Rhubarb Pie

Happy New Year!

Have a wonderful new year. 

I'll write something real in the next day or so, and Sherry and I will continue a slow back-and-forth.  In the meantime, we wish you all happiness and comfort and love in the new year. Thank you for spending it with us.

What A Marvelous Difference We Have

Hi friend.  I'm rushed, but I'm struck by how different we've grown to be, and how this one difference, this sense of identity with respect to other people, strangers, ripples in our lives.  Do we care what other people think of us? 

I think you're lying, and if I weren't rushed I would say it more gently.  Please imagine all the loving admiration in my voice.  I know you care DEEPLY about what other people think of you: you don't complain, you take care not to be boring, you track the needs of other people and how to keep them happy and content with the intensity and excellence of that big brain of yours.  You notice moods and you worry about hurting or giving offense.  You care A LOT about what some people think of you, more than me, I'm sure.  In your small and intimate circle I don't think I know anyone as sensitive to others as you.  I accept that there are worlds of people about whom you don't care, but even there, too, we have a small tug of war going.  It is stupid for people who don't know you to judge you by your clothing, but we're both smart enough to know they will and we are also both smart enough to know that persuasion and public support have meaning in our little worlds, so I believe you should win that game.

As for me, I'm not so concerned about the moods of my friends -- I don't take that on.  But I like to win over strangers: not for sport, although that was once true, and I'm ashamed of that phase.  Now I do it to help, if I can.  It's my job to learn more about other people and to teach them what they need to do to be happily and fully expressed at work.  I need to mind-read and persuade and influence and inspire, so I'm really focused on how that happens, and I love the study of it.  It's part of what I read about so hungrily.    

For all this focus on other people and what they think, I think I've left behind my vulnerability to judgment.  I am loved enough in my private life; I'm happy with who I am.  Facebook and its long lost faces reminds me not of people who were mean, but of a time when I was vulnerable, when I looked to certain specific people and hoped desperately that I measured up.  I don't think I do that any more, but those faces remind me of that sad time and it's not a completely cheerful reunion with those long lost friends.  I am sad for the part of me that didn't know how to be easy. 

Life is long and gentle and we get to choose our way.

I was terribly ostracized in sixth grade, completely isolated. I took the whole thing fairly stoically. I read a lot and stopped trying to make eye contact or exchange words with anyone. Some kids were mean. Most just ignored me. Several months after we graduated, one of the moms, I think it was Ms. Kahane, saw me at the park. Her son had been popular. She recognized me and said hi, and somehow got around to asking me if I missed sixth grade and everyone I'd gone to elementary school with for years. If I remember right, I told her “No. It was horrible and everyone was mean to me. I don’t miss anything about it.”* (I didn't tell her that her son had been a full participant in my shunning.) So yeah. I do understand not wanting to go back. Back wasn’t all good.

See, now, this story and your post make me want to go in two different directions.

Let's try the first direction:

The stuff you say, where you worry about people's perception of you. I don’t get that. This stuff:

“a sense that who I really was inside was uncool and unambitious and unworthy according to the rules of the [law school] world”

“My ambivalence about this question is now officially Odd.”

I really don’t understand that worry. I think it was burned out of me in sixth grade. I do not give a fuck what people think of me. I don't care on the downside and I don't care on the upside. I don't care. It wouldn't occur to me to wonder what people in my class in law school thought of my goals. They aren't me, so I don't care. If they went as far as telling me that my goals are wrong, I would care enough to tell them to suck me. But I would never actually entertain doubt based on that. Other people having opinions about my preferences for having children?** Shockingly irrelevant. The names of distant stars are more important to me. I don't care. They aren't me and their lives aren’t changed by my choices in having children. It is unlikely that I'd notice, but if it got through to me, I'd forget it by the time I wondered whether we have enough arugula in the garden for a salad tonight. I just don't care.

This shows up other ways. I don't care what clothing I wear because I don't care what impression I make because I don't care what strangers think. I have finally honed my wardrobe into entirely bland, but that's out of an intellectual decision, not because I care in my heart. I also don't notice praise. It never sinks in. I'm stunned when I realize that people have been paying attention to me and pay heed in meetings, because I didn't care enough to notice that was building. It made me a resilient blogger, because I laughed when people hated me and I ignored when people fawned on me. I don’t care about either. (I hated when my message got twisted. I care a lot about information transfer. But I don't care about strangers' opinion of me. (This fades some at the extreme ends and I do care what friends think of me. But it holds for most of the middle ground of blogging.)) I think this blind spot, held deep and strong, came from giving up in sixth grade. I knew everyone's opinion of me and it sucked. It wasn't going to get better, so my only option was to stop caring.

