Life Is Short, and So Is Money.

That's what Brecht says, and I believe both and accordingly despise 'shopping.' It is not a grand political stand, and I don't live in a treehouse: I freely acknowledge that sometimes there are things that one needs, and that some of those things must be bought, with money, rather than fashioned from twigs and pre-chewed gum saved up for the occasion. And the things I buy I want and/or need, so once I have them I am pleased that I do. For example, the car without a puddle on the rear floor was a much-appreciated replacement for the one with the puddle.


But I don't like the process of it, certainly, nor do I enjoy the near-Las-Vegas levels of visual and auditory stimulation I have to go through just to get the thing I need. I also am not usually thrilled that there are so many other people there doing the same thing I am attempting to, except doing it more loudly, more assertively, and far, far more happily, with an unmistakable air of being where they belong and where, indeed, they wish to be. Many, in fact, are patently there to savor precisely the process, rather than even obliquely striving to pursue, and succeed at, a goal-directed mission. Myself, I have a list (and yes, fine, sometimes it is one item, but I am likely to forget even that when confronted with Shrek on thirty different widescreens while still trying agitatedly to figure out if plant lightbulbs are by lamps or potting soil), and I want to use that list, find the things, pay for the things, and get home.

But today it didn't work like that. The goal of the mission was a new computer. This had been coming a long time, and the last couple of days had made it urgent. I had done all I could with the old one, but tweaks and external crutches can only get one so far when it is the machine inside the machine that is dying. There are many cars on the road with 300,000 miles on them, but few have the original engine or transmission, and none have the original tires. And if the car spent most of its lifespan being driven in Labrador, at some point it is reasonable to step back and rationally consider whether putting a new engine in that old shell is the best course of action. In this case, it was not.

So, having looked for weeks and months at various offers, and becoming slightly conversant with where it is people for the most part go to buy computers, I decided I felt safer buying a new one than a used, and that a cheap one was fine as long as it had ample memory. I also decided against buying one online, as the wait would be longer, it could arrive damaged, and there was no way of telling at what precise moment the old one would completely stop working. It is not easy using it as it is now, but it is handier than not having it at all, especially if a lot of what I am doing with it is researching my options for replacing it...

The story didn't start off terribly. I had heard on NPR that the Great Satan of discount shopping, Wal-Mart, offered (cheap, obviously) computers now. I drove to a Super Wal-Mart at about 3 AM after having looked at the Wal-Mart website and seeing that there were many options. The drive itself was very pleasant, about an hour each way in the calm dark of the early-morning freeway. And inside the store, although it was admittedly hideously bright, it was as deserted as the roads. Nice. Very nice. But what is on the website isn't what is in the stores, and there were only a couple laptops, and they were ghastly. Even by my standards. I did, however, locate some Diet Coke and Fiddle Faddle, even a bottle of the rare Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi, but I got confused trying to find nutrition bars, and gave up. Still, the Fiddle Faddle added immeasurably to the pleasantness of the ride home, and the BBC had a very idiosyncratic long reportage on Kazakhstan's burgeoning oil-fed Wild West.

It didn't solve the problem of the moribund Pavilion, though. The next morning I got serious about used ones. That stern resolution crumbled upon itself after the first (interminable) conversation with the first seller, who didn't really have what he said he had but who would be getting other ones soon, tomorrow, even, from his 'purveyors,' if I wanted to wait, although he could never be sure, of course, what exactly those 'purveyors' would purvey to him, nor how long it would take him to get the computers into working order, but he would be happy to et cetera and I could rest assured that.

Thus.

I went to the Best Buy. At that point, it was for me like shutting up and shutting down the GPS and taking the circuitous but well-known route, as I had looked at their website the most, once I heard of the Best Buy about a month ago. I even had a piece of paper I had written their specials on, but that was at home, next to the computer.

I found the Best Buy easy to navigate. They had large signs with large letters hanging from the ceiling, and I was relieved that I didn't have to walk through cramped aisles of fishing tackle and foundation garments to get to COMPUTERS. Likewise I enjoyed the approach of the salesmen, whose low-pressure tactics could easily be taken for apathy and boredom. I didn't have many questions, either, since most relevant facts were on cards below the display versions of the laptops. When I did ask one guy why this one with so much memory was the same price as a nastynasty Acer with a processor from 1972, he said it was on sale and a very good buy and I said I think I had that one written down and I'd take it. I figured I had the cat in the bag by that time. Certainly at least a very large bird in the hand. In this I was mistaken.

I have never had anyone 'set up' my computer for me before, but he said it was standard and free and quick. I figured it must be quick, if it is quick for me and I don't do it all day. Then, he said that for only $29.99 they would configure? orient? what was it? --oh, yes, Optimize and Personalize -- it for me and that that would be quick, too. I am an idiot, and I said yes.

I had no idea what was to be 'personalized' about it, since they didn't ask me any questions or, as it turned out, input any information about me into it, but at that point I just wanted him to stop talking. I did want to be home soon, but at that exact moment what I wanted more was for him to cease speaking. I felt that $29.99 was a reasonable price for that service.

However, it wasn't quite over, as he had to ask various people if they could call Bill so that Bill could count the money a second time. Once Bill arrived and counted the money again, it took a few minutes for the two to figure out my change ($9.21), as the change drawer had already opened on its own and thus not displayed the correct change to give back. My salesclerk confirmed with the technical people that my Optimization and Personalization would be done within forty-five minutes. Of course, had I opted out, within that time I would have already been home and online...

Nonetheless.

I had it, at least in a sense, and that was closer than I had been at 3 AM in the Wal-Mart by the Indian casino lost among the Little Debbies. While I was leaving the store, though, to begin my waiting, my phone rang. The noise from the parking structure was so loud that I said I would go to my car and call from inside. Except that I couldn't find my car. I was pretty sure that I was on Level Four, which is, except for the highest and as-yet uncompleted level, the top one. Thus, easy to remember, so I figured that if Level Four was sticking in my head, there was probably a pretty good reason.

I knew the area I had parked in. I was pretty sure, too, that I didn't just know the aisle but the space. But my car wasn't there, in either aisle or space, not on Level Four or Level Three. I called my friend back, and could barely hear, but said I had lost my car and was really going to call her back, just not quite yet. I went all the way down to the bottom level, figuring that perhaps 'extreme end' was what I was remembering, and just mistaking which extreme, but I was wrong about that, too. And the configuration of the floor was totally different, which was at least helpful, so that I knew I didn't have to walk the whole floor.

I did find it eventually, and detoxed a while inside, next to the vandalized BMW that had angered someone by taking up two spaces in a crowded parking lot. Once I felt a bit composed again, I decided against my better judgment to restore my blood glucose at the food part at the Target, the only source for food in the little mall. It really didn't help much, because, despite the presence of baby-changing stations inside the restrooms just a few paces from where we were sitting, a young Chinese couple saw fit to change their baby's soiled diapers in the cafe area as two teenagers ran around the tables chasing each other and yelling. When I had eaten as much cheese off my pizza as I could stomach, I left the food area, bought some nutrition bars, and went to spend the rest of my wait at Ross.

