A n n a r c h y

On Thursday, my son finished up his junior year of high school, and today his dad, little sister and I drove him 75 miles to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he’ll spend the next 6 weeks immersed in Art. He’ll spend much of that time muddying his clothes in the ceramics studio, with his hands elbow-deep in clay that turns magical in his two hands — hands that have turned sinewy and strong from all his time at the potter’s wheel.

He hugged me and patted my back with those hands when we left to drive back home. He’s gone to summer camps before. But this was the first time that he didn’t push me toward the exit with impatience, counting the seconds before I would stop embarrassing him, or smothering him, or fretting too much, or whatever it is that I do that usually drives him absolutely crazy. “Thanks, Mom,” he said instead.

We were standing in his dorm room, the place that will be his home for the next six weeks. I don’t think he was talking about the twin-sized bed I had just made up for him, with the freshly purchased extra-long sheets and the fleece blanket from his bed at home. He seemed to be talking about something else entirely, and it was that other thing that caused a sudden lump to rise in my throat. [Read more →]

As I sometimes reveal here, there is something universal about the awkwardness of family.

About a week ago, two childhood friends launched a site to document as much. The results — in the vein of LOLCats and Stuff White People Like — are hilarious:

The Choker: “This is what happens when your male role model is both a priest and a gym teacher.”

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My Two Dads: “You may use your calculator for this equation.”
(Favorite comment: “I am very confused by this. Is the guy in the front right like a neighborhood computer guy who helps them out sometimes?”)

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I’ve been thinking about Things That Scare Me for a while, and when I wrote it, it turned out much longer than a blog post. So here’s an excerpt, including photos of the video shoot in Steve Garfield’s dining room cum video studio.

A few weeks ago, I had to film a video greeting that would be shown to 14,000 people who had registered for an online conference my company was holding. It was a short video – no more than a minute or so. All I had to do was smile warmly and welcome folks for dropping by – sort of like a digital version of a Wal-Mart greeter. It sounds easy enough – fun, even – but for some reason the prospect of the filming completely unnerved me.

Maybe I was worried about the number of potential eyeballs gawking at my every move. Or maybe I worried about stumbling over my script, like saying shit instead of sit. (And the more I worried about that one, the more convinced I became that it was going to happen.) Whatever the case, certainly that Tuesday when I entered my friend Steve’s house in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, and Steve pointed his camera at me and told me to start talking, I worried about all of that at once. I felt excruciatingly self-conscious, awkward, and scared.

I was what grownups in the 1970s called a “nervous” child. I worried constantly. I was afraid of lots of things – snakes, the dark, monsters, our house catching on fire, deep water, loud noises, being kidnapped, the school bus, Russia, talking to adults, answering the telephone. I was thin-skinned; it was easy to bruise my feelings. Everything embarrassed me.

Typically, this came out at night. During the day, I played outside with the other neighborhood kids and – other than taking pains to avoid a few key triggers – generally got along okay. But at night I’d lie in my twin bed watching the shadows on the wall, and imagine all sorts of horrors that would twist my insides into a coat hanger.

“Mom!” I’d yell, as suddenly another thought occurred to me. “When was the last earthquake?”

From her recliner in the den she’d yell, “Go to sleep!” [Read more →]

Since I make my living attempting to make my words paint a picture—or at least a good doodle—I don’t usually subscribe to the hooey about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Not everybody feels this way, of course. Napoleon said, “A good sketch is better than a long speech.” And, truth be told, I find myself sometimes agreeing with Napoleon, even though I do think it depends largely on who is doing the sketch and on who is speaking. For example, I have no idea whether Martin Luther King Jr. could draw. But, still, I imagine that a sketched version of “I Have a Dream” delivered to the crowd in Washington via overhead projector would have been something of a train wreck. You see my point.