From this perspective, your awareness of other people's opinions seems like a big burden. You spend bandwidth and energy on it? It adds a constraint to your decisionmaking? That looks tiring. Is there a way to take that load off you? My opinion of you and whatever you choose is that it is brilliant and perfect. If you must consider an outside opinion, couldn't you just use that one? I wish you could just not care, but the only way I know to achieve that is a year of ostracism, That trade-off isn't worth it.

Now, back to the fork in the road and the other direction:

Strangely, for all that I don't want to re-connect with my past or join Facebook, I really do track the persons from my life as closely as public internet allows. I google old classmates every few months. I keep track if I can. I like getting news about marriages and babies. I have to say, I also like that Facebook and Twitter are taking some of that function away from blogging. I think people want very much to say how they're feeling in the moment and I think they want to relay their news. But that was never my favorite part of blogs. I've always liked blogs that add synthesis and tell truths that take more work to express. I like the blog access to arcane expertise.

We talked about what we wanted this blog to be, and one of the things we discussed was valuing the blog form of media. It is too easy for me to dismiss the essays I put up, the ones that show a small piece of what I know about how we move water. Whatever. It is just a blog post, without good citations or an institution backing it. But the aggregate of those posts is a body of work. It happens to be a format I'm good at, and I haven't taken to another as readily. So maybe instead of thinking that I'm not good at reporting or writing academic articles or whatever it is that blogs aren't quite as good as, I should instead value what a blog is and does.

One of those things is the longer stories and insights that you write so beautifully. I'm happy if we keep writing those here, on whatever schedule suits our urge to write. I think we're both over our first blogs and that greedy need for numbers. We can wait between posts until something moves you or me to tell a longer story, lingering in the details. I'm writing at the policy blog now, but I remember how I liked to go back and forth between policy and personal on my old blog. The pendulum will always swing and I will always want to write the other again. Perhaps from time to time, Tweeting will feel inadequate for the thoughts coalescing in your mind and you'll look around for a pink and red blog to write on. Perhaps I'll just want a place that I imagine is warmer and cozier and just friends talking about the worlds they love.

But really, this is up to us. Even more really, I'm not trying to win the blogs any more. There is no external prize, so we should do this in exactly the manner that makes it a gift. If it is a burden, we should stop.

But What If I Don't Want to Go Back?

A few things: end of the year always means reflection and goal setting, because I am nothing if not a relentless self-improver.  I always remain unimproved, but the process of trying to become a better expression of who I aspire to be is pretty essential.  I've been thinking a lot about how I learn, what I learn hungrily and what I can't seem to learn for the life of me, what I remember and what I forget.  I've been thinking a lot about reading -- I always read, but I'm starting to take seriously my reading, and to think about making a plan for how I do it, because I'm coming to accept the truth that I won't get to read everything there is, and I don't have time to waste on reading that I'm not psyched to do.  I have a two-page reading list for 2009 already, and it doesn't include all the Shakespeare to come.  Look for some aspirational posts about that.  Maybe.

But here's the thing. I'm not feeling like blogging, much.  Some of that is that my time is occupied on rather boring things, so I don't feel that interesting.  But some of it, I think, is that my exhibitionist itch is getting scratched in other ways.  I'm Twittering, for example, and playing around with Facebook's capabilities and that process does some of what blogging does: they both direct attention, they both have an audience, and there are differences in format that I feel I should learn.  So that's where some of my own navel-gazing goes, and by the time I'm at home I don't find myself with the impulse to tell in the same way.  The different formats make a difference in WHAT there is to say -- if you're stuck with limericks, there are certain stories that you just won't find yourself telling, and that's kind of what the restrictions of status messages are like.  But anyway, some of my attention and thought have been going into learning about and playing around with these two blog alternatives.  I'm not sure it's where I'll settle.

And here's what I've noticed.  Facebook is really becoming ubiquitous.  I feel like I need to understand it and watch it because I want to understand its role in professional networking as that emerges, so I can advise students with relevance.  But every day people from high school or college connect to me, and I am experiencing some strange sensations as I revisit my relationship with these people from my past.  Not all of my time in college was fantastic.  I was depressed, irresponsible, and self-destructive my senior year.  By the time I left college I was convinced I was dumb, because I wasn't studying anything I cared about, and my strengths didn't seem to be recognized or admired by anyone.  I was unkind and self-absorbed in law school.  There were some great moments, some strong and true connections, some deep memories, some life lessons, but there was also very little confidence, a lot of doubt and envy and shame, a sense that who I really was inside was uncool and unambitious and unworthy according to the rules of the world.  I think that's part of why I feel so driven here, to connect to college students and support and encourage them as they explore what they want out of life.  