No one was changing diapers at Ross, which gladdened my heart. But now, I was officially shopping. Aimlessly wandering the aisles of a store I didn't want to be in, looking for nothing in particular and with no goal other than passing time. I picked up a brassiere that may or may not fit, found they did not have towels like mine or shoes in a 5 1/2 or little girls' pants size 10 with straight-cut legs, and did not like the shape of the Turkish wine glasses which I wanted to buy just because they were from Turkey and no one drinks wine out of stemware there except at American hotel bars. But I put the bra in one hand and some candlesticks for the bedroom in the other and waited behind the other twenty masochists for the lonely cashier to set me free.

After that I returned, diminished, enervated, soulless, to the Best Buy, to be reunited with my Optimized and Personalized laptop. I waited in the Service line for a long time. Ahead at the counter was a schizophrenic lady in earthy clothes gesticulating madly at every word. Also much of the time when there weren't words accompanying her gestures. I asked the two guys in front of me if they thought this was the right line to wait in if I was just picking up a computer I'd already paid for, and one just stared at me and the other very annoyedly said 'I DON'T KNOW.'

I didn't actually need Service. On the other hand, I also didn't need an Online Order Pickup or whatever the other line by that one was. So, I thought it prudent to ask an employee in Computers where I would stand to pick up a computer I had bought an hour and a half ago that had just been Optimized. He said, That line there - you'll be first.

And I was. For a very long time. And many employees went by me, around me, in front of me, behind me, and almost through me, but whatever duties they were assigned to did not include helping the person in the vanguard of my imaginary line. I waited a very, very, very long time. After a while there weren't so many people coming in and out by me, which intuitively felt as though my hitherto slim chances of being served were now circling Nil or NaN. Finally, I, the person who never sends back a scorched sauce Mornay, who lets every pedestrian cross and every car cut in front of me that cares to, said, rather loudly, Is there anyone anywhere who could possibly help me just pick up a computer I bought today?

The guy who had been standing in front of me on the other side of the counter for the last twenty minutes came up and told me I wasn't waiting in a line, that that's the line there, and I said I was told to wait here and that's the only reason I was waiting here and could I just please get my computer and go home, it should be done by now could I just please get it so I can leave now please thank you.

And he did get it, and it took about 4.5 seconds, and I made it to my car on Level 2A, and the banged-up Beemer was still unmoved, still unseen by its uptight owner, and by now the parking lot wasn't so crowded and I made it out quickly and easily and took the counterintuitive route home and found the neighbor's cat waiting for me and my monkey candlesticks at the door. Next time, I swear I will buy anything, everything I need online. Even if it requires replacing things before they are absolutely 100 per cent completely no question about it dead dead dead, even if it means I don't get to break out the baling wire, kebab skewers, and yards of Velcro tape, I will do it, because I can put on some Ella Fitzgerald and silk pants, I can eat sushi or a bowl of chili or Little Debbies or Fiddle Faddle if I feel like it, I can burn sandalwood or Livani or both at the same time, or I could be dyeing my hair or setting my fingernail polish -- and all this without screaming fluorescent lights, poopy diapers in the wrong place, pushing, shoving, stripped brakes echoing off concrete, lines that aren't lines, 'Personalization' that is anything but, and the wretched sense that I've been had in some vague yet disturbing way at the end of all of it.

Who is a hero? He who conquers his urges. -The Talmud.

The Bed

I got my new bed. If you knew me, or knew of my bed, that sentence by itself would suffice. It would convey all the glory that is the bed, the deep and abiding joy I expect it to render eternally, and the nerves, fever, chills, and fear attending its acquisition and assembly.

But we did it. It took hours, but at some point late at night the bed was a bed. It is more difficult to put together than Ikea models because it is an antique Chinese Wedding Bed, and instead of screws and bolts and nails, and instructions in non-idiomatic English, everything is tongue and groove or maybe mortise and tenon and there is no instruction manual, only a picture from far away with a vaguely melancholic man looking up into the distance. And because it is wood and also old, even when 'identical' pieces exist, each one can only go one place. In many cases, though, the pieces are clearly not identical, and the assembler must figure out through physics and geometry where they are supposed to go. I was very pleased that my friend helping me had some of those at his disposal, because I do not.

A nice thing about coming across this bed (I could have looked for one, as there are many online and storefront places that sell them either regularly or intermittently, but that would have been dull, and it would have felt like cheating, too, just like when you Google your Internet date before you date him) is that I already had the Chinese Wedding Cabinet. The finish isn't the same, but I have restained nearly everything else I own, so if at any time I miss the mix of woodstain and incense aromas I can tackle the huge armoire and make them match more closely.

At this point, however, I am still scarred from the process. Getting the pieces out of the first place was long; wrapping them and stacking them in the huge, sour-milk-pong-reeking truck was tedious, and wedging them through my narrow stairs, back into the bathroom, and then forward into the bedroom was exhausting. Then there was the throwing old futons 'out of the way' and the laborious assembly itself. There is perhaps a two-inch clearance at best above the top rail, and two inches is higher than the bottom of the light fixture. Before, it had a shade. Now it is just an ugly metal thing hanging down with two spaces for lightbulbs glaring angrily from above. Nobody likes a crybaby, and furthermore I don't think anyone is going to spend much time staring at the ceiling when in that bed (not least because there is little light inside the bed), but it does look crap, sorry to say.

Also, however, as the second photo shows, there is a great deal else to capture the attention: curtains all around, reeds and willow at the entrance, a candle lantern hanging from the cross beams, and more pillows than there seem in the picture. It is assuredly de trop, but sublimely so, particularly on these long winter nights when it seems perfectly appropriate to spend hours reading by candlelight inside what amounts to an elevated indoor tent. Plus, there are a few inches of space on the platform between the mattress and the frame to store the books and pens or laptop, and in certain parts the wood goes up high enough to prevent them from falling off in the manner of cats and pillows in other regions of the bed.

Thus it is convenient as well as a visual and tactile feast. And not unsightly like other beds, where my books were visible either on the bed or fallen off to the side, or could hurt one if lurking unnoticed under the covers. This way nobody needs to know whom I sleep with. Although, I suppose, if they were close enough to see what books were around in the bedroom they would probably have a fairly good idea of at least part of that answer. And so far it is only the vagrant cat who has any notion at all of my bedtime reading.

Dollar Days at the Goodwill

I don't deny, as per my earlier comments, that the poor have appalling taste, regularly eat appalling food, and can be heard unrestrainedly and unrepentantly screaming at children in markets and alleyways from Bangor to Bangalore. They wear track suits and wife-beaters, raise and lower their vehicles in accord with the year's and their region's working-class trend, are known by diminutive versions of their names in adulthood, and track 'celebrity news' with the passion and vigor other groups reserve for changes in stock values or political causes. But as unconcerned as they may seem with the weighty matters of the day (with the exception of the latest celebrity diet), if an Armageddon of whatever sort comes tomorrow, I want to face it alongside the half-time hustlers, the tenement-dwelling single mothers and guys whose pants, if inflated, could confer safe trans-Pacific passage to an unpapered family of seven.

Why? Because what we have that the rich don't is Reality. Sometimes, when one is without money or pleasant options, there is, admittedly, an embarras de richesse, a too-lush assortment of Personal Growth Opportunities, in this arena for anyone's taste. It can be downright confusing at times, the Opportunity, yet again, to decide which bill(s) are most pleasingly left unpaid and which, in their pink or blue insistence visible beneath their undisturbed little white jackets (we don't open them until we have the money in our hand and need to figure out how many or few money orders we can get) are a better bargain to pay NOW, and thus avoid the recurring Fifty-Dollar Reconnection Fee. Or worse yet, the next step: the Fifty-Dollar Reconnection Fee coupled with the You're-Clearly-a-Bad-Risk-and-We-Don't-See-It-Getting-Any-Better four hundred-dollar deposit.

