Introvert | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jan

if the world could sit tight for one night

Posted by Perich at 7:25 am

Three years ago I took a writing class at Grub Street on “Building a Writing Career.” Ethan Gilsdorf kicked off the class by having us go ’round the room and introduce ourselves by saying, “Hi, my name is [$name_here], and I’m a writer.”

“This is an important part of growing as a writer – identifying as one,” he said. “So no matter what you think of your work, whether you’re published or sold or not, introduce yourself as a writer.”

It was a full room, just shy of twenty folks around a table. The introductions started at the far end and rotated away from me, so I was no earlier than #11. Yet I was the first person to introduce myself as a writer without qualifying it first. Not “I’m trying to be a writer” or “I want to be a writer” or “I’m a writer, I think,” followed by nervous giggles. Just saying it and owning it.

And this was in a room full of peers! All people in the same spot: uncertain about their craft, looking for guidance, ready to learn. And the instructor gave us permission to call ourselves writers, even if we didn’t feel that we were. Even if we thought it was aspirational, not indicative.

It’s hard to call yourself a writer. I still struggle with it, my burst of “courage” three years ago notwithstanding. And I’m far more qualified to call myself a writer today than I was then. If someone congratulates me on my success or asks how I’m doing, my first instinct is always to duck my head, give a shy smile and make that weird “ennhhh” sound that we associate with Jewish grandfathers. I’m getting better at nodding and saying, “Thank you” or giving a sincere answer, but it’s a conscious choice. It’s like improving your posture or watching what you eat: you commit yourself daily anew.

Why are we so scared to identify ourselves as writers? I’d guess for three reasons.

First, identifying yourself as anything creative often prompts odd responses from other people. “Oh, you did improv in college? Do something funny.” While no one will ask you to produce a poem on short notice, calling yourself a writer can lead to a variety of unpredictable questions. This isn’t a reason to stop identifying yourself, as such, but it can make you self-conscious.

Second, we have a hard time owning labels that other people don’t assign us. I have no problem identifying myself as a marketer, since someone’s paying me to fill that role. Fathers don’t have difficulty calling themselves parents. But there’s no license or exam or certification process to become a writer (MFAs don’t count).

Third, as much as we have to commit ourselves to calling ourselves writers, we have to commit ourselves even more frequently to actually writing. Writing takes constant work and there’s little immediate reward. It’s easy to fall off and miss a few days. And if you don’t feel like a writer, identifying as a writer can make you feel like a fraud.

But what about you? Do you have a hard time identifying yourself as a writer? Or as whichever art form you’re passionate about (a singer, a sculptor, etc)? If not, what have you done to get over that hurdle?

Nov

the floods is threatening my very life today

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

A few years ago, Joel linked to a New York Times article on a famous experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram. And no, not the one you’re thinking of:

Quickly, however, the focus turned to the experimenters themselves. The seemingly simple assignment proved to be extremely difficult, even traumatic, for the students to carry out.

“It’s something you can’t really understand unless you’ve been there,” said Dr. David Carraher, 55, now a senior scientist at a nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Kathryn Krogh, 58, a clinical psychologist in Arlington, Va., was more blunt: “I was afraid I was going to throw up.”

More than three decades later, the memories are still surprisingly vivid, testimony perhaps to the trauma of their experience …

The experiment? Boarding a crowded subway train in Manhattan and asking someone to give up a seat.

This article struck me so hard that I still remember it more than seven years later. Just reading about the process – a healthy man asking a stranger for a seat – makes my pulse race. I suspect if I had to actually carry it out, I’d have a reaction similar to Milgram’s: “The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge.”

This is probably why I have such a hard time asking for help.

I attended a talk given by Barry Eisler last week. After the Q&A, people circled around him, eager to talk self-publishing. One education writer lamented his experience with a publisher: feuding over the title, changing the cover. Eisler sympathized. The writer concluded by mentioning another book of his and giving Eisler his card.

I felt that same quickening of nerves that I described above – and I wasn’t the one talking! I was standing six feet away. But just seeing someone lay out their need like that was like watching surgery. And he wasn’t even asking explicitly for help! Not an introduction, or a recommendation, or even mentioning his book on a blog. Just making a connection. That alone terrified me.