Anyway.  All that bad stuff wasn't Yale's fault, and it wasn't the fault of the folks I knew there.  When I think about it clearly, I think there were a lot of people there who saw the good in me I couldn't fully appreciate in myself.  But the parts of me that didn't find expression there, and are happier now, are kind of made jittery by Facebook.  Are you going back there? they ask me.  Are we going back to that world? 

And the children! Everyone has children now.  I thought that was happening, but now there's proof.  Everyone my age has children.  My ambivalence about this question is now officially Odd. 

(Oh, also, we bought the House after all.  The seller came back to us, and we gave in a little bit, and the deal is done.  So let those smug urban posts rip....)

The Time Has Come To Tell What Can Be Told

  So let me tell you a little bit about my carpool.  It's been a little more than three months, and I think there's enough for me to say even without breaking the "what's said in carpool stays in carpool" rule.  I love the carpool, for a million reasons that I didn't expect.  Saving gas is the least of it, as it turns out.  

The structure of our carpool is a little unusual.  The college has about 600 employees, who are clustered in the college town and in a few other places, like my small city 25 minutes south of the college.  There are a couple of other carpools that go from my city to the college town, but ours is the biggest and the best.  There are 9 of us in this carpool, but not everyone 'pools every day.  Usually there's just one carload of us; occasionally we send two cars.  We meet at a park-and-ride lot right near the highway between 7:45 and 7:50 AM, and aim to leave promptly at 7:50 AM.  (Despite my best intentions, I am the chump who comes flying in at 7:49 AM or even sometimes as late as 7:51 AM, all apologies and dropping water bottles and travel mugs of coffee.)  Who goes on which day and whose turn it is to drive is managed by our carpool captain, who sends an email out on Friday afternoon asking who's planning to participate on which days in the following week, and then checks his spreadsheet of who drove when and how many days each person has ridden, and sends out the driving/riding plan for the next week.  He assures us it is not all that hard, but my mind always gets stuck wondering how he sorts out whose turn it is to drive from an erratic group of semi-regular participants.  Luckily, I figure I don't really need to remember: I'll be there, with my car, each day, so if people get into my car I figure it's my turn, and if they are all expectantly waiting in somebody else's car I just jump in, apologize for being a minute late, and buckle up. 

I really like the fact that it is not a door-to-door carpool.  That helped me join -- when I was uncertain about the social dynamics of riding to work with strangers, I was relieved by that part.  It lowered the sense of personal entanglement, and removed my fear that someone lingering over coffee or tardy getting out of the shower (probably me) would make a carload of people late.  It keeps it a business relationship: we meet, we ride, and that's that.  Conversations stop when we get to the park-and-ride lot, there's no polite idling in someone's driveway to hear the end of a story.  The drive to and from the park and ride is the beginning and end of my working day.

The first best thing about carpool is that I now get to work on time, and leave on time, reliably.  It's fantastic! The next best thing about carpool is that I laugh almost all the way to and from work. And oh, what I learn about the college.  Almost every day someone sighs, and then says, is it okay if I vent a little bit?  So those are the conversations where you learn how things work in other departments. 

Not mine, officer!

Aw hon, that's rough.  I think every housebuying cycle comes with a story of the house that got away.  This was your urban house, right?  You only say the word and I'll write you all about the inconviences and minor hassles.  I can tell you more about screaming in the night and guns found in my bushes and the neverending cleaning trash off my yard.    Of course, if you find another urban house, I'll write you about the smugness of being a part of a city and how I enjoy strange street interactions.  Just let me know which you want and I can provide.  They'll both be true.

It's Hard To Know What To Think

Oh, my friend.  I love what you wrote about the toaster.  That's the heartbreaking thing about the holidays, I think, all those good intentions, misdirected.  Your gracious post didn't include the things that you must have thought -- the part about wondering, does my dad even KNOW me at all? Does he listen, or watch, how I actually live?  How could he give this to me if he knew me, even a little, in the way I yearn to be known?  That's the sadness of holidays -- we try to send these messages of love, but in the ways we get things wrong we instead deliver this message: "I don't know who you are." 

I'm feeling a little bit blue because NBT and I just drew a line in the sand, and so did the seller, and although our lines in the sand are very close, close enough to smell one another's breath, close enough not to make much of a difference to either of us, nobody is budging, and the deal is off. 