(As a sidenote, however, the Bad-Risk Deposit has its benefits that no rich person would consider. To the poor, however, once they manage to take it from the food and telephone budget and send it in, that deposit serves as a functioning savings account which, the next time the electricity bill is the one needing ignoring since the food and telephone now have to be paid, they can use against itself. At least until they have to pay it back up.)

Clearly, all this Reality results in outpourings of creativity. Not merely the shell game of 'Which bill shall we pay this month? - Ah, looks like the penny's under the T-Mobile this time, honey!' It's much broader, although the common denominator is, of course, money and its lack. Rich people have no idea how many times over how many months you can reinflate a punctured tire daily and still get to work and school. The wealthy would have no idea how to make a ten-dollar thrift-store child's bed into a brilliant settee. They don't know all the short cuts, long cuts, and beautiful side roads that I do, from having cars that wouldn't go over 45 MPH. Or that foam and fabric and a glue gun are all you need for a beautiful headboard.

Some definition is in order, though. I'm not talking about either the idle rich or the idle poor. The wealthy who do Put Their Pants on One Leg at a Time, Same's Us, yar, and the poor who go to their two or three jobs and try against exhaustion not to have everything completely suck when they are at home. Who don't want to use the food bank, and know which dollar store is better for plates and spatulas and which for socks and frozen food. The ones who make do with the smallish hole in the car roof and just adapt and at some point stop noticing it. Who have earned a deep and invaluable sense of perspective and an instinctive knack for prioritizing, in every area. The classic hymn declares that it's a gift to be simple. I think likewise it is a blessing to have been poor.

St. Nic

I smoked a bit recently, and more than I would have liked, once I woke up the next morning wishing I were dead. I used to smoke, though, and less than I would have liked at the time, as I would have, were it possible, smoked in class, at yoga, at the symphony, in the shower, and while asleep. Now, by contrast, I smoke perhaps a cigarette or two a month, if the situation presents itself and I feel like it.

I didn't grow up smoking, or even around smokers. The only smokers at boarding school were what seemed to me frighteningly mature European voluptuaries with recklessly free-style hair and a penchant for wool vests, and louche Americans whose older sisters brought them drugs for their birthdays. Later, though, once I was married, I would keep a pack of cigarettes in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer, and once every couple of months take one out and smoke it while cleaning house. Sometimes my husband and I would each have one, walking around the lake or sitting at table after dinner. I didn't know how to inhale, but the act of it was pleasurable, and I liked the smell.

Once my husband turned gay and I moved to Greece, it was a bit different. In Greece, smoking it not merely encouraged, it is nearly enforced. My first memorable Greek smoking experience was being offered a cigarette in a bank by the teller as consolation for a lengthy but inexplicable wait. I gleefully (I'm smoking in a bank! I'm smoking in a bank!) accepted both the cigarette and a light off his Zippo, and felt dangerous and sophisticated and almost truly Hellenic myself. I wished Veronica Lake or Alan Ladd could have been there to see that I now could wait for a train as fashionably as they could.

My brands of choice were Gauloises and Kiretsiler, both very spicy, rich, and aromatic. You can't get Kiretsiler outside Greece, and these days in North America you have to go to Canada to get Gauloises, but those were simpler times, and smokier. I eventually learned to inhale, but I figured it was unlikely I would become addicted, as being attached to, or consumed by, things, was never one of my especial weaknesses. Eventually I did, but it took a long time and I enjoyed both before and after. I never felt much of a 'rush,' but perhaps that was because with not inhaling for so long, the amount of nicotine I was receiving very gradually built up as my smoking expertise developed.

Any arousing aspects seemed more to come from the physicality of smoking, not what was actually being inhaled. I didn't like to feel any kind of intoxication, and would always eschew pain medications after surgeries, so that suited me well. I knew there was nicotine, and nicotine was some kind of mild stimulant, but so was caffeine, and that didn't seem to be a big concern for most of the people who loved coffee, as evidenced by the overall lack of ruined espresso junkies in business suits begging for Change for a Venti Please outside Starbucks.

At the same time, I knew that cigarettes were implicated in heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, high blood pressure, COPD, digestive problems, dental problems, circulation problems, arterial sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, and just about everything else except Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, with regard to which there exists an inverse association. But, we are all going to die of something, and while smoking-related deaths are among the more ghastly and prolonged ways of accomplishing this, I would have no ethical or logistical problem with using my last Social Security check to buy a Glock and avoid Stage Four of anything, particularly since I would be, if not of sound body, at least of sound mind at that point, owing to nicotine's anti-Alzheimer's properties.

So that was fine. I was never a talented smoker, not only remaining ignorant of the arcana of smoke-ring blowing and the esoteric 'French Inhale,' but continuing always to look vaguely ill-at-ease in both embouchure and grip. Nonetheless, I persisted in my hobby, partly because there is nothing like a smoke break when you are going to school 'double full time,' doing an internship, and working thirty hours a week. (And maybe the stimulant action didn't hurt, either, but again, I didn't actually notice it.)

Then, I read about smoking and dopamine. Basically, smoking both inhibits dopamine uptake and promotes the release of more dopamine -just like the clearly psychotropic drugs which had always scared me. Certainly I had heard the oft-recited 'smoking is as/more addictive than heroin/cocaine,' but I didn't think of it as getting me high like that. As I viewed it, I had an addiction to a fairly innocuous drug. There was no euphoria, no distortion of reality, no belief, not even once, that I could fly or pick, unassisted, a good muni fund. Frankly, I didn't even feel more energized after a cigarette. The side effects of the method of delivery, smoking, were odious, to be sure, but the drug itself, nicotine, was not a concern.

Dopamine, by contrast, is a big deal. It is a hormone and a neurotransmitter, and involved in learning, pleasure, reward-oriented behaviors, memory, attention, desire -- in brief, cognition and desire/emotion. As that sunk in, it was patent that I was the same as the cocaine or meth junky. I may not be feeling as high as her or him, but my brain is doing exactly the same things in anticipating and receiving the drug. Studies showed smoker's dopamine levels spike from just seeing a lighter, or even a stepped-on cigarette. Far more so if the smoker's nicotine level is low. Then, when the reward is given, the first puff is smoked, there is another, higher wave of dopamine caressing the smoker's brain.

Which repelled me, so I quit. The first day was hard, because of course you think, Oh, I'm doing X; I should light a cigarette. But then the next day you can look back and see that you survived, and quite handily at that, blow-drying your hair or painting your toenails without one, so it's fine. Moreover, you can answer any momentary But I - with a factual Nooo, you don't, because you don't smoke, darling, because you have proven that you don't, because a smoker would have already had five that day before you started that abortive whinge, so shut up and get on with it, already.

I Broke My Hip in a Cialis Commercial

Cialis. It's the extended dance-remix version of Viagra. Take it, and you've got 36 hours to convince someone to have sex with you.

I could care less.

