Anita's Weekly Column

Never, Ever Call Yellow Cab of Boulder

2007-07-14T12:51:00.000-06:00

I’d like to share my experience with everyone I can: Yellow Cab of Boulder went out of their way, not only not to have me as a customer, but to ruin my chances of getting to my destination by any other means.

My car was in the shop for repairs, and I was told that it would be ready for pickup at 5:30pm on Wednesday, July 11. Since I was performing in a show that opened at 7:30pm that night, it was very important to me to pick up my car and get to the theater on time. Since I was staying in Louisville, where bus service is almost nonexistent, I decided to call a cab. I called and checked web sites for several cab companies, most of which told me politely that their cabs don’t come to Louisville. Yellow Cab of Boulder, however, did not say this. Their web site had a form for an “Advance Time Call,” a way to call for a cab 24 hours ahead of time, so I filled out the form on Tuesday, July 10. I noted that the form said “This is not a reservation,” but failed to tell me what, exactly, an “Advance Time Call” is. I asked for a cab to come get me at 5pm the next day, figuring that, even if the time was not exact, if the cab arrived within an hour of the time I asked for, I’d still have no problem picking up my car and getting to my opening night.

At 4pm on Wednesday, I’d had no call, no email, no indication at all that the “Advance Time Call” had been received. I called Yellow Cab, and the call taker assured me that they had my order, and I was “all set.” I thanked her and settled in to wait. At 5:15, I called again to ask if the cab was coming. The call taker told me they were “running a little late,” but assured me that they had my order and she’d let the dispatcher know that I was still waiting. I called again at 5:30, and at 5:45 and was told the same thing. I asked the call taker if she could find out for me whether any cab was even in my city that day. She said she couldn’t get any information; all she could do was tell the dispatchers (who apparently can’t talk back, themselves) that I was still waiting.

At 6pm, when my cab was one hour late, I called and asked if the call taker could tell me if a cab was ever coming to get me. She said she couldn’t; all she could do was tell the dispatcher, again, that I was waiting. When I requested that she put me on hold and ask the dispatcher if any cabs were anywhere near Louisville that day, or any cab driver had been told to come towards me, she said she couldn’t do that. She said there was no way to know anything, because “our drivers are independent contractors,” as if this explains why nobody can speak to them. As further excuse, she argued that my house was not in Louisville, but in Lafayette, (It isn’t. My house is between the Louisville Post Office and the Louisville Police station.) as if this explained why Yellow Cab had repeatedly offered a service they refused to provide. I hung up the phone and sobbed for a while. By this time, it was too late to walk the 3 ½ miles to the car shop, to find a friend I could beg to pick me up, or to find another transportation service. If Yellow Cab did not come through in the next 15 minutes, there was no way I could get my car and get myself to the theater before the curtain rose.

At 6:10, I called again to ask if my cab was ever coming. The call taker assured me that she had no idea. I asked why, since they can’t get anyone to any place at any given time, Yellow Cab is in business at all. Yellow Cab’s customer service didn’t know that, either. She said she’d be happy to tell the dispatcher that I was still waiting, though. I pointed out that, in 5 minutes, it would no longer matter whether a cab ever came. She offered to cancel the cab and take down a complaint. I told her I’d call back in 5 minutes.

At 6:15, still sobbing, I called to cancel the cab and file a complaint, though I couldn’t imagine who would read the complaint—the non-speaking dispatchers, perhaps?—or what anyone at Yellow Cab would do about it. Only then was I put through to a manager, who listened to my complaints, heard that, in my experience, Yellow Cab not only didn’t want me as a customer, but had gone out of their way to ruin my day and make me hate the company. This manager told me that the manger who’d called me back to confirm my Advance Time Call should have told me that they don’t guarantee anything. I pointed out that no one had ever called me back, and that the call takers who were the only people I could ever get a hold of before her had said nothing of the sort, but only made it very clear that they knew nothing about anything. She said she was sorry, and all she could do was put me through to the voice mail box of Travis Menaphee, her manager. I left a message, explaining my whole experience, in Travis’ mailbox.

Travis left a message on my voice mail on Thursday morning, saying he’d like to talk with me more about my complaint. I called back, got voice mail again, and left another message. I have not heard from Travis again.

I must admit that I did make it to my show. I called my 65-year-old mother, who lives in Lakewood and hates to drive after dark because she can’t see very well at night. Mom rushed all the way to Louisville, I jumped into the driver’s seat and sped all the way to the theater in downtown Denver, and having missed all pre-show preparations and scared the rest of the cast, I rushed into the theater 5 minutes before the curtain went up. My mother waited through the show while the sun went down, let me drive to the closed repair shop (where my car, paid for over the phone, was waiting with the door unlocked and the key in it), got my car, and let my poor mother find her way back to Lakewood.

If Yellow Cab had simply told me in the first place that they had no interest in serving me, I could have called my mother the day before and asked her to come get me in the daylight. I could have called all of my friends until I found one who was available that night. I could have walked 3 ½ miles to the shop. I could have hired a limousine…I could have done many things besides nearly ruining a show on opening night. Yellow Cab of Boulder went out of their way to ruin my night, and their systems are apparently set up to do just that. My advice to everyone who will listen: Never, ever call Yellow Cab of Boulder.

Want Yellow Cab’s side of the story? Call 303-777-7777 and choose the option for Boulder and Boulder County, but be warned that all you’ll get is a call taker who knows nothing and can’t communicate with anyone else in the company.

Click

2007-01-17T23:30:00.000-07:00

There was a violent gang problem at the junior high school I was supposed to attend, so my parents open enrolled me at the next school over, just too far away to walk to. My mother drove me to school in the mornings, and my father picked me up every afternoon. When the bell rang at the end of my last class, I’d collect my books from my locker, rush outside, and eagerly watch the parents’ cars arrive. I couldn’t get away from junior high fast enough.

For the first few days, I was troubled by spurts of false hope. One mother had a Nissan Sentra, dark red, the same model and color as my father’s car. I could not consciously see any difference between the two cars. She usually arrived a few minutes before my father did, so that when she turned the corner into the parking lot, I got all excited, ready to go home, until she got close enough for even a nearsighted kid like me to see who was driving. My heart leapt up, then crashed back into my stomach, and I was trapped at the junior high school for five more incredibly long minutes. She didn’t always arrive first, though. Sometimes my father got there first, so my hopes stayed high, and my disappointment crushing. After a week, though, I found the solution in my subconscious mind. Until the car pulled right up to the curb, I had no logical way to know whether it was my father coming to take me home, or Decoy Mom there to disappoint me. Still, if I could calm myself down enough to feel it, I noticed that something clicked into place in my mind when the car turning that corner really was my father’s car, the one I’d ridden in for years and often looked for in the garage to tell me whether he was home. It was the click of familiarity. I don’t know what I was seeing—a scratch on the headlights, perhaps, or the movement of that particular set of wheels and shocks over the cracked pavement—but when I felt the click, I knew that car was there for me.

As my life goes on, I’ve noticed the click in other situations, and I’ve used it often to inform me or comfort me. It’s most pronounced with people. When I think I see a good friend across the mall, or an ex-boyfriend on the street, I watch the person walk, shift weight, move hands, turn, for just a moment. I’m not consciously looking for anything. I’m relaxing my conscious mind, waiting for the click. If this is someone who means something to me, part of my mind will recognize some little detail—the shape of Rachel’s eyes, maybe, or the way Brian’s feet turn out when he walks—and I’ll know without a doubt who I’m seeing. This is a common experience. I’m only surprised now when I expect a click and don’t feel one.

