Rhubarb Pie

You Say You Want A Revolution

I was driving south yesterday, listening to the radio, and that Beatles song came on.  It was a lazy summer day, the long grass buzzing gently with sunshine and bees.  I had just taken a detour to stop at a farm stand and my backseat was full of spinach and young garlic and strawberries and scallions, and I was ever so slightly lost on a backroad I haven't traveled in ten or more years.  I was looking for landmarks, swaying hills and big trees and old trailers and swaybacked barns.  And I was singing along.

"We all want to change the world," said John Lennon, and I thought of you and your column and I looked at the landscape, buttercups and indian paintbrush and those purple flowers I always forget the name of, and I thought, I don't really want to change the world at all.  But I know I should want to.  And Megan does. 

This mindlessness, this contentment, is a privilege.  I feel guilty about it.  And I think I'm correct-minded, I would have agreed with you in those earnest undergraduate conversations, if I had been over in the hippie living community instead of playing a drinking game on the other side of campus.  We need to change our world.  But I drift into a dreamy state way too often, I look out the window and I sing along and I go around a curve in the road and I think, does this look familiar or not, and I smell the tang of that young garlic in the backseat and I can't be sure whether I'm lost or I'm right where I'm supposed to be.   

Write a column, please.  Some of us, even the ones on your side, don't like to think about the hard things.  Or we're far away from them.  Or we're lazy, unprincipled, dreamy.  I am all those things, and you're not, and it's why I admire you so much. 

.sllactaC

Oh man.  I'm sunny again today, but can I tell you?  I was SUCH a grump yesterday.  For no good reason that I could tell.  I ate enough, worked out, did the usual things that I do to keep cheerful, and none of it worked.  I mean, it may have worked in the sense that I didn't dismember anyone or anything.  But that's also because I kept my distance from people.  The people I love didn't deserve to deal with my glowering self.

I was grumpy all day long and keeping a very close leash on it.  You kind of have to know me to know when I'm pissed.  The angrier I am, the more polite I get and the more tightly I control my voice.  Fortunately, my sister and the boys are away this weekend.  I didn't have to manage my temper last night, but I did have to go retrieve her car, like we arranged.  I left later than I meant to, at twilight.

Now, I don't care.  In Sacramento, I walk out at night.  I walk anywhere in Midtown with no fear at any time of the night.  I would do that here too, but people keep scolding me.  My sister and every one of her friends have been mugged.  My sister is adamant that I carry mace if I go out at night.  It worries her and it bums me out.  I miss walking out at night.  But I was supposed to go get the car from the BART station and she wasn't here to worry, so I left at twilight.

The neighborhood is gentrifying, so you just don't know who the people approaching you on the street are going to be.  Hipster couples?  Black kids from the high school?  Huge Islander dudes (well, them you can tell from a distance)?  Friendly people?  Scary people?  Could be.  But I walked down the big street and kept my head high.  Lots of eye contact and saying hi, because I always do.  Also, because I want to be ready to react if someone is threatening.  Whatever.  There were hipsters in front of the pizza place and women on bikes and people getting Korean food.

Twice I had to walk through groups of black men.  I hate that I notice this.  I hate that I have to decide to avoid or go through the middle and I am not savvy enough to know what they're up to from down the block.  I hate that I have to include the possibility that they could hassle me in my assessment.  I was, walking in my sister's old bad neighborhood, shot with a bottle rocket by a bunch of neighborhood kids.  Other men seem worried that I'll forget that I'm stacked. 

But approaching the first group of a half a dozen men, I relaxed pretty fast.  In their thirties and forties, sharp dressers, friendly faces.  Very sharp dressers.  Now, a man whose fedora perfectly matches his suit vest may steal your heart, but I wasn't scared for my wallet.  I said Evenin' and got a chorus of Evenin's; as I walked past, one guy shouted.  "Hey!" he  said.  "I like your hairdo!"  That made me run my hand awkwardly up the back of my bob, which we all laughed at.  So I was already feeling better as I walked towards the second group.  Younger, in front of a sketchier store front, one friendly glance, one steady look, and then two chatting handsome guys.  I grinned at one of them and he grinned back.  "Hey girl.  It's yo world.  It is yo world, girl."  My heart lifted and for the rest of my walk into the evening, it surely was.

If it is a losing bet, don't double down.

On my visit to my French cousin, we'd sneak away to walk and talk with our hearts open.  We don't see each other nearly enough, you see, and we think the other is great.  So we have to talk long and hard in the few days we get.  Anyway, I'd said something about how I give up sugar for a month a couple times a year.  "Oh," she said.  "That's so American."