But while I am as sick as anyone else of the constant stream of content-free drug ads featuring frolicking puppies and toddlers, harmonious family dinners, fleece-clad upwardly-mobile thirty-somethings scaling mountainsides and dancing in pollen-infested meadows, and sixty-year-olds demonstrating their newfound taste for Moderate Physical Activity, with no mention of what, other than some general improvement in quality of life, these drugs can be expected to proffer, and while the Cialis ads do speak of what it is they are meant to address ('erectile dysfunction'), they manage to be as noxious as the vague 'you'll just have a better life, but we won't tell you how' ones.

Why? I don't mind the naughty-naughty nudge-nudge-wink-wink 'we're seventy but we're still going to git-it-onnnn' tone. Get it on, septuagenarians, get it on! And if you need a pill or a pulley system or a troupe of Chinese acrobats to get you there, it's not for me to judge. I think the more people there are succeeding in having happy sex lives, the fewer aggressive drivers, bar brawls, and Monster Trucks we will encounter in the world. And, the drug is about sex, after all, so fair play to the advertising firm for finding the space in their thirty seconds to be clear about that.

So clarity or frankness is not what gets under my skin here. It is those accursed bathtubs! These ads all focus on sex within a relationship, the intimacy of it. That the sex, qua vehicle of intimacy, guarantor of intimacy, proof of intimacy, was what was missing in an otherwise good relationship. Take this pill, you'll get that back, and then all the other good stuff that you did have will be even better by virtue of this restored sexual sharing. The ads show the couples doing things together, looking good together, sharing vacations, sharing a life.

And then they close with them up on a hill in separate bathtubs. Matt Beebe of Lilly says that shot was all but accidental originally. But they've stuck with it, and it's stupid. Take the drug, get it on, and then go your separate ways. If there has to be a bathtub - which is, I would argue, not necessarily the case - then have one bathtub, with the happy and contented reconnected seniors in it together.

The bathtub evokes a womb. Security, comfort, safety, warmth. Which is, in the ads, part of what the sex was meant to signify for these couples, as well. The men are portrayed not as popping a pill and heading out to the local bar to troll for strumpets, but, rather, as still attracted to, and wishing to have sex with, their wives, who are presented as attractive and havesexwithable. And then, after the shots of romantically-lit cuddly moments, the tinkling of soft jazz and wine glasses, a voiceover about livers, kidneys, blood pressure and the risk of four-hour erections takes place over a shot of the couple unable to have sex, because they are stuck precariously on a cliff, or stranded in a field, separated by walls of porcelain, something perhaps a four-foot, but not a four-hour, grandissement could solve.

White Knuckles and Sunny Mondays

I am not a good driver. This in no way means I am a bad driver, a far too encompassing and emotionally-laden term to be entirely apposite. In fact, I am a good driver at times, such as when I am going twenty-five miles an hour in a residential area with which I am well familiar. Particularly if there are stop signs, stop lights, or roundabouts at every intersection, no pedestrians or pets, no noticeable inclines, and provided that the sun is at an angle favorable to seeing forward.

But I am not bad. Per se. I am effusively, comprehensively polite, for example: I never go first at four-way stops, even when it is my right. (Largely because I can never figure out what is supposed to be right or left when it's all a circle, but that's beside the point.) I stop for pedestrians and children always. I likewise brake for dogs, cats, wayward ducks and geese, regardless of coloring, origin, or gender. I don't speed -- and not solely because my car lacks a usable fifth gear. I am circumspect; I check the side and rear mirrors constantly and, even though I can't actually see over the passenger side headrest, I do the right thing and at least attempt to check my blindspot prior to changing lanes. Which admittedly is seldom necessary, as I am sufficiently courteous as to remain in the slow-traffic lane whenever possible.

But all that circumspection, caution, and courtesy which would likely, in another driver, amount to boundless competence on the road, pale when matched against my utter and sheer lack of confidence. Sadly, while it may work for other things such as messy homes, body odor, and excess body weight, in this case 'knowing it is the first step to overcoming it' is a ponderously mistaken assertion. In this case, it is precisely KNOWING IT the makes the hands shake, the vision blur, the chain smoking fail to work, and the very balls of the feet and tip of the nose sweat. It is the foreknowledge that this can't possibly end well each and every time I have to get up to freeway speed or navigate a labyrinthine and wily Downtown Business Sector filled with greedy shoppers and angry, harried drivers. Being overwhelmed is not my problem: the problem is my awareness of being overwhelmed, which is insurmountable and irremediable. I have many pleasant, and even marginally utile, attributes. Urban navigation is not one of them.

There are so many places downtown that are appealing that i have just never gone to, since no one else suggested them when we were out and I can't drive myself downtown. I had a friend staying in one or other big hotel in the center last year, and I drove around in so many circles, and got stuck pointing upwards at what seemed to be 90 degree angles so many times, and stuck at lights even on the flat streets, and missing street signs, that I ended up parking about a half mile away, because I could never see the PARKING HERE signs until I was already passed them, or too close to pull in without getting rear-ended or shot....

By the time I got there, I looked as bad as I did last night at the end, except that the bald spots might even have been bigger, the pupils even more dilated and the skin yet more ashen and the voice still less audible or intelligible and the grammar far, far more tenuous, due to the fact that it was (cue funeral march) Sometime in the Afternoon that all this tragedy occurred, so there was about 8562 per cent more traffic than early in the night/late in the evening on a Monday.

How Stupid Are We, Really?

Or is it lazy? Please see Michael Bywater's excellent _Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?_ for a sobering exegesis on media and government infantilization of We the People. For a less-well-written rant, however, I offer up my enduring nausea at a long-running commercial for an osteoporosis medication, starring the presumably brittle-boned Sally Field.

This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.

As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.

How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.

Unless I am wrong.

Don't Ask

A friend called me the C-word last night. No, not 'conversational' in a reckless gambit to make me believe I'm witty, nor 'conscientious,' in some euphemistic slur on my precise salad-forking tendencies, but complex. A few weeks ago, when I was still young and naive and had an Internet dating profile up on Match, it did say 'complex' in the profile. But I didn't mean it. It even said I wasn't, right next to it, to clarify. It was only in there to scare off any witless chuckleheads who might have problems with a date who has held season tickets to minor league hockey and the symphony in the same season.

The dullards, in other words, one of which my friend assuredly is not. So what he was commenting on was not some assortment of trivial interests or activities that would seem irreconcilable to a lesser man, but rather something about my personality or emotional life. I would know more about the comment, and its basis and subtext and metatext and and implications, except that I didn't ask him to elaborate, and I don't even remember what I said that elicited this remark.

That is because I don't ask questions. This is a failing and a strength. It is a great strength when dating mobsters, for example, and it can keep a marriage going long after a spouse's infidelity would have crushed the union for a more inquisitive type. It protects one from needing to engage in all manner of unpleasant conversations with employees, clients, friends...with even taxi drivers and shipping-company representatives. It is seemly. And, I would argue, frequently pragmatic: if the package will be delayed, if you will be unable to make it to work or home, it is the consequences of that fact which are the most pressing, not whether it is strictly true that you have seven children and all have suddenly been stricken with broken femurs and the bubonic plague.

Still, sometimes it is indeed counterproductive. Even if I do believe that everything necessary will ultimately be evinced, I imagine an argument could be made for the convenience of knowing some things earlier. I might not spend hours on a big bouillabaisse if we get your shellfish allergy out in the open before it is strictly, absolutely relevant. Or, with regard to dating, I might learn something about you if I inquire as to how or why past relationships ended. And yet it rarely occurs to me to do so.