But the odds that Eisler will remember that guy are greater than the odds that he’ll remember me. So the educational writer made the smarter play.

Why does asking for help bother me so much? Why does it bother anyone? Because it’s an admission of lower status. People consider Chinese culture exotic because of its obsession with “face”, but the same jockeying for position goes on in Western society. Passing someone on a narrow stairway, inviting someone to your house, getting a friend to pay back a loan: there are a thousand subconscious calculations about status that go on there.

The problem: if I want to succeed as a writer, I need help.

The good news, as anyone who knows me can tell you, is that I’m not a complete shut-in. I’ve asked people for help in the past. And it’s worked, too! Not always, but often enough that I’m making progress, both as a writer and as a person capable of asking for help.

When I do get over myself and put my hand out, it’s usually because I’ve done one of the following:

Own up to your lower status. The only thing worse than being a six is pretending you’re a ten. Acknowledge that, in this situation, you’re at the feet of a more experienced voice. I owned up to my need for guidance when I asked Tess Gerritsen for advice on my unfinished novel (and you think Gerritsen doesn’t get this question a thousand times a year?). And it netted me some useful advice.
Visualize the end, not the means. David Lieberman pointed out this behavioral quirk: we break down things we love into a few steps and things we hate into a lot of steps. Going shopping can be “drive to the mall, find what I want, bring it home,” or it can be, “go to the mall, fight over parking, try on a million things, find the cheapest one, get my friend’s opinion, etc,” depending on how much you like shopping. So, as much as I hate asking for advice, I try not to focus on the asking process. Instead, I focus on the expected result. That pleasant “Eureka” sensation I’ll get when they say the one thing that clears the fog^*. Focus on the finish line instead of the process. No one runs marathons because they like waking up at 4:00 AM and waiting at a registration table.
Practice the pitch. People get nervous about asking for help because they feel like it’s an imposition. Well, they’re not wrong. It is an imposition! Time is precious. So if you’re going to impose on someone’s time, ask in a graceful way. Rehearse the approach if you can. Work on an elevator pitch for your idea so you’re not fumbling and improvising. Buy a book on business writing: they’re easy to find, and they always have sections on how to write a request for help. Which dovetails into …
Be willing to pay. I think this is cheating, because paying for help isn’t the same as asking for it. There’s probably some good sociology on how transitioning to a currency economy atrophied our race’s ability to ask for help^**. But real effort costs money. And if you get the opportunity to work with an expert and have to pay for the privilege, don’t dismiss it out of hand. Money spent on access isn’t wasted.

To that last point: I signed up for Brazen Careerist’s boot camp on building your blog, hosted by founder Penelope Trunk. The first day’s webinar was on generating great content, the key to creating a successful blog. Trunk’s most important piece of advice: “be vulnerable.” A compelling blog should be about what you’re learning, which means showing the world where you’re vulnerable. Not mopey or helpless or overly confessional, because that shit’s boring. But people like to read stories about growth, because everyone’s trying to grow^***.

Being vulnerable. Admitting to lower status. Asking for help. Well, here goes.

_________________
* Or, if they don’t have anything useful to say, the smug sense of superiority I’ll feel afterward. “Ha! They think they’re so great …”

** Not that that’s an argument for going back to barter, mind.

*** And yes, this post is an attempt to follow through on that tip, along with others she gave. Clever of you to notice. Put your hand down; you’re already getting an A.

Oct

no one lives forever, though; no one’s wise to try

Posted by Perich at 11:40 am

Sometimes my obsession with Ted Leo scares me¹.

I have either RJ or Marie to thank for introducing me to him, not sure which. Both of them made mix CDs for me within the same six month period, one with “Me and Mia” and the other with “Biomusicology.” Or maybe “Bridges, Squares” was on one of them. At some point the name Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cracked the caseyanthony barrier and I knew them as someone to look for. RJ burned me a few tracks and I buried myself in a dark cave², listening to Shake the Sheets until I had it memorized.

Last week, Meghan saw Julie Klausner record her podcast live. She tumbled about how much fun it was, and how Fred Armisen was there, and oh, Ted Leo played the opening song. Reading that, my first reaction was a a brief spasm of jealousy that a friend of mine had seen Ted Leo play more recently than I had.