Last Saturday, when the air in Colorado was a balmy six degrees Fahrenheit, my friend Brian and I went snowshoeing on a trail just west of Boulder. We trudged through a meadow and into a forest, marveling at views of snow-frosted mountains. When my legs started to wear out, we turned around and retraced our tracks. As we stepped out of the forest, me first because Brian suggested that I, being less tough and more tired, should set the pace going back, I saw four more people toddling towards us on snowshoes.

“It’s Anita!” the head of their line sang out. I could tell that the voice was a man’s, but I didn’t recognize it. Nothing clicked. I watched him as he lead his group across the meadow and stopped two feet away from me—a space invasion for a stranger, but a comfortable distance for a close friend. The rest of his group, who I saw now were all women, stopped in a line behind him. “How are you doing, Anita?” he asked, friendly, charming, warm.

“Great!” I said, trying to match his familiar tone, but I kept staring, trying frantically to figure out who he was. He was bundled up for the weather in a black stocking cap and gloves, a forest green parka, and polarized orange ski goggles that covered half of his face. The other half was sprinkled with dark brown stubble. Still, I felt I should recognize anyone who was so happy to see me. He was small for a man, about my height, thin, and moved with athletic grace. I thought of my former boss, Joe, but Joe was a close friend of Brian’s, and would have called out to Brian, too. Also, Joe would have clicked. This wasn’t Joe. I had no idea who this was.

“Please tell me that the snow gets deeper as we go on,” the man said cheerily.

“Well…”

“No, not really,” Brian admitted for me. The snow was too shallow for snowshoeing, actually. The teeth on the bottoms of our snowshoes had scraped rocks from time to time, and the ground peeked through around the roots of some trees.

“But the view is gorgeous!” I added, still staring, looking the man up and down. As my eyes rested on his parka, it clicked for me right before he pulled off his goggles to reveal sparkling green eyes. “Oh, Ron!” I blurted out. “I didn’t recognize you at all! I recognized your jacket first, but…”

I quickly introduced Brian, reminding Ron what I’d told him in years past, that Brian was a guitarist and a buddy I’d met while working at Sounds True. Then I introduced Ron to Brian. “Brian, this is Ron, my ex-boyfriend from,” I scanned the three women, realizing that at least one of them probably thought she was his girlfriend, “years and years ago.” I remembered that Ron had always hated it when I introduced him that way, as my boyfriend when he was and later as my ex, but I suddenly realized that I had no other way to explain why I knew him. That was the full extent of our relationship. Brian was my former co-worker, my guitar teacher, a client whose cat I had cared for, a musician I admired, and one of my best friends. Ron was simply my ex.

Ron quickly sang off the names of his companions, waving vaguely towards them as he did. Now that Ron and I had finally expanded the conversation beyond the two of us, Brian asked the women if they knew of other good places for snowshoeing. One of them—their names had blown away from me in the rushed introduction—suggested Bear Lake. Then we all nodded and smiled and started off in opposite directions. “It was good to see you again,” said Ron, still wearing his charming smile.

“You too!” I called back. The warm, welcome feeling stayed on me as we stomped up a hill, but then I remembered the relationship I’d had with Ron, which I hadn’t thought of in the months since I’d finally stopped speaking to him, stopped pretending I could be his friend. The pain of trying too hard to prove that I was good enough for him, always feeling that I’d failed, for a year and a half as his girlfriend and two years as we tried to transition into friendship, came flooding back. “Wow,” I said loudly, so that Brian could hear me over the crunching of our snowshoes, “it’s amazing how much he still pisses me off.”

Brian told me that wasn’t too surprising, and he launched into his own story of a cheating ex-girlfriend who threw him away years ago, but who still pulled him down into depression when he ran into her again. As we toddled back to his car, on the ride back into Boulder, and over curry dinners at a Thai restaurant, we talked on and on about old relationships. We wondered what our significant others could have been thinking, analyzed our embarrassments, and marveled at how much we could still suffer from them years later. “I guess the only way to really get over someone you’ve loved is to fall in love with someone else,” Brian said.

I’m not sure I agree. I had misspoken earlier: It wasn’t really Ron who pissed me off. Ron made me feel welcome and cozy in a detached sort of way, like the great party host that he is. I’m clearly not over the story—it still upsets me whenever any little thing reminds me of it—but as for Ron himself, Ron the real person whose life is going on entirely without me, he doesn’t even click for me anymore. My life has gone on without him, too. I wonder if Brian’s statement was simply inside out: Maybe, now that the click is gone, I’ll finally be able to click with someone else.

The Assistant Storytellers

2006-11-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

The cast of the play I’m acting in is at our neighborhood bar for post-show drinks, and one of my fellow actors is showing me his tattoo. He’s whipped off his shoe and sock, and is wiggling his bare foot next to my chair so that I can admire the wide, serifed X across his big toe.

“Why an X?” I ask.

“Well, it’s…” He trails off, then starts again. “Do you want the real story, or the more interesting one I’ve made up?”

“Both,” I say without thinking about it.

“How about this? I’ll tell you three stories, and you guess which one is true.”

“You’re on,” I reply, while thinking to myself, I like this guy! I hope I can keep him as a friend after the play closes! He tells me three stories, and I lose the game. Even though I know that the most mundane of the stories is likely to be the true one, I pick the most interesting and unusual tale, the one with political connotations, the one that says more about him than I already knew. I’m not really playing the game as we’d set it up. Instead, I vote for the story I like best. Even though it’s not true, the story he invented says more about him, how he thinks and what he values, and how he sees me, what he expects I’d like to hear.

I love a good story! This is, at the root of it all, why I’m here tonight. As Harrison Ford put it in his interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, an actor is merely “an assistant storyteller.” With the help of other actors, the director, the set and lighting designers, the costumer, and the playwright, we have been telling a story that isn’t true. It never happened, and never will. Somebody just made it up. Still, we’re all willing to devote hundreds of hours of our combined lives to telling it. Some, myself included, believe that telling these false stories is the most satisfying and important thing that we do. We are out for drinks to celebrate our success in telling a total lie.

It occurs to me that I will choose a good story over a true one most of the time. I don’t actually believe stories that sound unlikely, but I like to hear them, to roll them around in my mind, and I am more likely to remember them than I am the truth. Even now, two days after my colleague showed me his toe, I remember every detail of my favorite explanation, and only the faintest gist of the true one. Of course, I usually say that I value honesty, and I do value it deeply when it is necessary to give me the power to choose my own path in life. For example, if I’m in a committed relationship and I ask my partner if he slept with someone else while I was out of town, I want him to tell me the truth so that I can freely decide whether I still want to be with him. If I ask my employers whether they’re working on phasing out my job, I want to know the truth so that I can plan my career. If a play I’d like to act in is pre-cast, or if the director is sure that there’s no way she’ll cast me (because I look the wrong age, because she knows I don’t have the skills needed, because my eyes bug out when I’m surprised, or for any reason, really), I want to be told that so I can choose whether to spend my time on the audition. Telling people the truth in matters that affect their lives is a matter of basic respect, of valuing their personal freedom. If I’m part of the story, and it’s happening now, the truth is very important to me.

Still, most of the things people tell me are not factually important to my life. They’re told in order to bond with me in some small way, to share something about who the person is, to impress me, or to entertain us both. A false story can do all of these things just as well as, and sometimes better than, a true one. I don’t need to know the real reason why my colleague has an X across his big toe. I don’t care whether another theater person I know was really a secret member of The Strawberry Alarm Clock. My life and my choices will not change whether or not my best high school friend really had a fling with a hot guy in a Billy Bragg t-shirt while she was in New Orleans when she was sixteen. Still, I love the stories.