Likewise I don't wish to talk about myself unduly or accept injudicious praise, so a comment I might construe as flattering or untrue is likely to be met with a simple demurral, and it may thus only be an insult with the sting of veracity that would elicit requests for expansion. Simultaneously, in the other direction, I am seldom sure where the line is that separates conversation from prying, and I thus always err on the side of politesse. In other words, I believe you will tell me what you believe I should know about you at this point, and I am trusting that you are possessed of sufficient good sense and consideration such that we would likely be in accord as to what is relevant.

It is a leap of faith, I suppose: I'm assuming you'll want to let me know that you are still on parole for those youthful murders in '92, or that you lovelovelove Monet, or that, if you had your heart's deepest desire, you would furnish your house in Tuscan Cat style. It's not just about bad things, though: with this as my prejudice and custom, I often miss comments others would construe as leading, as openings, and I sometimes grasp this after I'm gone, in a sinking esprit d'escalier moment on the solitary homeward drive.

Let me clarify that these are not in the main momentous insights or wickedly witty bons mots I regret missing the chance to impress people with. Rather, these are things such as, 'Good heavens, how did that make you feel at the time?' 'That's horrific; how did you get out alive?' 'My, theology to genetics: that's a big jump. What prompted the switch?' 'Huh, next seat, eh? What was Rushdie like in person?' Or even, as a recent example that will haunt me ever, 'Oh, to where?'

It's not as though this is crippling; I do carry on conversations all the time. And in the last case, I saved myself when I noticed the blinking 'insert question' light. However, were I to guess, I would suspect most people would not have hesitated and would have found, instead, asking the question to appear more seemly than not asking it. Perhaps to most it would not even have been a question of appropriateness; it would have been fluid, 'natural' to perceive the statement as an opening. Perhaps in most cases no deliberation would have been called for. All of that is needless speculation, of course; if I'm meant to know whether that's true, I will in time.

You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.

Schlieβlich, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.

Nobody, I imagine, intends to spend the evening in bed crying.

Well, that's not true, not even for me: I remember that in the past on occasion I tried to schedule nervous breakdowns. I'd force down some wine (beer doesn't help for this, and I'm 'scared of' liquour), stare at a wall or read A Lover's Discourse or The Captain's Verses or something equally drippingly love-riddled while listening to Dwight Yoakum or Leonard Cohen assuring me that it could be far, far worse, and hoping that the expulsion of excess saline from my system would dismantle and implode the oppressive palimpsest of whatever melancholia and frustration had been of late clogging my chi and messing with my chakras.

I'd stare, and think terriblyhorribly plaintive thoughts in so deep a way as to verge on the Continental, but it very seldom worked. These days you can orchestrate Armageddon but not a good old-fashioned emotional meltdown. Lucky, then, that they sometimes come unbidden, or I'd have no chi left and all of my chakras would be stuffed down somewhere in my perfectly-manicured feet.

If you actually know me, then you know I have struggled with this for some time. Dating, that is, not missing appendages or wondering what to do for hosiery. I don't miss any appendages, for what it's worth, just some extra organs and clearly extraneous bones in my face. Plus, I have the addition of bone filler in there, so I'm actually ahead of the game!

No, it's Dating. Nothing ever killed me so much. No deadline long or short, no employer going bankrupt and issuing bad checks, no marauder on the street, no toilets exploding as soon as the gay husband pulls away to go to a music conference. No bad tailoring, no smashed face, no ventilator or morphine or housemice stealing a great-grandmother's platinum square-set diamond ring I was only so recently considered 'mature' enough to be given. All of that I can take, and more, too, and still feel well enough to enjoy what remains of the remains.

It doesn't work for me. I don't know how else to say it. I think there is perhaps one person who knows precisely what I have at stake, but he is far away and has enough unpleasantness of his own going on but if he were here he would let me cry on his shoulder and it wouldn't help me in the slightest but at least I wouldn't be reading Neruda.

So I quit the Match.com. They made one check a box for reason leaving (no one wrote me; I found someone; I'm too busy; not the right time...) and write a 'suggestion' as to how they could better assist people finding people. I couldn't see very well at the time, so brevity was in order, but I did try to think for a moment, for my own purposes not theirs, get some clearer if not clear idea of what the deal was, and what I managed was something hideous and dripping with bathos on the order of 'if you are an exception it is perhaps better to be alone.' That was my unconscious sense of things previously, and it appears I have circled full round to embracing it as an explicit Mission Statement or something akin. In between I thought --

well, it doesn't matter what I thought. I thought I'd take a chance, that's all.

But why should it be so hard? Why do I think I'm so bloody different that I have anything to whine about at all? In a way I don't: I think we're all walking stereotypes of one sort or another. If I am in any way misanthropic, I am universally so, and, after all, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch. As anthropoid as you. So I'm lumped in with the lumpens, and with you, so have no fear.

However, leaving aside the fact that we all have our share of frailties, fears, and outright stupidities, we are nonetheless individuals, whether you imagine us to be barred subjects, children of God, overembellished limbic systems, or neurotic egos tucked inside moribund skin bags. This being the case, I have my singular perspective on life, my unique experiences, my own tendencies, my particular desires, and my peculiar, annoying idiolect, to boot. All of this makes me ill-suited to most; it may well make me unsuited to all. The latter, at any rate, is my current stance, despite the enormous social pressure on us all to sort ourselves in twos at any cost.

However, my faraway friend insists that part of what makes me different also makes me want to be in love, be in a large, expansive loving relationship with one person. And I think he is right sometimes, but I don't want to hear that sort of thing. To hear that I was made to sing, but have to figure out some way to do it without a throat.

In the Christian tradition, Lucifer was the king of the angels, a big guy on the heavenly roll call, and when God told him man was now above him, it was his ego, his excess of pride, that made him wince and protest and ultimately get demoted and exiled, the job transfer to Hell. In the Sufic tradition, it was his Love. Iblis was as true, as natural, a Lover as could be imagined. Roses sprang up where he knelt in praise. He was a creature of fire, yes, a djinn, and man was made of dirt, which pales by comparison. But it wasn't a sense of superiority that caused him to disobey God. Rather, how could he prostate himself before anyone, anything, other than the object of his worship?

God sent him an impossible task, according to this reading. An immoral order. Mercurial and vain and wishing to have His new creation - and His Will - acknowledged and obeyed, He issued an edict: the Angels will bow down. But Iblis loved; he loved God beyond anything; he spent his days in adoration and veneration. So, he obeyed the First Commandment, and his heart, and his love - for he could bow down before no one but his only Love, God - while flouting the letter of the new, para-doxical dictum that God had now promulgated. For this mind-numbingly difficult choice, his sentence was revocation of the one thing his heart desired: to live in the sight of God and continue to be the Lover he was meant to. He was forever thus denied the one thing that defined him, enriched him, gave him meaning and life. In this telling, God sends him to Hell, where Shaitan nonetheless continues to sing his praises and to whisper Hallelujah, with every damned breath.

Well, I'm not a djinn, interior design preferences notwithstanding. But I don't like things that look like other things while not possessing the core, the essence, that is constitutive of the real thing they are so cruelly resembling. And so I want little truck with facsimiles of Love, approximations of ardor, or close cousins of intimacy. To me, casual sex sounds like the sort of thing someone might resort to because the bowling alley is done fulled-up.