I don’t feel this way about any other artist. There are plenty of writers, directors, actors, musicians, etc. whose work I love. There are a handful of artists whose work I examine obsessively for hidden meaning: Gene Wolfe, Jay-Z, and the like. But Ted Leo is the only artist at work right now who I can’t pretend to be cool about. I can’t sit in my comfy chair, glass of Scotch in one hand, and hold court on his merits. I can’t be a detached borderline hipster with pretensions to cultural criticism.

I hear his shit and I just need to rock the fuck out.

Trying to pin reasons on an obsession demeans both reason and passion. But this is a blog, so that’s my job³. So I’ve tried to untangle the reasons that I’m so unreasonably fixated on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and I’ve found four.

First, there’s the political content. TL/RX hit me at a point in my life where I was finally swinging from right-libertarian to left-libertarian to … whatever you want to call me now. I hadn’t pinned all my aspirations on Obama the way a lot of my friends had, but the fact that no one was taking him to task with the furor that Bush had been was frustrating. Along comes this punk from D.C. who, like me, can’t “deal with trying to process / pigeons acting like they’re doves.” I hear this for the first time, then the fifth, then the fifteenth, and I can’t get enough of it. Not only is it the frustration I’ve been feeling, but it’s so artfully expressed.

Which leads me to my second point, and that’s the political passion. It’s one thing to dismiss the inability of a two-party system to constrain the agglutination of power with a disillusioned wave and a bon mot. And I’ll never get tired of that. But it’s another thing to channel that sentiment into emotion. Disillusionment doesn’t mean deadening; your “good-bye to all that” doesn’t need to be a weary sigh. It can be angry. It can be joyful. It can be hopeful. It can be a lot of things, not all of them bitter. I’ve written before about the need to separate the anti-war movement from the hippies with which it’s traditionally linked, to give voice to “full-throated pacifism.” TL/RX run the gamut.

My third point: words. Lyrics and vocals matter more to me than almost any other part of a song, which probably explains why I like hip hop so much⁴. But if the musical composition is great as well, that’s a pearl without price. I’ve loved what little Elvis Costello I’ve been exposed to because of his gleeful blend of pop rock style and subversive lyrics. I loved the Hairspray musical for the same reason. Ted Leo plays in that same field. He can turn the passionate-but-doomed-but-inspiring struggle of an anorexic into a blaring rock anthem. He can get a crowd singing along to a cheery ditty about the sad tendency of radical movements to turn in on themselves. For someone who loves language as much as I do, every Ted Leo song is a feast.

And finally, the music is just really damn good.

The dispassionate critic I’ve been trying to be for thirty years is crying out for help. This is ridiculous. It’s like there’s a different person living in my head, a person with ripped jeans and a studded leather jacket and an encyclopedic knowledge of Operation Ivy. Some day Ted Leo’s going to die (everyone is) and I’m going to be bent out of shape for a week because, as far as I know, there’s no one else giving voice to the same issues with the same passion and skill in the form of awesome indie rock. I don’t know how to fix this. I’m not sure I want to.

________________
1. A value-add, for people who know us both, is to imagine this entry read in the voice of Kevin Quigley.

2. For which read “my apartment.”

3. It’s not.

4. The white suburban adolescent fascination with the authenticity of black urban poverty and anger explains the rest of it.

Oct

if you don’t, you’ll be alone and like a ghost, I’ll be gone

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I lost my class ring some time over the weekend. I wore it to work on Friday and I couldn’t find it on Sunday evening, when I was dressing up for the Yelp event at the Artists for Humanity Epicenter.^* At some point in the intervening time I took it off and set it somewhere. I’ve checked my dresser, the pockets of every pair of pants I might have worn over that period, and (now) my desk at work. Nowhere.

I’m not heartbroken. I liked the ring, but it was a very light stylistic choice: maybe two steps removed from an affectation. I’m proud of my school and the quarterbacks it produces, but not as proud as some. I just liked having one piece of not-so-flashy jewelry. An accent, not an ornament.

