particular life! Better yet, every one of us has a day just like this, every year! As Dr. Seuss wrote in The Birthday Book, it is the day to, “shout up at the sky, ‘Me! I am I! And I may not know why, but I know that I like it! Three cheers! I am I!’” Still, few people truly understand my love of birthdays. I generally work out the big packet of disappointment that grows in my heart every January 27 by spending the rest of the year making far too big a deal of everyone else’s birthdays.

My good friend Janette, born August 8, 1955, knows just how I feel. This August 8, she turned 50, and this year she decided to make sure that Janette Day was done up right. She ordered catered barbeque and three cases of wine, then wrote up an invitation asking everyone to bring their favorite side dish to share. She sent it out to all of her local friends here in Colorado, the entire company she works for, her mother and her brother and his whole family, friends from her days living in California, and her nationwide creative writing group, who meet over the internet. On the Saturday before August 8, she put on her sparkliest outfit and opened her doors. Sixty-two people from all over the country filled her house and spilled into the back yard, meeting and greeting, joking around, giving gifts, eating cake, playing glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, and most importantly, remarking upon all the glory that is Janette. I was particularly happy to be part of her fan club that Janette Day.

My dear friend Ron, born August 8, 1967, does not share our view of birthdays, but he knows and likes me well enough to be amused by my giddiness. For his birthday, I mailed a paper card and sent an email one, even though I knew he’d be out of town and unlikely to read them until days later. When I called him on his cell phone to remind him how happy I am to know him, he told me he was in the middle of shooting a video of Klaaske, his best friend’s mother, as she talked about her particular philosophy of life. He’d already told me why he was in California: His best friend, Françoise, who has been such since they met in college nearly 20 years ago, has also been his roommate for most of their adult lives. Together, they have lived in California, Germany, Holland, and Colorado, and visited six of the seven continents. Her family considers him a part of the clan; her nieces play with him as if her were an uncle. And Klaaske, his mother too in many ways, has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic stomach cancer. Her doctors tell her that chemotherapy is an option, but probably won’t make enough of a difference to be worth the suffering and loss of quality time. Time is at a premium now: they have declared that she has a few weeks to live. Françoise’s sister, nieces, and stepfather, all of whom live near Klaaske, are staying close by to savor every last moment they have with her. Ron, Françoise, and friends and family from across the country have flown out to see her, to hear her, to admire her one last time. They are making videos and audio recordings, taking pictures, trying to save every hint of her that they can.

As I see it, Klaaske is having a birthday writ large. All of the people who know her have the blessing of knowing how little time they have left to enjoy her before it’s too late. I wonder how many of them have been building up to this by celebrating her a little bit when the reminder day comes around every year, and how many of them are trying to catch up by expressing all of their admiration in a few short weeks.

However large a label comes with each one—“32,” “40,” “60,” “83”—I will always be grateful when my birthday rolls around every year. I am even more grateful that every person I love has a birthday, so that I won’t forget to celebrate them all before my chance has past. Happy birthday to Ron and Janette, and Klaaske too, and to everyone who has the pleasure of knowing them!