One of my favorite vacation experiences came when, on an extended road trip around the eastern U.S., I blew into Savanna, Georgia, and found it advertised as “The Ghost Story Capital of the United States.” I went on a walking tour of supposedly haunted places in historic downtown Savanna, listening to a handsome young man in a Shakespeare festival t-shirt, who later admitted that he was an actor, too. With compelling passion, he told us who had been murdered in this house, and what demons had entered that one because the headboard of the bed was made from iron stolen from a cemetery gate. He told us about a lonely old man who had moved into another historic house, then found his best friend and perfect companion in the ghost of the kindly doctor who had once lived there. As he told us about the doppleganger evil spirit who had attacked one of his college classmates in the mansion-turned-apartment complex on the next corner, I realized suddenly that I didn’t believe a word he was saying. In the next instant, I realized that I didn’t care. I loved the stories anyway. I learned more about the spirit of Savanna from those dubious tales than I would have learned from a dry, proven historical account.

In the same way, I learn more about my friends from the stories they tell about themselves than I would from knowing what actually happened to them. It’s more revealing, actually, when people tell me what they wish had happened, than when they tell me about their real pasts. Now that I think of it, though, my fellow actor’s true story is poignant in its way, as is the fact that he prefers not to tell it. I suppose my favorite way to learn about someone is through his game. I want to hear both stories: what really happened, and what we wish were true.

It’s not Nice not to Stare

2006-08-29T17:30:00.000-06:00

On a lovely, sunny afternoon this past April, I was sitting in a Noodles & Company restaurant in Lakewood, Colorado, waiting for my “to-go” order to be cooked. I was not looking lovely, at all. My right leg was propped up on my left knee, and I was using my hands to hold my bare right foot up higher still. A pair of crutches leaned against the bench beside me. I’d just taken off a painfully tight Ace bandage, so my ankle was now visible in all its glory: black, purple, and blue swirled with neon green and yellow in a tapestry of bruising that covered me from the knuckles of my toes up to my knee. There was a spot of pale, papery white over my Achilles tendon. My ankle, under the bruising, was swollen to three times its usual size. I was not at all surprised when a small boy stopped to stare at this spectacle. I hoped he’d ask me what happened. It was obvious that this was a recent injury, and I had a good story that I wasn’t tired of telling: how a piece of lumber had fallen on me while I was backstage for a play I was acting in, how I’d gone on with the show because, miraculously, my character had an injured ankle, too, and how I blamed the whole accident on the actor who had said “MacBeth” in the dressing room, as every theater person knows that the Scottish play is very bad luck, indeed…

Sadly, my storytelling opportunity was snatched away. Just as the boy opened his mouth to speak, his mother strode up, grabbed his arm, and jerked him away, growling, “Don’t stare!” She didn’t acknowledge me at all.

I was constantly surprised by strangers during my two weeks on crutches. A few people would help me out, hold doors for me, and better yet, ask what happened to me and tell me about the misadventures that had put them on crutches in the past. Overwhelmingly, though, my experience in public places was of being completely invisible. Even on the day when I went to Super Target, and a wonderfully friendly security guard gave me a buzzing electric go-cart of a shopping cart to ride around in, shoppers fell over themselves to avoid seeing me. Small children watched me go by, but were jerked away by hissing parents. Adults looked up at the sound of the motor, then quickly became fascinated by shower curtain rings and wedge-soled shoes.

As my injury began to heal, my invisibility grew more complete. I donated my crutches to charity after two weeks, but I had a pronounced limp for months, rolling awkwardly over my stiff right foot on every other step. My friend Daryl called it “zombie walking” and I laughed because I knew that I would not be a zombie forever. Still, now it was not so clear to the general public that I’d had an accident, or that this was a temporary situation. Not one person held a door for me, even though strangers had often held doors for me when I was healthy. (After all, I am a 32-year-old woman, and not bad looking.) Children were still pulled out of view by hissing parents, and adults still looked up and then quickly away, but nobody asked me how I came by my limp. I felt less and less excited about shopping, or going to libraries, or hanging out in coffee shops. I stayed home more, and spoke more quietly, adding to the cycle of invisibility.

Now, four months later, I look completely normal. I don’t limp at all unless my ankle, which is still weak, has seen heavy exercise lately. A good hike or a tap dancing class will bring back the limp for a day, but otherwise I look comfortingly ordinary. People sometimes hold doors for me again, and children only stare at me if I’m knitting in public. I feel solid again. I’m louder, and easier to see. I worry, though, about those people who are permanently unusual, whether from a disability, a simple physical difference like a deep skin color, being very tall or very short, speaking with an accent because their first language was not English, or liking to wear unusual clothes. The standard in American culture, as in many others, is that it is not polite to stare, but in practice this means that we resist the urge to acknowledge any difference—awful or beautiful or neutral—and in this supreme effort, we refuse to acknowledge an entire person. This well-meaning attempt to be polite, taught so well to most of us that it feels like a reflex by the time we become adults, often causes us to shun people for being interesting. The unusual becomes invisible. Even now that I’m visible again, this effect makes me very sad. I know it’s painful for everyone who is obviously unique, and it’s also a great loss for everyone who refuses to see them.

I saw a surprising example of this on a recent Sunday morning. My Sunday morning ritual these days is to stop by Vic’s coffee shop on Main Street in Louisville, Colorado (Colorado readers, please visit Vic’s. It’s a lovely, cozy place.) to sip green tea, eat a chocolate croissant, and knit while my talented friend Brian plays his guitar for the patrons. A surprisingly large number of people come in on most Sundays—with clipless bicycle shoes clicking, small children in tow, and friendly dogs tied up on the sidewalk outside—order their complicated coffees, and leave. A few folks sit down at the comfortable tables to read the newspaper and chat. Few pay any attention at all to the man in the corner who is improvising amazingly intricate melodies on a guitar.

Well, one fine Sunday morning, while I was staring over my knitting at Brian, trying to figure out how he made that last lovely trilling sound, a group sat down at the next table over. A mother was there with a baby in a carrier, a girl of seven or eight, and a friend, an adult woman much like herself. Mom and her friend were chatting away when Brian ended his tune with a flourish. There was a beat of silence, and then the little girl began to clap. I realized, all of a sudden, that nobody ever claps for Brian at Vic’s. Though I love his music, and I’d even told him so from time to time, it had never occurred even to me to clap when he finished a song. Why not? So I’d raised my hands, about to join the little girl, when her mother grabbed her hands, held them apart and hissed, “Stop that!”

Oh, yes. Now I remember. I don’t clap because I’ve been raised, as every kid whose parents value standard American politeness has been raised, not to draw attention to anything. No matter how unusual, how painful, or how wonderful a person’s difference is, we’re not supposed to admit that it’s there.

Well, I say, forget all of that! It may be polite to avoid staring at all costs, but it’s nicer—perhaps I should say kinder, or more useful for creating a better world—in any case, it makes more sense, I think, to admit when something is strikingly different about another person. We all know that everyone is unique, and it’s not likely that that a person with an obvious, visible difference hasn’t noticed it. If you notice in a respectful way, perhaps with a nod and a smile when you catch the person’s eye, it’s just another way to make contact with someone new. If someone has chosen to be different in an interesting way, like a lady wearing a beautiful headscarf, a teenager sporting a green mohawk, or my sudden change from light brown hair to flaming red, that person may enjoy telling you why they made that choice. It’s surely better for you to ask than to pretend it is’t there. If someone looks like he or she may need help, offer it, and if you’re told he or she is doing fine, you can admire more people for the creative ways they’ve found for taking care of themselves. And for heaven’s sake, if someone is different because they’re doing something wonderful, acknowledge their talent and encourage them to do more. In any case, we must stop punishing people for being interesting. Please, let's not let any human being become invisible because we’ve been taught that it’s not nice to stare.