Anyhow, pricing out replacements has helped me come to terms with the loss pretty quick. Hang on tightly, let go lightly and all that. It’s also helped me realize how charmed of a life I lead if the most frustrating loss I’ve suffered in a recent memory is a piece of jewelry that I was fond of but not infatuated with. I treat my body about as well as a car that hits about one in every two scheduled service trips. I save money but don’t pay attention to it. I live in a safe city, surrounded by friends who give me the time and support to pursue my dreams. I’m a lucky guy.

_________________
* This is a signpost so my future self can place this event in its time, not an attempt at namedropping.

Oct

hong kong, part 5

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Part Four

What else is there to do in Hong Kong, besides eat dim sum and buy cheap merchandise? Try a foot massage! But get a recommendation first, because every block has the sign of the smiling insole poking out of one building or another. We got a recommendation from Josh and Emma (echoed by Fodors, so we marched through Central to Happy Foot Reflexology Center. $200 HKD (about $26 US) apiece got Sylvia and I 45-minute foot massages. And these people do not waste your time. They will grind, roll, buff and pummel your legs from the knees down. I appreciated it, but Sylvia, who dances when she’s not accompanying me through Asia, felt like she’d been given a new pair of feet. Highly recommended.
Speaking of typical tourist stuff: Victoria Peak is worth the hype. Find a way to get your tickets ahead of time (lots of tour buses offer packages) and plan to eat at a restaurant on the peak gallery. Take a public bus down for cheap and save yourself some time, too.
Expats drink all over the city, but the best place to find them seems to be Lan Kwai Fong (LKF). Picture New Orleans spread through a series of near-vertical alleys, only accessible by steep, cobblestone paths. Josh and Emma took us to a couple of bars in the neighborhood our last night there. I remember none of their names.
Sylvia found us two museums. The Hong Kong Museum of History had a permanent exhibit on the history of the island, taking us from its geological formation (I skipped that) through the days of its early tribes, up to British rule, Japanese occupation and the present day. The Hong Kong Museum of Art featured a lovely exhibit on calligraphy, the history of Chinese “export painters” who reproduced British sketches en masse and the art of scroll paintings. Each museum advised us that their doors were disinfected eight times per day.
Hong Kong seems prepared to funnel users into and out of the city better than anywhere I’ve been. Free shuttles loop from every hotel in Kowloon to Kowloon Station, where you can take a reasonably priced monorail across the water to Hong Kong International Airport. You can even check in for your flight at Kowloon Station. Only Walt Disney World (where you can do flight check-in from your resort hotel) beats it for convenience.
Several people asked what was my favorite part of the trip. I always have a hard time with this question. Small talk remains a mystery to me, and this question seems like such an obvious conversational gambit (e.g., “Tell me about a time you overcame a challenge”) that it shakes me out of the moment. I wonder if I’ve failed at my end of the conversation: if I’ve just been staring blankly, rather than providing entertaining patter, and the other person is prompting me.
But here’s a contender: one night, Sylvia and I took dinner in the lobby lounge of the Intercontinental Hotel. The lobby features two-story windows that sweep through a lounge the size of an auditorium, looking out over Victoria Harbor. As an effusive waiter served our cocktails – a Ruby Dragon for the lady; Laphroaig, neat, for the gentleman – the daily light show began. Lasers beamed from one end of the bay to the other while the tallest buildings in the city – the Bank of China Tower, the World Trade Center, the ICC Building – lit up from within. Ferries and party yachts glided across dark water. I sat before one of the finest views of a city I’d spent a decade longing to see, scotch in hand, and thought: I win.

Not my photo, but you get the idea.

Jul

I believe that love alone might do these things for you

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Liz Caradonna responded to my post about self-promotion for amateur performers. Her response is great; go read.

Liz’s point is that the “asshole strategy” is rarely a conscious strategy per se.

If someone can explain to me “this is our marketing strategy because ______,” and reference some insight, some rationale and preferably some demonstrated results from the strategy they chose, I will gladly excuse them from this public outing, and would give serious consideration to their argument that in certain situations you have to be an insufferable douche to get fans.

My guess is that the typical improv group on Facebook cannot actually make that argument and back it up. They are not doing this because they’ve made a serious inquiry into a variety of marketing strategies, considered the cost and ROI, and settled on spamming their friends because they concluded that this would be the most efficient or effective thing to do, instead of or in addition to any of the other possible approaches to marketing (both assholey and otherwise).