She may have meant the food Puritanism, but I think she meant the larger idea of self-improvement projects.  So American, so striving, so driven, so ceaseless. I do it too.  The list is long, but just for starters I'm trying to revise my walk and the way I stand (shoulders back and down, don't crane head, pelvis tucked).  That's before I get to anything actually productive or try to help anyone else.  So believe me, I know the urge and I'm even glad for it.  Working at projects, including myself, actually does make my life better.

But here's the thing I came to last year.  I'm all for self-improvement.  But I am done with self-discipline.  Done.  As a technique, self-discipline has taken me as far as it can.  I am thirty-six, and self-discipline has been the way I drive myself for as long as I remember.  That's what people told me.  Do it harder, do it again, practice, eat less, restrain more, work at it, push harder.   And I am done with that.  The way I figure, self-discipline has taken me as far as it is going to (pretty fucking far - through lots of school and having a job and owning a house).  Anything that's left is not something that self-discipline works for.  If self-discipline worked on the remaining problems, it would have fixed them by now.

This last year has been about finding other techniques for bettering me.  I got a physical trainer.  This is ridiculous.  I've been heavily involved in sports since I was two.  If there is anything I know, it is how to condition.  But I wasn't doing it, and I was badly out of shape.  So I turned that problem over to someone else and that has been GREAT.  Outsourcing that discipline works, as my bulging triceps can attest.  My sister changes the physical system.  If the clothes aren't folded again, she figures there's a reason.  She'll provide the folding table at the right height, the sufficient hangers and the big-enough dressers until doing the laundry is smooth and easy.  I'm trying to see if bribing me works.  Are there indulgences that I'd trade for not doing something or other?  (Not much success with this one.  My wants are modest and I should just get massages if I ache.)  At any rate, I'm looking for new approaches.  I don't know which ones will work, but I am very sure that self-discipline doesn't any more.*

So, hon, if you want to change your email habits, that's cool.  I think you're perfect, but if you want to be more perfect, that's fine by me.  But I'm curious about how.  Are you going to change your email habits by, you know, trying harder and working at it and reminding yourself?  Are you going to apply self-discipline to this problem?  If self-discipline doesn't work, are you going to beat yourself up for that?  Will you tell yourself to use even more self-discipline?  Will that work?






*Also, it is worth noting that nothing I've ever been good at came about by self-discipline.  I never forced myself to do TKD.  I absolutely loved it in the years I got good.  In the end it was habit, but it wasn't a habit I fought.  The blogging wasn't effort and that blog was only good when I was full of enthusiasm.  Painting my house bright colors was compulsion and a vision for the result, but not self-discipline. 

Best

I've been mulling over your reaction to that guy who writes "Ciao" at the end of his emails.  I know a guy who does that, or at least used to back in 1997, and I remember thinking it was very silly.  (In between wondering whether maybe it was very sophisticated, and I was just very provincial.)  I have been similarly bugged by people who sign their emails "Cheers!"  Who says that?  And what does it mean?  Did they spend a lot of their formative years in a pub in Ireland?

But I still don't really know how to write a decent email, especially to a stranger who I would like to impress.  My email habits are sporadic and lazy and formed partly during school and partly during life as a lawyer, so they alternate between being too casual and too formal.  Half the time I postpone reading emails and they disappear off my screen and I never answer them at all, and half the time I am doing something else when I check them so I dash off a hasty line full of skipped words.  And half the time I sit down with my full attention and I read an email from someone else that's signed "Cheers" or that has a silly inspirational quotation on the signature file and I decide immediately that the person is a blowhard or an airy-fairy flake.   I often sign my emails to strangers with "Best," which is ridiculous.  'Best' what?  Best wishes?  Best of luck?  My best to your mother?  What do I mean, and why don't I say it?  I mean none of those things, because they all sound silly, and yet somehow a long time ago I arrived at "Best," as my handiest signature and now dash it off without thinking about it.  I don't think "Best" is as bad as "Ciao," but maybe it's worse.  At least 'Ciao' is a word meant to be an opening or closing.  What does 'Best' even mean??  And then the way I sign my name -- often I just type the letter "S", if I sign at all, so do recipients wonder whether I was going to type a word and got cut off?  It is only with rigorous self-control that I am resisting going back into my email archives and skimming through all the various closings I have used in emails past, to try to figure out whether I'm a blowhard or not. 

As you know, I spend a fair amount of mental energy feeling guilty about not living up to my ideal.  I would like to be the kind of person who reliably responds to emails, with wit and insightfulness and good grammar.  While we're at it, I'd like to maintain an empty inbox, and tidily organized folders and an updated signature file with the right contact information.  And I'm not that kind of person, so I feel a tiny bit bad about myself whenever I open my email.  I think the answer is to check email less often, and actually pay attention when I do it.  Add that to my list of self-improvement goals for the summer.