If you have any sense in you, you walk between two worlds, all the time everyday. There is how you endeavor to be, which is the fruit of years of study and prayer and introspection and pain and glory and hard-won knowledge. And then there is the reality of living in a postmodern, postindustrial, capitalist culture, in which one still must be functional, and be able successfully to fill the gas tank or snake the toilet or insert a hyperlink or navigate the wilds of a wine list when necessary. In which constant self-less-ness does not work. A culture, as well, predicated not merely on the ceaseless satisfaction of desire, but on its constant cultivation. Obviously those two appear at odds.

Yet in Love these two, and so many other ostensible antinomies, can be reconciled. In true Love giving is a form of receiving. In true Love the Lover seeks less his own selfish satisfaction and rejoices in pleasing his partner. He takes joy, as well, in actions that further their Love, their bond. He finds that their desires mingle, and her pleasures become his own. In pleasing her he pleases himself. No one commands Iblis to sing as he does, in other words; he simply cannot help it.

They also create a world and a refuge. They see parts of each other no one else does. The sad, the holy, the weak, the child. The pained, the vexed, the parent, the patient, and all the flecks of the eternal spirit dimmed to others' view by the pressures of everyday life. And it becomes, rather than frightening, a relief, a release -- because of the different, extraordinary sort of trust that exists between and over and around them.

And to some extent all of this sounds absurd and fantasaical. And I know I am fourteen in some quite obvious and substantive ways. But I retain the right to my position that Love can be this sort of thing by pointing out the frequency with which people take the Song of Solomon and anything by Rumi to be secular love songs. Ergo, I am not alone in this notion that Love can be something quite distinct from Like.

Alexander Pope Was Wrong

Somewhere between Emily Dickinson and Jean Rhys lie most of the rest of us. Between knowing too little about love to know what to hope for and knowing far too much about it to find hopefulness anything but otiose. Between adolescent longings for the miracle that will save you from having to go to sixth period and the eminently adult realization that nothing is going to save you from anything ever again except God as you construe Him/Her/It/They/Us and what scant measure of caution you are still half-able to muster while getting ever more looped in the loops of her hair.

People always talk about jadedness, and much of our discourse makes it sound like an utterly inevitable concomitant of aging: reach a certain year, and not only are you compelled to vote conservative, buy a sportscar, take up yoga or Italian, set at least one of the presets to 'soft jazz' and attempt in largely unsuccessful and risible ways to reclaim your lost youth, but you also arrive at the hitherto unthinkable position that the vast majority of people are irredeemable asses. I don't believe it's age, though; I would venture it's experience, which is not at all the same thing, at least for some people. If you could live in a pleasant box up to that age (which assumes, of course, the complete lack of both 'soft jazz' and middle-aged adolescents in that nice box with you), then you wouldn't be jaded at all. If you never fall in love, never get tromped on or kicked in the teeth, I fail to see how you could manage to be cynical when contemplating your odds for either of the last two happening simply because you were considering doing the first. There would be no correlation for you, let alone the suggestion of causality.

So it's experience, then, and if you have rather little, you may not be cynical -- but the cost is that you are not especially wise, either. And I suppose this is where I find myself. Not quite Emily Dickinson, since I at least get out of my room sometimes, but certainly not Marlene Dietrich or Coco Chanel, either. When it comes to men, or love, I have no idea what I am doing, and so most of the time I do nothing at all.

I've been single most of the time: take my thirties, for example. Or my teens. It's not the same as reclusive, but it's certainly non-average. There were a couple ill-starred, brief marriages in there, and the rare relationship, and a bunch of me going about my business not worrying about coupling, or love, or whether I was starting to become Greta Garbo. No especial yearnings for something I could have felt I was missing, as I was traveling, or going to school, or running a little business, or whatever.

But I'm starting to feel that both the cynical people and the Dickinsons and Garbos of this world are perhaps on to something. That really, frankly, if you can't know what anyone means by anything they say, it doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to listen to any of it. At least in business meetings people offer up flowcharts and spread sheets to back up their point. At academic conferences you cite page numbers, and offer caveats in advance of your (purposively, of course) too-literal translation, or you have slides with the artworks on them glowing behind you while you argue whatever it is you mean to say about the changes in mudras in 18th-century Thai Buddhas. You back it up with something, in other words, because you have to, because that's how it's done.

Not so in the personal realm. I wouldn't hire a mailroom boy just because he insists he is nice, but that is how it works in dating. I'm not going to call your references, even if you were to proffer them. What I get is 'face value,' and no matter how much I like your face that's not very much. And since I don't know you, I have only a general history of interacting with all the humans I've ever encountered to draw upon in figuring out whether I think you're lying about your wife's affair or your girlfriend's craziness or your catharsis in Mumbai or epiphany in the Bronx. And since even a stopped clock is spot on twice a day, there are times when any of us can get it right, or at least not hideously, egregiously, flamboyantly wrong, using our intuition and experience to come up with the right sensation.

But Dietrich would be better at it. And perhaps some modicum of cynicism is actually called for. I could call it scrupulousness, caution, objectivity, reason, or wisdom and make it sound better. But I never do that, take that approach: that's what I do when I'm thinking about a new car, or whether I should use thyme or dill, or if I need to stop at the rest stop or can make it another ninety miles. I don't want to analyze everything a date says! What if we do enjoy each other, and begin to date, and fall in love -- will I then have to continue checking everything he says against observable facts? God save me I should prefer to die now.

Even with trivia it runs counter to my nature: if it is genuinely something I could never care about, and you really want me to believe it, fine. I could never care, so that means I don't now, too. If it has more weight it will always come out, and generally sooner rather than later. If I am to get the sort of relationship I would hope for, it has to be predicated on radical, utter, full, and deep trust. Starting out by checking the alumni register or Googling anything about a date other than best driving routes isn't me. I can't help feeling that if it is my business to know who you are, I will.

And perhaps the same is true with the reticence I offer you in return for all your putative facts and the biography I fail to investigate and countercheck: I could tell you all about me, all I could give you, all the ways that I am, and the things that I've done, and the beauties and terrors that I've seen, and what it is that makes me cry and what it is that I want more than anything -- but however attractive or repellent any of them may be, they don't matter if you can't take them in context, can't take all of me and let each of them emerge in a graceful, organic, meaningful pattern...

The lover's discourse stifles the other

who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance. -Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

An acquaintance, having read the profile I managed to endure having up on Match for two weeks, made interesting comment. Well, interesting to me, at any rate, as pretty much anything regarding me is a source of endless (self-) entertainment. Which is good, inasmuch as that at least makes one of us.

What he said was that, while on the surface my profile appears to be very intimidating in terms of what I would be seeking in a partner, it is in fact, or so he reckoned (correctly, as it turned out, but then he is smart and that is invaluable when it comes to reckoning, dead or otherwise) not at all. This is because, unlike in the overwhelming majority of cases, I offer no list of what he has to be. Or like, or be like. And there isn't one, isn't any such list, anywhere in my head.