This is likely true. I have a habit of ascribing good intentions to just about everyone. But it’s plausible that most people who spam Facebook haven’t given the costs and merits the same thought Liz or I do.

I maintain that the message-blast or invite-all has merit in certain circumstances (and I think Liz ultimately agrees). Here are some examples:

A brand new group forming. No one knows you exist yet. Announcing your presence to the world is reasonable.

A sea change in an established group. If the format of your weekly show undergoes some transformation that merits a fresh look, this is worth reaching for a new audience.

A big opportunity. You’re performing in a special venue, or with a famous act. It’s such a big deal that people who wouldn’t normally be interested might have their curiosity peaked.

Liz lists some questions that a group should ask themselves before they engage in any marketing plan, message-blast or no:

1. Aside from this Facebook event, what else are you doing to market your show in order to ensure that the seats are filled with paying customers who will likely continue to come back and see more of your shows? What else have you considered doing? Why did you choose to do this?

2. So far, how has this Facebook event contributed to ensuring that the seats are filled with paying customers who will likely continue to come back and see more of your shows? How does this contribution stack up against alternative marketing strategies – or no marketing at all?

To these I’d add the following:

3. Why do you want an audience? Why should someone see your show, as opposed to watching reruns of 30 Rock? Do you have a unique viewpoint to share? Has your group undergone a recent change in theme or style that deserves attention? Are you testing out different formats and looking for feedback? Or do you just want asses in seats? (I don’t mean the “just” in that last one as dismissively as it might read)

Answering question #3 should make a difference in not only who you target (large groups vs. select performers), but in how you target them. “Hey, come see my new improv troupe” tends to get overlooked. “Hey, we’re trying this new format that got huge buzz in New York last summer” is more compelling – to a recipient who cares about improv formats. If you know why you want an audience, you’ll know which audience to target.

Liz closes with addressing my point on the dilemma between art and friendship, “the last refuge of the natural misanthrope who finds himself also doing some type of art.” I don’t know that art justifies my misanthropy – gin does most of the heavy lifting there – but I’ll concede I drew the point a little broad.

The fact is, tension between being good to others and being successful in personal pursuits is universal – whether you’re an artist, a politician, a scientist or the world’s best garbage collector. Some people are good at managing this tension; some are not.

While this is true, art is unique, or at least an edge case, in that it’s not very rewarding. There’s no money in it and the fame, if any comes, is fleeting. You have to take pleasure in art for its own sake, which is a self-centered thing to do.

I’ve discussed this before, when Overthinking Season 1 of Treme.

Why is art such a struggle? Remember, art values the aesthetic over the utilitarian. Art deliberately avoids the utilitarian – the useful, the profitable, the merchandisable. You can make money off of art, but that’s largely out of your hands. If you want to make money, there are easier ways to do it.

Devoting yourself to improving your craft as a parent, a mechanic, a copywriter or a basketball player not only yields social dividends, but it comes with an extensive support structure. People love art, but they don’t understand the process. So indulging in the process takes a little more dedication. “I have to leave early because coach has me running two-a-days” gets more sympathy than “I have to leave early to go paint a sunset.”

Working hard at becoming an artist is fundamentally different^* from working hard at any other task. The privacy required for composition, the conceit required for performance, guarantee that.

That said, Liz and I know people who prove that it’s possible to be both a dedicated performer and a great friend. I’ve even been known to pay for a round on occasion. So it can be done. But it’s not easy.

____________
^* Different, not nobler. Art is no nobler than any other craft, unless you mean the Versailles sense of “noble,” i.e. “indulgent; requiring luxury to patronize.”

Jul

wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Some day, thirty or more years from now, you’ll come visit me in my dingy home. I’ll bustle around and play host, offering you a drink or pulling down old yearbooks to show you. You’ll see me bump into coffee tables or misplaced chairs. “I worry about the Professor,” you’ll whisper to your friends. “He seems so clumsy.”

Don’t worry. That happens to me all the time.