The Marriage Business

2006-06-01T20:06:00.000-06:00

Check out Traveling Hypothesis, and R.J.’s suggestion that our government “get out of the marriage business” and start recognizing “partnerships” instead. My response to this was so involved that I decided to post it on my blog, instead of his. Here goes:

R.J.: What bothers me about this situation is that the definition of "marriage" as far as the State is concerned has been so thoroughly stretched out of shape that your proposed solution is simply renaming marriage "partnership" and continuing with it as it was originally intended. How progressive of you. Still, silly as it sounds, this little semantic change is what we need to solve the problem.

Let me explain: The religious right, and many other religious people, yell about "gay marriage" and belittle commonlaw marriage because they think that, if our officially secular government recognizes a "marriage"—even if it's just because a man and woman walked into a courthouse and signed a form, or even just filed their income taxes together (Yes, you can get legally married this way, at least in Colorado and some other states which recognize commonlaw marriages.)—it means that they are part of the holy union laid out by their particular religion. That's not what it means. The reason governments got into the "marriage" business is the same reason why you suggest they should be in the "partnership" business, instead.

In fact, that's originally why everybody got into the marriage business. The idea that love has anything to do with marriage is very new. Many cultures still don't think that, and many modern, intelligent, well-educated people still practice arranged marriages for purely social and financial reasons, in whichi love does or doesn't develop after the wedding day. (Yes, intelligent, modern people do this. Does anyone else reading this have a brilliant college buddy who is living happily in an arranged marriage? I have.) From the start, "marriages" have been partnerships set up to ensure that children would be well taken care of. Group marriages are not a new idea, either. From Hindus to Mormons to ancient Hebrews, many cultures have allowed groups (mostly one man and many women, but sometimes with many men, as well) to get "married." It's always for the stability of a family.

So why is marriage considered mainly a religious rite? Well, in the early stages of all cultures, religion and government were the same thing. The United States' separation of church and state was a ground-breaking new idea. When religious law and state law split up, we all got confused about which one "marriage" belonged to. And after the split, as we struggled to decide which of our beliefs belonged to religion, and which should belong to everybody.

We've also got all kinds of ideas about what "marriage" means, and this adds to the confusion. Some of us think that it means exactly whatever our particular religion says it does, which is far more than what it should ever mean to the state. Some of us also think it means that we've found our "soul mate," and are just celebrating that we are in deep, true love, and intend to be so forever. And then many folks still get married purely for financial and legal stability. All of these layers are admirable and valid reasons for making a commitment. Most folks who get married are going with many layers at once, and that's great, but no wonder we're confused!

So, as R.J. suggests, I think our governments should quit talking about "marriage," just because the word has become too heavily loaded, and get into the business of "partnerships." Or, heck, "recognized relationships" or "civil unions." Just pick a term that applies just to the government layer. Then it should recognize any legal adults (I really wish our states would quit recognizing "marriages" involving children too young to sign contracts, or to legally have sex outside of marriage. Try Googling "minimum marriage age." It's downright creepy.) who choose to enter into a contract to form a family unit. Any number of people, of any genders, should be eligible. It should be a pain in the neck to divorce one’s self from such a unit, but possible. The units should be given all the legal powers that married couples have now—especially powers like the ability to order medical care for children, and such.

Yes, I do have my own blog. Sorry to ramble so. As you can see, I feel very strongly about marriage. I really like the idea, in all of its layers. If I was really excited about the idea of raising children soon, I would be looking for a good candidate for the state-sanctioned layer—for a firm partnership to make the huge job of raising children easier. It’s such a tough and important job, that a partnership deal is a great idea. I’m not in a hurry to have kids, though, so I won’t settle for that any time soon. I’m not strongly religious, either, so the religious layer isn’t important to me, though I respect folks for whom it is. They should, and do, follow whatever rules their religion sets up, and they care about their faith’s sanction more than the State’s. As for me, I’m dreaming of the “soul mate” layer. I think it can be done, and that’s the kind of “marriage” that I most like to think about, the kind where it doesn’t really matter whether anyone besides you and your mate recognizes the union. You know who you are, you’re devoted to the union, and the only question is whether you want to have a party to celebrate. That’s what many people, gay and straight, have, and that’s the layer I personally like best. But, of course, that part is none of the government’s business.

The World-Wide Web

2006-04-07T15:31:00.000-06:00

I’ve just discovered another multi-user blog, and I’m having great fun with it. The first post reads, “Whoever cleans this place must be a man. He didn’t put the trash can back in the stall! Now where am I supposed to put this bloody tampon?!!”

The reply below is says, “Shove it up you’re a*#, you whiney bitch!”

And to this, another unsigned note says, “Why are you afraid to write ASS, when you’re willing to say BITCH?”

“Yeah,” says another, “and your grammar is atrocious. Learn to use an apostrophe!”

The intellectual snob in me perks up. Now the discussion is getting interesting! After this note comes another reader’s thought: “Grammar and punctuation are not important, as long as your point is clear.” This one is actually signed: “~an English minor.”

I’m ready to join the fray. Below the English minor’s comment, I write, “Used properly, grammar and punctuation make your point clear to everybody. That’s why they matter.” I sign my comment, “~an English major.”

Reading on, I see a post that I feel I must comment directly on: “Here I sit all broken-hearted. Came to s*%#, but only farted.”

“Oh, that’s original!” I write, hoping that sarcasm will come across here. Ah, well. I can’t expect brilliant discourse from every post in this place. After all, this is a stall wall in a women’s bathroom on the University of Colorado’s campus. I am surprised and delighted to find a discussion of any interest here, but the truth is that I usually do find some philosophy, and some hearty back-and-forth debate, in any place where people write anonymous graffiti. The tunnels under roads on the University of Northern Colorado’s campus, outhouses on hiking trails, and the tables in funkier coffee shops prove equally entertaining. Sometimes, while typing my thoughts to my friends, I’ve stopped to wonder what we did before we had weblogs, but that just means it’s been too long since I’ve visited a rarely-repainted public restroom. People have been airing their opinions, and hailing or smashing down other people’s, for as long as we’ve known how to write—perhaps longer, actually. I wonder if that’s what the paintings in the caves of Lascaux were really all about.

I learned a similar lesson from a recent trip to San Francisco. When I’d returned to Colorado, I was explaining to my friend Ron why I had taken a snapshot of an old wooden telephone pole, encrusted with staples. “Oh, this is cool!” I gurgled. “Izu, the guide on The Haight Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tour, says that this was the main message post in Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love. If you were looking for someone, you’d just staple a note up here and wait for a few days. Eventually, your friend would walk by, read the note, and staple one up for you, telling you where and when to meet him. If you were new in town, and didn’t have a place to stay or food to eat, you’d staple up a note asking for help, and someone would leave a note for you and hook you up. The hippies took care of each other back then, and this was how they made contact.”

“Ah,” said Ron, nodding sagely, “the original Craig’s List. I knew it started in San Francisco!”