Consequently, many of the things that came closest to being stipulations were mediated by friendly and sort-of relativist terms: he doesn't have to believe in God, for example, but would ideally 'believe in Good'; he should 'more or less accept some sort of ontological basis' with regard to my referencing the mundane, the sordid, and the divine as categories. So not hardcore at all; in fact, pretty nimbly leaving the door open for discussion on whatever, even the huge things -- provided he knows what the bloody heck I'm even talking about.

That, of course, remains a bit of a sticking point, and one which I've argued with myself over for years. Intellectually, of course, I would think it fatuous to hope someone, friend or lover or sister-in-law, has the same reading resume, for example, that I do. Certainly my reading has been as much a part of my life, or my development, as my varied experiences -- but I wouldn't expect or consciously hope that someone would have had the same Life History that I have, so why do so with books, or thinky pursuits?

But I do imagine there is a bottom level either of fluency or of competence with the ideas and values I might be expressing, or the way in which I intend a certain word, or come to a position, or approach an idea or situation. And I'm not sure, though, whether that relates to actual intellectual experience or innate intelligence (the 'fluency' versus the 'competence'). Moreover, there is certainly the part of me that wishes on the one hand never, ever to fall in love with someone I'm going to have to have arguments with over Homi Bhabha or Agamben! Really really really. That part of me that distrusts and at some level despises all language and particularly despises any language that talks about language. The part of me that can love, rather than 'love.'

So, wow, it would be fantastic to find someone who did believe that some things transcended language, defied articulation -- and who was passionate enough to be able to seek those sort of experiences openly, genuinely. Unpostmodernly!

But, anyway, yes I do not say, must like Telemark skiing and growing Siberian ginseng; must be at least this high and weigh no more this; must eat, or not eat, meat; must like Western Swing and Shostakovich. So mine, for all its bloated words and grandiloquent turbidity, makes, in a sense, far fewer demands on the potential suitor than all those who ask that you agree on income, occupation, children, pets, occupation, hobbies, politics, and 'turn-on' and 'turn-offs' before you make a move one way or the other. Of course, not that I worked this out or laboured over the diction, but I'm sure somewhere in my pointy head there was the notion and the desire that the content and the writing and the vocabulary would nauseate and repel the least suitable.

Still, it is not as though I don't have desires or limits. We all do. In my case though, I have this possibly wrong-headed but nonetheless inextinguishable belief, or at least sense, that what matters is ultimately evinced. This, I have discovered (and so have others, and I'm sorry, genuinely) is one more thing that makes me a ghastly date. I don't ask questions. I'm also pretty sure I give weird answers when people ask me normal ones. The latter relates to so much being contingent or context-driven for me. As a very trivial example, I really do hate pickles, at some level. Nonetheless, I have a jar of Zesty Dills, I believe they are, in the front of my refrigerator, and I have on occasion cut up two of them and eaten them for dinner. But if someone were, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, to wish to know on a first date where I stood on the matter of pickles, I would not know how to answer. I would probably say I hate them, because that is an answer, and because it came to my head, but it's not true in the way I can say I like taking long drives alone listening to weird reportings about Central Asia. Certainly if he asked something of greater substance I could well be far more nonplussed and nearly preverbal in my stumbling attempts to come up with something resembling an expectable answer...

Partly it is because, when it comes to the big things, especially anything having to do with a big-R Relationship, nothing is really true at that point, and you as my interlocutor have no context for understanding anything I might say about me, if it were the case that I could come up with something. As there is no relationship, it serves little for me to do what amounts to conjecture about what I might or might not be like in a relationship. Admittedly, too, as I look at it, I think some of that reticence derives from an inground and inescapable sense of the seemly, even when I can remember 'what I am like' or 'what I like.'

But it's also truly that what I like depends on who you are. If I don't need a 6'2"-6'4" linedancing Presbyterian wildlife-biologist father of no more than two, then what I will enjoy with you depends on who you come to this as, and what sort of connection we develop together. If you really want me to come crew with you at the stockcar races, and I love you, then manifestly I am going to come to love the stockcar races, and your car, and your hot new exhaust system, and your pit crew. I may well come to love the pickles the Snak-Shak passes out with their hot dogs!

Frankly, it's also just fair. I am no longer twenty, and have tastes and opinions and my own little life, and I would hope that no one would demand that I stop engaging in all the silly little things that give me pleasure. If I hold out the hope that you will accept that I have a weakness for bad Arab dance music at times, and that every other month my house has a completely different color scheme, then who am I to ask you to renounce fly fishing or your veneration of a comic I consider insipid and exhausting?

And so instead of asking I wait. So, too, I think that what it occurs to you to tell me is arguably more revelatory than those things you share merely because you were prodded, those things that were not in your head, even if they really are a part of your life. I am given more things - more information, more insight - in the former case than the latter, by a lot. There is an interesting why there that doesn't exist in the second case, in which the only 'why' is because I asked you to tell me. Which is very boring compared to reflecting on what it might mean that you described your employees but not your firm, or your favorite poets but not novelists, or how you felt in Denali but not in Dalian.

In other words, I can make you tell me about mean, mean Sr. Catherine making you stand in the hall yet again for passing notes in class, or whether you preferred to be the bank robber or the policeman -- but what do you want to say? I'm not going to get a full picture anyway, I am not going to get to your core at this point, so what is the self you wish to give me, here where we are now? Yes, it could all be lies, but it could also be untrue that you went to Catholic school!

Upon reflection, I have decided that this approach, the receptive rather than active or inquisitive one, makes normal people think I am cold, uninterested, and in all likelihood a supercilious she-devil. Commingled with my insurmountable inability to give the vaguest idea of how I am when I'm in love (which is, in all frankness, the opposite of how I am when I am with someone I don't know -- but who would know that??), it makes for a very unappealing proposition for my unsuspecting date. And in sense, a very, very strong sense, if you like (not that I think it's possible, but let's hypothesize, shall you?) how I am on the date (the distance, the ostensible apathy, the cool, the lack of anything resembling the guts of me in evidence anywhere), then you will not like the me that would emerge in a Relationship. If you, by contrast, find the Date me ineffably off-putting, then my bad luck indeed, as you might be just the sort the Relationship me would get on with brilliantly.





Too bad you and she will never meet.

Because Underneath ,You Feel Pure Permanence

I don't think most people know how to be in relationships. I don't believe most people are, in their hearts, really looking for something huge and overpowering, something not merely substantive, which is unusual enough itself, but transformative. Love can do that, can change us immeasurably for the better, but one has to be opened to it, one has to accept the vulnerability that is both a prerequisite and a consequent of real love.

And of course that is terrifying. It is totally unlike our normal interactions, which are based on suites of deliberately congruent, affected manners, dictions, postures, appearances, that correspond to and flesh out whatever role we are enacting in that context. This isn't base or even dishonest: on the one hand, we really do need the second cellist behaving like a cellist during the symphony and not a botanist or ironworker; and on the other, he really is a cellist, as evidenced by the presence of his chair in the pit and his bowing of the strings. That isn't disingenuous; it's getting the job done!

But maybe it is the difference between a Bach fugue and bebop. Precision, order, the beauty of the work found in its elegant mathematics, in its stolid girders, right angles and re-bar, in perfection of Form above all else, as against the piercing, unutterable glory that can come only from leap of faith compounded geometrically by subsequent leap after leap after leap -- all these being, not 'explored' in a self-indulgent descent into solipsism, and certainly not 'reconciled' or 'rescued' once the head reemerges --no, not at all, but bared, freed, radically embraced, and then transcended and born anew, via that selfsame melody that could always so easily enslave a pedant or fundamentalist.