At least once a day, on average, I will careen into a stationary object like a drunk in a Buick. I’ll bump my hips into the corner of a desk or smack a banister with the back of my hand. When vacuuming my apartment three weeks ago, I dragged a coffee table onto my bare left toe, creating a nasty scrape that just recently healed.

I am a clumsy giant. I can’t keep track of all parts of my body at once. I have as much say over what happens to my extremities as Marcus Aurelius did over the far corners of the Empire. Part of it comes from my height, doubtless, but part also comes from my tendency to focus more on my thoughts than my surroundings. I play with sentence structure and random ideas on the drafting table of my head, all while kicking over trash cans and elbowing vases.

Save this note for my future caretakers. If I’m bad in my old age, I’m no worse than I ever was.

Jun

these are the days when you wish your bed was already made

Posted by Perich at 10:08 am

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

- Arthuer Schopenhauer

Our office shares a floor and a restroom with a rent-a-desk tech center. Coming out of the men’s room the other day, I found a man with professorial wrinkles and a denim shirt smiling at me. “They locked me out,” he said, indicating the door to the tech center.

I was suspicious at first, since HR had sent out an e-mail hours earlier about a laptop being stolen from our neighbors. But this guy looked harmless. A Chicano Noam Chomsky. So I let him into our office and walked him to our front entrance so he could try the other door. He thanked me.

Our office has a glass facade and I sit near the entrance, so I could still see the professor. More importantly, I could hear him: trying the handle of the front door, pounding on the metal shutters that separated the tech center from the hallway, pacing and fretting. I hadn’t even registered the time. When you work for a start-up, 5:30 doesn’t feel late. But apparently our neighbors had locked up for the day and my new friend had left without his keys.

I have never been locked out of my apartment. Whenever I change locations – home to work, restaurant to movie theater, car to store – I pat down my pockets to make sure I have everything with me. Keys, wallet, cell phone. I have backups of every key I need secreted away in clever locations. It would take a concerted effort, with teams of ninjas and monkey pickpockets, to strand me outside my apartment.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to me at a young age that terrified me of being locked out. Sure, being trapped outside sucks. But there are worse fates. And the marginal increased risk of leaving the house without my little ritual might be worth the marginal gains to my blood pressure. Two hours locked outside of my home one night vs. another year of life.

We’re collections of habits masquerading as planners. I wonder what created the habits I follow. Why I can’t leave the house without keys, wallet and cell phone but I’ll sometimes leave credit card bills unpaid through sheer forgetfulness. Why my desktop (on my computer) needs to be tidy but my desktop (actual) is a sprawling pile.

Always knowing where my keys are doesn’t make me smarter or more careful than everyone else. It means I devote my focus and care to particular things. What I want to know is why those are the things I focus on. What set my priorities for me?

After a few minutes, a lady with frizzy hair answered the professor’s knocking. He didn’t look like a laptop thief anyway.

Apr

thirty’s the new twenty; I’m so hot still

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

For as far back as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of growing old.

At an early age, it manifested as a fear of lost time. I threw a temper tantrum when I got to an Easter Egg hunt late, because I’d never be able to catch up to the other kids. My mom found me crying on the stairs one morning after I realized I’d spent the whole morning watching cartoons – half the day gone doing nothing. I don’t know what caused it (but being lulled to sleep with Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” can’t have helped).

As I grew older, I pestered my parents with questions about what Heaven would be like. Would I be stuck somewhere? Would I have to do the same things over and over? They answered as best they could. When I gave up religion at sixteen, I was struck for a while with a terrible fear of death. My biggest concern was losing a train of thought – imagining something really interesting, or assembling some great idea, and then never coming back to it. Since then, I’ve lightened up a little. Death is equally permanent to everyone it calls on, so there’s no sense worrying about it now.

But growing old still scared me. Not just the physical and mental decay, but losing things. I recall stumbling shell-shocked out of a production of James Joyce’s The Dead at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Hawver was up, so I stopped in and flopped on his couch. I rambled about death and loss and innocence. Being a good friend, Hawver took my blathering in stride.

I was twenty at the time.

Over the last few weeks though, as the next big milestone has been staring me in the face, I’ve taken an inventory of the self. And I’ve realized I’m no longer quite as scared of growing old.