Part of me is really bummed -- that's such a cute house, there in the city, and we were going to get a really good deal on it, with or without the concession from the seller that we said was the dealbreaker.

But part of me is proud of us.  We made a plan and stuck with it, unflinchingly.  We didn't make a deal we couldn't walk away from.  The  money means more to us than it does to the seller, we're pretty sure of that.  Every month that we DON'T buy a house means our financial situation gets a little more secure, and it sure looks like we're not going to miss the chance of a lifetime if we don't act RIGHT THIS MINUTE.  So, we think our reasons for sticking to the plan are sound, and it's nice to be the kind of person with that kind of discipline.  Except, the cute little fenced-in yard, and the skylights, and the fireplaces! 

So I am giving myself a couple of hours to wallow, and then project Move On begins.  Project Move On will include looking at new listings, finding fault with the house as it was, viewing segments like this one smugly, hoping for a mortgage rate drop, and telling ourselves how sorry the seller is going to be that she let us get away.  But right now it's all keening and wailing and beating the chest.  How will we EVER find something as cute as this house? We could have walked EVERYWHERE.  And the floors, those beautiful floors! All for what?  Discipline? Really?! Pigheadedness, more like it.

Lots of cheese-y toast.

Now that I’m back in my house, I need a toaster again. Home for Thanksgiving, when my Dad asked what I want for Christmas, I mentioned a toaster. Perhaps it is not the most inventive of gifts, but at this point it would add great utility to my life. And cheese-y toast. I thought it would be an easy gift for him to give, as well. It was easy. That very day, my Dad ran over to Target and picked up a toaster.

The thing about gifts from my Dad, you see, is that since my sister and I have left the house, we have changed our lifestyles a lot. We both have small bungalows in dense parts of cities. We grew up on a suburban acre. At the time, our house was large-ish, a sortof ungainly mix of a former garage and an original two room house with an odd additional wing. People who weren’t us thought that it was strange that you entered the house through the kitchen. Since then however, Dad has remodeled piece by piece until it is a very large ungainly mix, with another floor and more other rooms and closets that are bigger than rooms in my house. Where my sister and I value finding exactly the piece of furniture that will fit and not dominate a room, my Dad values filling huge spaces and having three or four of everything in reserve, lest the earthquake leave the family without every last supply ever. Daddy thinks we live in eco-induced asceticism*, and does not understand that we find our lifestyles very comfortable and agreeable. Further, a hand-me-down much bigger couch (a hypothetical example) would be a burden, not a kindness, because it wouldn’t even fit in the room and then I’d have the hassle of getting rid of it.

At any rate, I asked Dad for a toaster oven. He ran out that day, so I could have a toaster even sooner. I should have known what would happen. He brought home the biggest, most complicated toaster you’ve ever seen. I think it might have convection capabilities. It was definitely programmable. It was huge. I just looked at my Daddy. I don’t think he understands how my life works**. The toaster can get back to Oakland in my sister’s car, but from Oakland, it is a bike-train-bike connection for me. How do I get the monster toaster home? Once I do, does it fit under my cabinets? I thanked him for it and we took it to Oakland, but I left it there, defeated by the prospect of riding home with it.

That worked out pretty well, because my sister called me midweek. ‘Hey. My toaster exploded this morning. The four-year old came and told about the big fire in the kitchen. Don’t suppose you happen to have a toaster lying around.’ What a coincidence! I did! She brought the toaster in and tried it. It was huge, took up way too much counter, looked bad. This is not the toaster for either of us.

We called Daddy and asked if he had the receipt. He did and we returned it, no problem. I went to look at the selection of toasters. There they all were, a long shelf of them. Toasters and toaster ovens, ranging from small to big. There were a bunch of small ones and a bunch more medium ones. There, in the very far left, in the far corner of the shelf, was the toaster he got me, twice as big as any other toaster, twice as complicated, twice as expensive.

I can just see him standing in that row of toaster ovens. He wants to get his little girl something, make her life a little easier, handle one of her problems. He looks at the toasters and almost picks some average one, and then, pulled as if by dowsing rod, he turns to the biggest, most toaster there. He loves his daughter that much. More than an ordinary toaster. He loves her all the toaster there is. He can’t see her all the time and he doesn’t support her whole life any more and heaven forbid that he talk about it too much, but he can make sure that she has all the toast she’ll ever want. He’ll solve his girl’s toast problems for once and for all.