So I think it's a big deal, Love. I have difficulty understanding shopping for it, I admit, and I get prickly thinking of the people who don't bother to reflect on it and its significance, especially when they do already, or could if they expended effort, live inside it. I think it takes work, yes, but so do wine and music and childbirth, and yet people keep doing those without saying Wait, I need some Time to Listen to 'Self' in the middle of a bloody solo or parturition.

When you are in love, when you cherish someone, you honor them. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. According to Thomas Merton, at any rate, and I agree that Love is indeed that elegantly simple, and that boundlessly rewarding. Still, it requires effort, requires temperance; and that miraculous, supple, and overpowering solicitude born jointly of eros and agape can only exist where there is sufficient maturity, wisdom, and openheartedness to allow its first seeds to grow.

I think where that sort of genuine and mature love is present, there are lines not merely inconceivable, but impossible, to cross. It's quite easy to see why kvetching about 'never getting any' to your hot boss or flirty assistant is risky, but while it may not be a Gateway to Sin! in everyone's view to lament someone's weight gain, odd facial hair choice, lack of understanding, bad habits, or emotional issues to friends, it nevertheless creates a rift. It lets someone in where they shouldn't be, between the man and the woman. It also keeps those complaints or critiques closer to the front of your mind, even when it's just you two. Joe from the pool hall is right there, in bed with you, with his I-Hear-You-Man comments from yesterday about his wife's growing middle as you run your hands up your wife's now-size-40 hips.

We are conditioned that, to a certain extent, articulation makes it so. Nearly all of our experience is filtered, necessarily, through language. This is why people do affirmations. 'I am good. I am strong. I do not eat Snickers.' Imagine if instead of desperate, last-ditch efforts at 'I love my husband. I love my husband. I love my husband' we had the wife daily complaining to her girlfriends about his stutter, his pot belly, his skin condition, and his lack of sexual skill. And, as we all know, our friends can be relied upon to take our side in such things. It is rare indeed for one of these sort of confidants to interrogate the speaker, ask him why it is he would want to say such disrespectful things, what it is he is really feeling, whether he understands that speaking out of class like that is going to leak a poison in and keep all those things in his mind.

I cringe when I hear such things spoken by people in a relationship -- and we hear them all the time. If it is one on one, I at least have the liberty and the opportunity to ask the other sorts of questions, the sort that can go somewhere, the sort that can open the person's heart rather than seal it shut for good -- but so often people just spout this crap, and don't care who hears. And then someone else commiserates, and tells private details about his partner. And then I perhaps know more about the state of his relationship than his spouse does!

Meanwhile, I am course am thinking You bloody idiots: you have someone who loves you! I am not speaking here of abusive things, or of gambling addictions, or infidelity. Instead, it's stupid, quotidian annoyances, or habitual ways of doing things regarding which the individuals' tendencies and preferences are at odds. Or, of course, pot bellies, skin conditions, Comfortable Shoes, fatigue at sex-time, and, simply, two people who were once together, engaged now in building up separate lives, deliberately or indeliberately. After a certain point, the fissure is irreparable, and if not 'Man,' then surely man's ego, has rent the two solidly asunder.

I have a stance, as well, partly ethical, partly aesthetic, part pragmatic, and part just Healthy Living, that distills down to wait and see, I suppose. A few bucks lost here and there at the race track is not the same as the mortgage payment going to the bookie. An otherwise shockingly thoughtful anniversary gift ordered too late for timely arrival is not the same as spending that anniversary with another girl in a hotel room. And, again (this is the pragmatic angle, I suppose, mixed in with the ethical), if you spend all the time collecting notes on what is not perfect, that, my dear, is what is in your head. Not the moments of beauty, not the act of deep tenderness, but the why-didn't-he-X-when-I-felt-sure-he-would? And if you take all those to your friends, because they're all clustering around your brain making you sick because you chose to focus on them and now can't think of the other things, after your iteration of all his/her failings, what do you think they will say? What average friend ever counsels, Yes, but she's so.... Or, But those are trivial, and look what he does when.... Or, Work on it, work on it, work on it, and keep your love for that person always in your mind?

But perhaps that is what distinguishes Love and friendship. Friendship so often concerns itself with reinforcing the status quo, with affirming assumptions rather than challenging them, by 'supporting' the friend in the least difficult, most prosaic ways. Love, by contrast, keeps always one hand outstretched to the Divine and the other gently opened to the beauty to be found here. It is the turning of the Mevlevi, the name of God ceaselessly on the lips, each step and every breath a rupture and mediation between the ineffable and the temporal.
Love seeks alternately to veil and to transcend the less savoury aspects of what we see in this pathetic, finite moment, pointing always to the grander vision that lies beyond. It reaches, challenges, wounds, elates, soars. Love never disappoints, although it sometimes kills.

I know you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,/because the place you cover up, O tender ones,/doesn't disappear; because underneath, you feel/ pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you eternity. -Rilke, Duino Elegies, 'Second Elegy'

Woes which Hope thinks infinite

Dating is hell. Strike that: dating is an unappealing and tedious proposition from which few emerge fully intact, and Internet dating is hell.

I'm well past being concerned about whether it is some weakness in me which I should be compelled to abhor and exorcise that makes me imagine I might like to be in love. I have come to accept that I am a human, and thus a primate and a mammal, and that makes it perfectly excusable that I should at times want to be near others of my species, or even to form especial bonds with some. I've stepped down off the ego-stretching machine I had initially bought for a weak-willed and insecure boyfriend and admitted that in a previously unimaginable number of respects I'm just like everybody else.

So I shouldn't feel bad about wanting to couple, partner, bond, reproduce, marry, or whatever. Just because something is prosaic doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do it: I can eat lasagne from time to time and still remain exceptional -- can't I? Just because I own pointy boots doesn't mean I read women's magazines -- right? A few average habitudes does not an average person make. Well, necessarily, at any rate, I tell myself: there is cause there for caution.

And beyond that, one has to be reasonable, as well. If I can manage to accept that my desire for an exceptional, fulfilling, challenging, sublime and transcendent connection to/relationship with someone else does not inherently condemn me to a life of mediocrity in every possible arena, then I have to be reasonable and accept as well that there are steps I should take to find this. I am as likely to be stricken by a romantic coup de foudre while redecorating my apartment again or making a nice paella for Kirkland arrivistes as I am to be pulled over for driving while confident.

Which leaves me few options other than dating. I thoroughly despise being 'hit on' while out. If I want to have a glass of wine by myself and bring along a portable Proust, it is not a plaintive and desperate invitation to discussions of literary theory or why Americans cannot enjoy Loire reds. Given my predilection for answering such come-ons with monosyllables when possible (as with 'Good book?' as a shudderingly convenient example) and with the unbecomingly catty 'I'm not here to make new friends' when not, I cannot depend on Chance to render unto me the Übermensch I so richly deserve.

This leaves friends of friends, friends of relatives, friends of clients, friends of students, and friends of fellow volunteers. Scratch all of them, because whether anything does or does not work, it's far too tangly and I like my things silky. I do rely on referrals, connections, goodwill and guanxi in other areas, and tremendously value the imprimatur of a trusted friend on almost anything. But not as regards his good friend Joe.

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.