He was right! This was the pencil-and-paper version of Craig’s List, where today I find places to stay again and again, I find jobs to help me put food on my table (or whoever’s table I’m using that week, traveling neo-hippie that I am), and where I meet new friends to exchange stuff and advice with. The Haight Ashbury message pole was, of course, just a large-scale version of the community bulletin boards that have graced churches, community centers, and grocery stores for decades. People have been taking care of strangers since long before 1967, and they continue to do so today.

I am in love with the Internet. I love all of the things and ideas and people I can find on Craig’s List. I love the power of blogs: My brilliant friend Rachel kept me informed about all sides of the latest Presidential election by linking important news stories to her blog. My dear friend Ron is extremely busy and often out of town on business trips, so I rarely get to see him or catch him on the phone, yet I read his blog and post my comments and feel that we’re still in touch. Having just broken up with an incredibly kind, but not-quite-compatible guy, I was afraid to call or visit, for fear of upsetting him even more. Still, when I thought of him, I could check his blog and rest assured that he was okay. My own blog helped me sort out a complicated friendship by telling my friend how I'd felt about him, six months after I felt it. I love the Internet! This is my favorite and most powerful way to connect with people! Still, from the hippie pole in San Francisco to the ladies’ room down the street, I see examples everywhere of the ways we have always connected. The World Wide Web is real, but it is older and more ingrained than any electronic network. The web of community is as old as humanity itself. That, I think, is particularly groovy!

Creep Update

2006-03-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

For those of you who read my post "Creep," I have wonderful news!

After a while, I decided that my old friend Brian was never going to speak to me again, and curiosity was killing me, and... well, I'm a jerk, so I downloaded and listened to Brian's CD after all. He's good. He's really good. I'm still amazed that I know such a person personally. If you like acoustic guitar, folky rock, or blues, I especially recommend him. Brian's greatest heroes include Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and David Gray, but Brian is particularly good at singin' the blues. He also has a really cool voice, though he doesn't seem to know that.

In even better news, I can, in good conscience, tell you all about Brian and recommend his music. You see, to my great surprise, Brian has started speaking to me again! (Apparently he's forgiving, as well as talented. I just hope he doesn't change his mind after reading "Creep," which, in fairness, I felt I should invite him to do.) Thus, I have his permission to recommend his music to all three of my loyal readers (and anyone else who might wander by)!

Give him a listen. His full name is Brian Blommer. His CD "Live: An Audience of One" is available on the CD Baby web site at http://cdbaby.com/cd/blommer and also from iTunes, MSN Music, and Walmart's online music store, to name the few places I've found so far. Just search for the artist "Brian Blommer" on any of these sites. You can listen to samples first, of course. CD Baby has longer free samples than iTunes, so I suggest you sample there. I'll add the CD Baby page to my links on the right side of this blog, too. Listen! Enjoy!

Brian also has recorded an electric, in-studio blues-based CD, "Too Young to Feel This Old," which he's let me hear, and which I hope he'll put on CD Baby soon. He's thinking of playing out in public more often, too. If I hear about any future performances, I'll let you know. (I know he plays acoustic improvisational stuff at a coffee house every Sunday, but I'd like to ask him if he minds before I send you all there...)

Luxury

2006-03-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

I seem to have so much time this week! It’s just that everything falls together so simply: I wake up each morning to an alarm clock I’d used before and known how to set properly, and I immediately know where I am. I walk into the bathroom and find all of my own soaps and lotions lined up just the way I like them—-no digging in the bottom of a duffel bag, stabbing myself with tweezers as I go, to find my shampoo. Similarly, all of my clothes are hanging in a closet in easy view, not stacked on top of each other inside a laundry bag. I dress in two minutes, leave my pajamas hanging on a hook instead of packing them away, and walk into a kitchen where all of my food is out of boxes and easy to find. The day goes on like this: I pet cats who already know me, and I sit down to write for hours at a kitchen table, knowing that I won’t have to pack up and move again for another three weeks!

All of this is rare for me. Last August, I gave up my apartment and began house sitting full-time. I move from place to place every week or so, sometimes every few days. Last week, between sits, I rented a room in an apartment full of roommates. My new roomies seemed to be very nice folks, but they were strangers still, and I felt so shy that I spent most of my time driving around town, hanging out in coffeehouses, dropping in on my mother for dinner, and running errands mis-planned to make me drive all over the Denver-Boulder area-—anything to avoid being at “home.” Within a few days, it was time to pack and move yet again. This packing, moving, shyness, and rushing around are my usual state of affairs. When I do slow down enough to wonder why I’m not making more progress on my goals—-building my freelance editing business, writing more, designing more submissions for knitting magazines, and so on—-I realize that most of my time is spent spinning in circles.

I love my house sitting life, and especially all of the pets I get to know and care for. I love the freedom of not having to pay rent. Still, I’m realizing how many comforts those of us who have long-term homes take for granted. Most Americans feel we have a lot on our minds—-how to pay our bills, how to advance our careers, how to take care of children and other loved ones, how long our health will hold out-—but it’s amazing to realize how many important things we take for granted. When was the last time you wondered where you would be living next week? I’ve gotten used to wondering, and to hustling on the phone and internet to figure it out. When did you last think about where your toothbrush was, or where your kitchen staples were? I spend a great deal of time moving mine around, unpacking them, organizing them, repacking, and moving again.

Of course, I take the most basic comforts for granted, too. I was reminded of this while listening (on that most addictive of luxuries, an iPod) to the February 17 edition of This American Life. In the segment “The Call of the Great Indoors,” Chelsea Merz told about her friend Matthew, who has been homeless for seven years. Matthew, in turn, had told her stories of people he’d met on the street, and how they gathered together to exchange advice on finding food and surviving the elements. Everyone’s favorite topic-—everyone’s obsession-—was sleep: who got any last night, where they did it, for how long, and how they’d managed it. One man Matthew talked with hadn’t slept a wink one rainy night, for the only place he could find to hide from the downpour was an apartment building’s trash compactor. He'd sat up all night, dry, but terrified that at any moment someone might turn on the machine and unwittingly crush him to death. People who live indoors, Merz pointed out, rarely think much about sleep. We may lose an hour or two sitting up, worrying about other things, but we rarely think about how amazing it is to find a place to lay around for six to eight hours, with no fear of being frozen, robbed, arrested, beaten, or crushed. To us, a bed in a safe room is too ordinary to think about; to a homeless person, it’s a miracle.

I think my current lifestyle gives me a nice balance of safety and awareness. I needed Merz to show me how wonderful it is to always have a warm bed in a relatively quiet room each night, but my odd lifestyle makes me notice the wonder of having one closet, one medicine cabinet, one kitchen, and one living room as a home base. On the rare occasions, like now, when I have a house sit that is many weeks long, I feel like a powerhouse of efficiency, living in the lap of luxury. Life is more exciting when I take fewer things for granted. I don’t want to live like Matthew does-—I enjoy knowing where my next meal and tonight’s bed are coming from-—but I am grateful for the opportunity to see how comfortable my life really is.

Perfection

2006-03-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

I am a perfectionist, especially when it comes to words.