So he picks me out the biggest most inconvenient toaster oven there, the not-useful one that I can’t carry home. The toaster that is still not big enough to hold all his love for me. If there’d been a bigger toaster, he’d have picked that one. In this case, it worked out great. My sister and I returned it and used the money to buy two small shiny toasters. He solved both his daughters’ toasting problems at once. I will make very many pieces of toast with it for a few years. I wish my Daddy lived closer so I could make some toast for him some mornings. We could eat toast together.

Upside Down Land

I'm still out here, still preoccupied by boring things, like sheetrock estimates and mortgage rates.  Buying this new house has taken a lot of my free time over the last three months, and although I am cautiously excited about the prospect of actually signing our names and getting the keys, I am also aware that my next project, selling the house we live in now, will require a similar fixation for a few more months.  It's no fun to realize you've become boring.  But sometimes it is part of adulthood, right? Paying a lot of attention to boring things.  

(I did get to spend a whole day on cartoons of brain chemistry, though, and it's not nearly enough but I made some good headway and I have my drafting table set up and my eyes on the calendar for my next session.) 

So the only really interesting thing I have to report is a change in my approach to my job that I'm experimenting with.  Like, I tend to think, I love my job because a lot of what it requires is stuff I enjoy and I'm pretty good at: I meet people, build a rapport reasonably quickly, uncover what matters to them and what their essential skills are, and help them write and present themself with clarity and confidence.  I do a ton of editing of student writing, and most of the writing I edit is a version of the personal essay -- either the personal statements for graduate school applications, or cover letters.  Slightly different form, but essentially the same proposition: "what you get if you pick me".  I like doing this kind of editing, and I'm clear and directed and quick and decisive, and the students I work with are really appreciative and they leave excited to go make the edits or revisions I've suggested.  Basically, I'm doing a set of things I've been told I'm good at all of my life, things that come easily to me, that I love to do, that I would do for free.  

Anyway, I just recently decided it's probably a bad thing for me to have concluded that I am good at this.  It's probably boring and growth-inhibiting.  What if I'm not actually as good a communicator as I think I am, or as good a writer or editor?  How would I approach my job differently if I were trying really hard to get a lot better at those things?  Instead of thinking I'm, say, a 7 out of 10, what if I thought I were only a 2 out of 10, and I worked deliberately to get REALLY, REALLY good at things that I've always thought I was naturally good at?  

It's been an interesting mental flip.  Do I do anything differently yet? Not specifically. But, I watch the way I work now, and notice the choices I make that up until now I've just been doing with automatic confidence.  Oddly, changing the lens with which I see my own skills really has a big impact on what I find interesting about the work I do.  I'm really motivated, I think, by feeling competent.  It matters to me that what I am doing is not just absorbing and rewarding, but that there's a path for me to excel.  Changing the way I think about where my skills are now and where they might be is both depressing and motivating.  

We could grade you, if your inner student needs that. A+ work, I'll say.

When you asked, 'is taking a few days to chart out the subject that has fascinated you so you read a lot about it and that is all jostling around in your head the dorkiest thing I ever heard', were you bragging?  Because dorky is how we roll around here and being the most dorkiest takes some trying.  You are blogging with a woman who has decided that for recreation, she will review government reports on climate change.

I am not even sure that your beautiful drawings qualify as dorky.  The ones you showed me were extraordinary, a rich and clear explanation of civil procedure, annotated and made intuitive.  I am not surprised that you understood a subject well after putting together a picture like that.  I am surprised that you undervalue your rare skill in comprehension and design, and play down that ability.  I don't have any hint of being able to draw entire topics like that, so I can tell you it is a gift.

I am also not surprised that you're feeling this urge now.  I mean, for a couple impressionable decades, we were on the school schedule.  You're even back in that environment.  If it is triggering rememberances of studying hard, well, those patterns were laid deep and enforced twice yearly.  Besides, I mostly liked the intense bouts of studying.  You're scared for your grades, maybe, but it is a very pure few days.  There is a single priority and a defined approach and a good purpose.  It is a selfish time, all your attention gathered in and your interest focused.  In intermittent doses, it feels good.

So, hon, of course I think you should make time to draw out the information you've gathered.  I think you should tell your sweetie he can play World of Warcraft, and stock up on snacks.  I think you should honor your work and your ability by setting up a comfortable work station.  I'd want you to put your books in a tall stack nearby, lay out your pencils and run your hand down some giant pieces of paper.  Then I'd hope you'd make yourself a pot of tea, call a dog over, and sink into a long day of concentration, fleetingly noticing the light changing.  Afterwards, I hope you'll show us what you did, and explain to me how the brain works.