What’s changed? The love of a good woman has certainly helped; always one of my chief impetuses to grow spiritually. Having a demanding job probably contributes. I may bitch about the hours, but if I vanished overnight there’s a modest book of business that would probably fall apart (for all the good and bad that entails). More of my friends are now over thirty than under it, and they set a good example for me. My lifelong dream of writing has become less of a dream and more of a concrete goal, with steps and a timeline. And, the occasional sprained back or sinus infection notwithstanding, I’ve got my health.

I’ve got some money, but not a lot of capital tying me down. I have experience but not regret. I have opportunity, but I’m not locked into a path. And I think I’ve finally figured the haircut thing out.

Thanks for waiting up for me. See you on the dance floor.

Jan

darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The weather reports for Friday escalated from flurries to a few inches to a snow emergency in a matter of hours. I stopped by the Shaw’s in Porter Square to pick up a few things in case I got snowed in. Then I started remembering groceries that I needed, one by one, and soon ended with a full cart. I’ve been trying not only to eat healthier but to stock my pantry with a wider variety of food. Having one healthy entree in the fridge still means I’ll go for a burrito if I want variety. But having chicken, salmon and flatbread pizza to choose from keeps me eating right.

I got in line behind an old man who also had a full cart. As I watched, he unloaded at least ten gallons of Coca-Cola (several 2-liters, several four packs of 18-oz bottles), at least twenty-four vanilla pudding cups, several bags of “Orange Slices” gummi candy and a small plastic basketball hoop. The cashier rang it all up; the bag boy loaded it in paper sacks. He pulled his wallet out, lips shaking, and swiped a card through the reader.

“It says it’s not allowed,” he said.

He tried swiping the card several more times. The cashier spun the card reader around to face her. “You pushing the button for credit?” she asked. He was. While she tried manually entering that card, the old man produced another one. “It’s a Home Depot card,” he said. “So maybe it only works for the Home Depot. I don’t know.”

The cashier twisted her mouth around after punching in the card. “It doesn’t recognize the card,” she said.

The old man tried swiping the first card – a Sears credit card – three more times. Each effort involved him fishing it out of his wallet, running it through the machine, punching in answers (“Credit? Yes”) with trembling fingers, and waiting. Each effort yielded the same response.

We stood there in that civil quiet: the old man, the cashier and me.

The bagger had gone on to service other checkout lanes, leaving a grocery cart full of fructose in the front. The old man put his wallet back in his jeans and pushed the cart out of the way. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Those are all the cards I have and I don’t have my checkbook.”

“Maybe it’s -”, the cashier said. “Kara?”

The manager came over. But the old man was trying to make a quiet exit. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Sorry to make you bag all that.”

“No, it’s okay,” the manager said.

“Sorry; sorry.” He left.

One minute later, while I was fishing in my pocket for my loyalty card, he came back. “Could you set that to the side?” he asked the manager, pointing at his laden cart. “For like twenty minutes? I’m going to go call the people and see what’s up with this card. Because there should still be … I should still be under my limit on it.” Then he left again, this time for good.

I wonder what that stage of life feels like. When the world is so full of petty frustrations that you just want to gorge on things that taste sweet. When you don’t know from one day to the next if the cards in your wallet will pay for what you want. Or, even worse, the day where you know deep down that the cards won’t work, but you hold out hope that something’s happened. Some accounting error, some jinx in the electronic machine, and everything you want is yours. Maybe he was scared that if he showed up with bread and milk that he couldn’t pay for, someone would step in and try to pay for him. He wanted a bunch of snacks, but he also wanted to make clear he was an adult. Just an error with the credit card. Happens all the time. Sorry to trouble you.

“He said he was sorry we had to restock it,” the cashier was saying to the bagger. “I’m like, don’t be sorry for us.” She shook her head.

You could see the trains of thought following everyone’s eyes: the manager, the cashier, the bagger. All wondering what had brought the old man to that point. Wondering if they’d fare better at that age, when they tucked a gray plastic hearing aid behind their ear and their lips shook. Not me, though. I’m not worried about getting to that point. I’d never show up in a grocery store and try to buy a cartful of things I couldn’t afford. I’m too allergic to shame. I’d just sit quietly in my apartment, not being a bother to anyone.