My profession is making the printed word as close to perfect as I can—I’m a proofreader. My friend R.J. Zimmerman has even asked me to proofread his well-read and entertaining blog for him. He’s afraid that he’ll mistype something, and later be criticized for being less than perfect. Happy to help—and thrilled that my compulsive perfectionism has some practical use: I can help a friend feel more secure!—I adjust a comma here, fix a spelling error there, and realize that R.J. can’t tell the difference when I’m done, and most of his loyal readers can’t, either. All my picking does is give R.J. peace of mind, knowing that he will be protected from criticism if some other nitpicker, one who doesn’t adore him like I do, should wander into his blog. This is not likely to happen. What we readers notice are his great travel stories, his inspiring ideas, and the political comments that get us charged up to write endless comments. Even I wouldn’t notice those missing commas if it wasn’t for my inborn yearning to tweak every printed sentence I see.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing most of all, though: R.J. has been steadily posting a few times a week for over six months now. He posts long memories of his world travels, short blips about news stories that rile him, calls to action for his readers (Travel the world! Speak your mind!), and even a cute little blurb about eating dessert first. His spelling is imperfect, he sometimes puts in apostrophes where they don’t belong, and his sentences are not the most beautifully constructed in English literature. Meanwhile, my latest post on “Anita’s Weekly Column” went up three months ago. I did put up a New Year’s Day post just two months ago, but I later decided it was stupid, and so I took it down.

It’s not that I’m lacking ideas. I want to write about spiritual and scientific explanations, to show that we must keep both in mind in order to know what really happened, but first I want to reread two books and review a movie to make sure I have all of my quotes right and my evidence in order. I want to write about the beauty of ritualized cannibalism and how important it is to our cultural life, but my ideas are too scattered, and I never feel focused enough to get them all down. I want to write about the long conversation I had with a good friend about recurring severe depression, and explore my later realization that my favorite relative and many of my closest friends suffer from mental illness… but I don’t know what conclusion I’ll draw from that, what I’ll discover about myself when I put together everything I’ve learned from these people. I have such marvelous ideas that I don’t want to damage them by trying to write them down. I’m afraid they won’t be worth reading if I can’t express them perfectly. I’m afraid, if my arguments and my evidence and my punctuation aren’t all in order, nobody will want to read my ideas at all.

Meanwhile, R.J. blogs on and on, worried enough about his imperfections that he’s asked for my help, but still willing to put himself out there again and again. He has somehow managed to escape the paralysis of perfectionism, the disease that keeps me silent. I admire his courage. Maybe I can do it, too. I fix up his apostrophes, and recommit myself to put out one terrible, boring, short little column each week. I’ll read it six times before I post it. At least I’ll know that the commas are in the right places.

She Who Might Be Cool

2005-11-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

In his blog, Traveling Hypothesis, my friend R.J. Zimmerman has posted an intriguing review of Lewis MacAdams’ book Birth of the Cool. It sounds like a great book, full of fascinating tidbits about the musicians, poets, and visual artists who shaped our world through the avant-garde movement, but I won’t be reading this book anytime soon. One of R.J.’s comments scared me away: “The story moves along one name drop at a time, leaving a story unexpectedly at the mere mention of a new player. It’s the kind of book you memorize so you can be cooler than your cool name-dropping friends at parties.” If this is a book by a name-dropper, for name-droppers, I refuse to read it. I have a great fear of any path by which people try to become cool by studying those who were cool in the past, trying to ride on their cool coattails by claiming an association with them. I’m afraid that to read such a book would remove any chance I have of ever being cool.

Yes, I do believe that I have the potential to be really, truly cool. I know that those of you who’ve met me are laughing right now. You’ve seen the wire-rimmed glasses I insist on wearing almost everywhere, even though I own contact lenses. You know that I wear no makeup at all, except on very special occasions—the occasions when I break out the contacts. You’ve noticed that my fashion choices have gotten a bit sexier since I realized that spandex-infused tight jeans and polo shirts are even comfier than the huge, baggy ones I used to wear, but that's about as dressy as I usually get. The Converse sneakers I wear everywhere are falling apart again, but I can't replace them because I don't know where to find bright purple again. I have a new haircut because I’ve realized that the all-one-length, long locks I’d had most of my life can’t get nearly as messy as my new, piecey short cut can. I can speak knowingly in the terms of Dungeons and Dragons, and I remember reading The Lord of the Rings more reverently than I remember the Bible. My stuffed animals have stuffed animals, and lately I’ve been knitting totem animals that represent myself and my friends. For fun, I read about mummies, autopsies, and neurological disorders.

It gets worse if you look at my childhood. I wear glasses now because I’m quite used to them; I was four and a half when I got my first pair. (Jerry Maguire would not convince the world that very small children with glasses were cute for another 18 years. In 1978, a four-year-old with glasses was simply a freak.) I didn’t learn to speak at the rate generally considered normal. In kindergarten, I was sent to a speech pathologist who systematically taught me to pronounce “sh” “t” “th” and “s” sounds correctly and at the right places in the language. I continued to see a string of speech therapists through the fourth grade because it took them that long to figure out how to get me to pronounce the “r” sound. In the meantime, I shuddered when people asked me my last name, knowing that they would never understand “Harkess” coming out of my mouth. I learned to avoid speaking at all. By the time I mastered “r”s at the age of nine, I was used to being practically mute, and stayed so well into high school. When I was six, my orthodontist started experimenting with pulling lots of baby teeth to see if this would make my adult teeth grow in straighter than otherwise expected. They didn’t. After my few remaining teeth leaned in, my canines grew in high up on my gums. From age 10 until I got my extremely painful braces at age 12, I avoided smiling so that other kids wouldn’t be scared by my fangs. On top of all of that, I was definitely what psychologist Elaine Aron now calls “a highly sensitive person,” meaning that I was one of those kids who involuntarily burst into tears with the slightest stress. In short, a string of issues beyond my control doomed me to a childhood as an incorrigible dork.

All of this, of course, is the blessing that gives me the potential to be truly cool. In his review, R.J. explains that MacAdams’ book has taught him what cool really is: “the detachment from what seems important to everyone else, mostly because nobody’s listening to you anyway.” Learning early on that I could not possibly attain the small details that seem important to everyone else, I learned not to care as much as most people do. I never struggled to fit in, simply because I never had much hope that I could.

I didn’t realize what a marvelous, protective gift my dorkiness was until 2002, when my very cool friend Rachel sent me a copy of the New York Times Magazine article profiling Rosalind Wiseman and her upcoming book for parents, Queen Bees and Wannabes. Wiseman had done a great deal of work with young teenaged girls. Her book, and the article, revealed how truly horrible these outwardly sweet little girls could be to one another. She shocked and worried a nation of parents by showing how the “queen bees” at the top of the most powerful cliques in most American schools can order communal actions that amount to psychological torture. Those at the top can make those on the edge do just about anything, all the way from buying clothes their families can’t afford, to standing for public humiliation, to going way too far with alcohol, drugs, and too-early, promiscuous sex. Yes, the clique system is dangerous and cruel. And what gives the queen bees such incredible power? It’s the desire of the wannabe, that urge everyone has to belong, to be accepted, to be part of a community. The wannabe wants so desperately to fit in that she will do anything to please those in power.

Wiseman’s book goes on to instruct parents on how to communicate with their daughters to help them navigate the clique system and rise ethically to a position of power. Me, I suggest a different solution. You see, I remember the cliques from my junior-high days. I remember the queen bee, her wannabe disciples in tow, following me as I walked home from school each day of seventh grade, yelling something about my hair. (I think it had to do with the color. My hair had recently turned from light blonde, like hers, to the murky midpoint between blonde and brown where it still is today. For some reason, this color, and my refusal to bleach it out or dye over it, is particularly offensive to 12-year-old blondes.) I remember ignoring her, and I remember letting out a friendly laugh as the wannabes quietly came to me at my locker the next day, apologizing for their queen’s behavior. I remeber being touched by their respect for me, but I don’t otherwise remember caring much. I definitely don’t remember changing my appearance or my actions to make this stupid girl like me. It’s not that I didn’t want to belong to the group. I just realized that nothing I could do would ever make that possible, so I went on with my dorky little life, saving a lot of time, energy, and money for my own interests. I’m grateful now that I was such a complete outsider. If I ever have a daughter, I’d like to give her such a gift. I’ll spare her the tooth-pulling, and I’ll let her speak correctly if she can, but I am definitely going to buy her the ugliest pair of glasses I can find, then make her wear them, whether she needs them or not.

I do believe in the problem Wiseman describes. Even as a girl, I had an inkling of what it was like to be a wannabe. I felt sorry for the sweet girls who met me at my locker. As early as eighth grade, I heard about drunken parties I could never be invited to, about the boys who prowled them looking for passed-out girls to have sex with, and the class president, who peed in another eighth-grader’s mouth because he was too drunk to enjoy oral sex. In high school, I heard about kids being rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. I heard about the girl in my senior class who got so drunk that she spent the night spread eagled on a pool table, having sex with any besotted boy who wandered by. I heard how horrible she felt afterwards, and that her parents threatened to sue the school paper for running a classified ad that cryptically mentioned the incident, but that most of the damage was already done. I felt sorry for her, too. I was grateful that I wasn’t invited to that party. My freakishness was my armor. I was saved from the torture of belonging.

This is why I believe that I may someday be cool. I think that we too often mistake being “in” for being cool, when in fact the two states are opposites. The “in” crowd, the fashionable people, those who belong, simply do as they’re told. They work very hard at being just like as many other people as possible. The truly cool do whatever works for them, whether or not anyone else understands it. They focus on their own lives, on causes that matter to them, on art that comes from their souls, and in so doing, they accidentally become unmistakably unique. The “in” are sometimes respectable. The cool are geniuses.

For example, the more I learn about Neil Young, the cooler I think he is. He is, and always has been, a strange-looking guy. His voice is even stranger. He is best known as a guitarist, but his songs are so easy to play that they are often taught to beginning guitar students. In his solos, he doesn’t show off technical prowess or speed; there are plenty of guitarists who play faster and more complicated licks. He just plays what sounds good to him. He even wanders from genre to genre, from the hippie protest songs of Buffalo Springfield, to the pretty folk of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to Crazy Horse’s hard rock—the precursor to grunge—to some beautiful country songs and some so twangy that I wonder if he’s making fun of the genre. When he dabbled in electronica in the early 80s, he was so far outside of expectations that his record label sued him for making “unrepresentative music.” Even now, at 60, he has not sunk into the mire of doing only greatest hits albums and “I-need-the-cash” reunion tours, as many older stars do. He’s still writing new songs, still performing, still using his power as a celebrity to propel his favorite social causes, like Farm Aid, Live 8, and his wife’s creation, the Bridge School. In an age when appearing in an iPod or car commercial is considered to be the best way to promote an album, Young is one of the few classic rockers who hasn’t sold any song for any ad. He’s surely a celebrity worth admiring. His real appeal for me, though, is best summed up by Kevin Chong, the self-described geek who wrote the homage book Neil Young Nation: “Young was the embodiment, in his appearance, his singing, his music, of a type of anti-beauty. To an awkward kid, this was appealing. Young sought beauty in frayed edges and worn-out patches. He reveled in bum notes, in buzzing guitar strings.”

Of course, I haven’t read Chong’s book, either. I’ll allow myself to read it in a couple of months. I’m rationing my Neil Young intake now, an album here, a book there. Loyal fan that I am, I am afraid of steeping myself too thoroughly in anyone else's story. I don’t want to become an imitator, or the sort of rabid fan who is so excited about someone else’s life that she forgets to live her own. That would definitely not be cool.

Anyway, I don’t ever need to know all about Neil Young, as I don’t want to be exactly like him. I just want to be cool like Neil Young—to be an outsider, irreverent, obviously imperfect, a little bit ugly, a little bit odd, and proud of it. Thanks to the gifts I’ve been given, I think I just might have what it takes.

Creep

2005-10-01T00:25:00.000-06:00

“I’m a creep,” my iPod croons through my earbuds. “I’m a loser…”

This is the song I most feel like hearing right now. Unfortunately, the only recording I have of it is not Radiohead’s original, but a cover by the aptly named lounge singer Richard Cheese. “What the hell am I doing here? Hey!" Richard oozes.

I turn off my iPod. I do feel the need to be punished, but this may be too much. Let me consider the situation: In my defense, I certainly did not set out to be as creepy as I now feel. My intentions were innocent.

I was housesitting for a generous man who had told me to feel free to enjoy his CD collection while he was away. I flipped through his enormous CD wallet, selecting just a few to load onto my iPod so that I could safely listen to them at work the next day. I even saved them in a special playlist to remind me to delete them later, so as not to violate the rules of fair use. This was how good my intentions were. My aim was to expand my understanding of folky rock music, which I’d enjoyed learning about with my great, now estranged guitar teacher, Brian. (Why estranged? Feel free to read my first blog entry, “Now That’s Comedy,” and then to ask, as one of my friends did, “Why does everything with you have to be so painful?”) This CD collection, with Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Allman Brothers, Jim Croce, lots of Neil Young, and the like, would be great for my education!

I got stuck staring at White Ladder by David Gray. I felt I should know who David Gray was, but I really didn’t. What did he sound like? Would I like him? Did he deserve a space on my little playlist? I realized that I had read about him before, about a year ago, when I’d last Googled Brian.

No, this is not the creepy part. I Google myself and my friends all the time. I highly recommend it. It’s fun. I’ve learned, for example, that my friend Janette has written scripts for three popular TV shows that I’ve never seen. I’ve found, to my surprise, at least one other person with the unlikely combination of names, Anita Harkess. I have also learned that Brian has written several passionate, eloquent CD reviews on Amazon.com. One of those CDs is by David Gray.

I couldn’t remember why Brian had liked him so much, so I Googled Brian again. The Amazon review, of Lost Songs, was still up, and Brian convinced me that I would, indeed, like David Gray. Strangely, though, Google now also listed a string of results for a songwriter by Brian’s name, who had an album available for purchase or download. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the same person. Brian has a fairly common last name, and his first name is, well, Brian. Still, curiosity made me click one of the links. I was taken to the web site of a small company that markets independent and homemade albums. I read this Brian’s liner notes: Grew up in Minnesota. Now lives in Colorado. Spent many moonlit nights racing his bike through his hometown while playing the Doors too loudly on his Walkman. This was the Brian I knew!

A line of links offered two-minute samples of his songs. I clicked one. Brian’s fast, intricate guitar picking filled my ears. Wow. In the two months since I’d last seen him, I’d forgotten how good he was. And was that his voice? The singer sounded like Brian, or like the best singing voice I could imagine based on the way he spoke. He had always avoided singing where I could hear him. Even when he was teaching and had to show me what “Sugar Mountain” or “Helplessly Hoping” sounded like, he would just mumble under his breath. Why? On the album, he had a rich, growly, expressive voice, interspersed with very successful imitations of Bob Dylan. (Yes, I realize that not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to imitate Bob Dylan’s singing, but Brian loves Dylan’s voice. By anyone’s taste, imitating him is, at the very least, a neat trick.)

Clicking on another song sample, I started to pay attention to the lyrics. This song was about his late mother, and probably written when she was still alive. Poor Brian. I could hear now how much he’d loved her. He must miss her terribly. I clicked on yet another sample. Brian sang about a beautiful woman. From the details of his description, I was sure I’d met her—Boulder is a rather small town—though she never had the effect on me that she’d had on him. Wow. I wished I could impress any man like that.

I moused towards another sample link, but a clutching heaviness in the center of my chest slowed me down. I stopped to examine the feeling: guilt. Guilt? Why? Well, having just learned that Brian was even more talented and sensitive than I’d thought he was, I felt really silly about having bitched at him because he didn’t fancy me the way I fancied him. I should have been grateful that such a person would deign to speak to me, let alone teach me and let me try to make music with him. I felt guiltier still for having hurt his feelings—those deep, raw, grumbly, expressible feelings.

Then the main problem dawned on me. I looked over the song titles again: songs about his family, crushes and ex-girlfriends, friends, travels, hopes… and I realized that, in essence, I was thumbing through someone’s diary—me, someone he knew and might have to face in person—without his knowledge or permission. Without thinking about it, I had wandered, click by click, down the path from curious student to major creep.

I closed the web page, vowing never to listen to those songs again unless, through some undeserved stroke of luck, I should someday be able to talk to Brian again and get his permission. Instead, I opened my iTunes library and began clicking on songs by artists I hadn’t played Frisbee with, whose cats I had never met, whose asphalt-scarred knees I hadn’t been shown. Still, every song struck me as disturbingly personal. Dar Williams sang “As Cool as I Am,” and her story was so specific that I was sure she had dated my last boyfriend, too. Sarah McLachlan sang “Possession,” a song famously created by editing together the letters a stalker sent to her. Alanis Morissette began a song with, “These are the thoughts that go through my head in my backyard on a Sunday afternoon…”

This is what art does, I realize. All of the artists who really touch me do so by revealing too much of themselves. Great artists require not only talent, skill, sensitivity, and depth—they’ve got to have guts! To create a song, a painting, a story, or even an essay that really touches people’s hearts, the artist has to hang his or her own heart out for all to see. Artists air the thoughts and feelings that the rest of us are too shy, too private to reveal. We love them or hate them because they say what we are afraid to say about ourselves.

I’m still a creep. Brian has potential, but he’s just growing into his artistry. There was a reason why he wouldn’t let me hear him sing. He wasn’t ready to share that much of himself with just anybody. I will not listen to his songs anytime soon.

Still, I’ve thought of a more fitting penance than listening to Richard Cheese: I want to be an artist someday, too. I want my writing to have courage like that, along with the skill to use it well. I will keep practicing these columns, at least one each week, until they are really brave, really touching. Then, if I ever do see Brian again, I’ll invite him to read them.

Men Are Like Rats

2005-09-22T20:24:00.000-06:00

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

2005-09-21T20:03:00.000-06:00

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

2005-09-20T21:32:00.000-06:00

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!

Now That's Comedy!

2005-07-27T21:15:00.000-06:00

This weekend, I took a writing workshop with Shari Caudron, author of What Really Happened: Unexpected Insights From Life’s Uncomfortable Moments. Shari writes smart, witty columns, taking her fears and foibles and transforming them into entertaining little parables. She read to us from her book, which includes stories of such troubles as her irrational fear of puppets, her enormous collection of unread books, and her perfectionist neighbor’s pet fish dying on her watch. Then, to show us how easy it is to transform our own lives into entertaining anecdotes, she gave us hands-on exercises, peppered liberally with advice.

Before starting a timed writing, Shari asked us to list uncomfortable moments in our own lives, anything we needed to digest and examine. “It can be something very small. Think about things that have happened just the past week!"

A subject jumped easily to my mind. One week before, I had gone to a play directed by the man I had come to think of as my surrogate father. Ken was one of my weirdest, but closest friends. I had blown up all over him two months before, when I had finally and suddenly burned out on community theatre, a hobby which had been my great passion for my entire adult life. The burnout was not pretty, and I still think it was partly Ken’s fault. Still, I’d missed him. My real dad died when I was fifteen years old, and it had taken sixteen more years to find a suitable replacement. I loved Ken, and I wanted him back. The best peace offering I could come up with was to show up for opening weekend of the play I had been auditioning for when I got so angry. I planned, I went, I even brought a friend to add size to the tiny audience—and Ken just said the obligatory “Thanks for coming,” and turned away. I emailed him when I got home. No reply. My passion for acting was dead, my first father was dead, and my second one had apparently decided that I was dead to him.

Time was up. Looking over my draft, I couldn’t see anything light or funny. I couldn’t think of a perky moral for this story. All I knew from this was that grief and loss can repeat themselves in more ways, big and small, than anyone wants to imagine.

Thankfully, we were switching gears for a new exercise. “You have to learn to see yourself as a character,” Shari told us. “You’ll want to focus on your imperfections, the parts of your personality that need work. Your readers won’t want to read about someone who is perfect. We all want to read about someone we can relate to, someone like us.”

Imperfections? Boy, have I got imperfections! Focusing again on my past week, I started to write about Brian, my guitar teacher and the best friend I made in my year and a half working for a small publishing company, before I left three months ago to go freelance. With Brian, I learned to love the guitar and to throw and catch (sometimes) a Frisbee. He was a big brother, a confidante, someone I could always count on to stand by me and tell offbeat jokes while we all ate somebody’s birthday cake in the company kitchen. After I left my job, he was my connection to that social circle, and his guitar lesson was always a bright point of human contact in an otherwise solitary week.

He was also the biggest unrequited crush I’d had since the seventh grade. After about six months of mooning over him in silence, I finally blurted out, “Hey, Brian? I have a really big crush on you, and it’s bothering me that you don’t know that.”

“Wow,” Brian said slowly. “That’s really brave. I would never have the guts to tell someone something like that.” He went on to explain very gently—his gentle kindness was one of the traits I admired him for—that he had no interest in getting involved with anyone at that point, not even me. Three months later, I ran into him and his brand-new girlfriend.

My inner crush-ridden 12-year-old knocked over my outer adult, who was apparently just a paper doll to begin with. I started picking at Brian, bitching about his tardiness at a lesson one month before. (“I wouldn’t have stood for that if I hadn’t had a crush on him!” my 12-year-old tiraded.) Finally, after three days exchanging confusing and confused emails, I picked up the paper doll again and explained to Brian what was really going on: I had a stupid, immature crush that I couldn’t turn off, and as I knew I eventually would, I was making a complete ass of myself. My only solution was to stop speaking to him altogether and hope that the crush would someday wear off. I wished him well and thanked him for putting up with me. Brian’s reply, as could be expected, was compassionate and kind. (“Aw! Isn’t he dreamy?” my inner 12-year-old cooed. I tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out how to punch her.)

That was that. Brian was gone. I’d have to finish figuring out how to pick Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” by myself, or wait until classes started again at Swallow Hill Folk Music Association in September. Worse, I’d lost a very good friend, all because I couldn’t control my emotions, even ones that had been proven to be pointless. Because I wasn’t 12, I was really a 31-year-old spinster who was becoming desperately lonely, now I was more alone than I would have been if I’d had no hormones at all. I’d made a fool of myself, insulted a dear friend, and lost a now precious weekly dose of human contact. I couldn’t find anything amusing in this story, either. When it was time to stop writing, thank Shari, buy an autographed copy of her book, and go home, I was so heartbroken that I could barely move. I spent the rest of the day in a sorrowful haze. I still couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read about my pathetic life.

Today, though, I’m remembering one of my estranged theatre dad’s favorite quotes. Mel Brooks once said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” My life, of late, is full of comedy. All I have to do is learn how to see it. I hope writing this column every week will teach me to do just that. You, dear reader, are welcome to come along for the ride.