On the other hand, this photo of me, above, actually illustrates Napoleon’s philosophy nicely. I could give you the background here: Setting the stage by telling you that I’m in Santa Barbara, California, at an alley called Zodos, competing in a company tournament with 30 or so of my coworkers.

I could describe the slickness of the lanes, and the tiny fear I had in my gut each time I went up to roll the ball down the lane that I would slip on the wax and land hard on my tailbone—as hard as my throws landed on the lane itself. I could explain that this was my first time with the big balls—since I’m a New England girl, I’m used to little balls. (I’m talking about bowling, people, bowling!) I could tell you that no one wanted me on their team.

And I could also tell you that, if you are looking for some durable hardwood flooring, ask the folks at your local bowling alley what kind of wood they use on the lanes. Because every single one of my throws landed like an H bomb on a New Mexico test site, and you’d expect a pretty big crater and perhaps a mushroom cloud from the rubble. But not once did the flooring crack or give way, which I thought was pretty impressive.

Anyway, I could tell you all that… or I could just let the photo speak for itself. If it could, it might say something like, “Holy shit! What is she doing? Is she having a seizure? Is she releasing a homing pigeon? This is bowling, lady, not slow-pitch softball! Geez, she really wasn’t kidding about that bit about being stunningly unathletic, more Eeyore than Seabiscuit. She really deserves to be the one standing on the sidelines, last-picked for the team. She really should be afraid of the ball—any ball—because I’m pretty sure that the lane management are terrified of it, at this point.”

Of course, that’s less than a hundred words, let alone a thousand. But still.

Photo credit: Sharon Edwards

The flight from Boston to Los Angeles takes six hours, during which there is a kind of caricature of intimacy that develops, at least in Coach.

You might not even know the name of the guy sitting at your elbow, but still: You know his choice of reading material; what he drinks with his meal; the way his face, erased of its wakeful composure, slackens when he nods off after lunch. Every once in a while, your thighs touch, or you get a whiff of his cologne, and it’s all at once completely normal and yet weird: Here we are, two people randomly seated together. We begin the journey as strangers and then, hours later, we part knowing more details about each other than many of our casual acquaintances—even if we haven’t exchanged a single word. We’re not friends, exactly, but we’re something.

Six hours is a long time to maintain a conversation with a stranger. That is, if you are the type who attempts that sort of thing. I’ve been thinking about this lately, because in the flights I’ve taken this winter and spring, I’ve noticed that the world doesn’t come down to, as some psychologists will tell you, Introverts and Extroverts—or Montagues and Capulets, or Sharks and Jets, or Shirts and Skins, or tomayto and tomahto, or whatever.

Instead, the world comes down to exactly two types of people: Those who chit-chat on airplanes, and those who don’t. [Read more →]

1. Three weeks ago, William tagged me in a “25 Random Things About Me” chain letter. I’ve hung around with William a few times, but reading his list feels a lot like a peek at his diary: Here are his hopes, fears, and his profession of love for Twizzlers.
2. I’m tagged again by Tim (”I’m a writer… but poetry is what I love to write the most”), then Kris (”I love Bailey, my Jack Russell cocker who puts her paws over her face when I scold her”), and red-headed Stephanie (”I am addicted to television.” And, comically, “This is not my natural hair color.”)
3. I’m sensing that this thing is bigger than I might have thought. I do some research and discover the concept: Generate a list of 25 “things, facts, habits or goals” about yourself in the notes section of your Facebook profile and publish it there. Then, tap 25 of your friends by asking them to do the same. “If I tagged you,” the instructions explain, “it’s because I want to know more about you.”
4. I debate whether to play along. I like reading the truths, dreams and candy habits of my friends. But I’m a little unsettled about participating. It’s the term “chain letter” than unnerves me.
5. In the sixth grade, I got a rare letter addressed to me. It was hand-written on blue-lined paper in a sloppy pencil scrawl, and there were 10 names printed in block letters at the bottom of the page. The letter implored me to mail a dollar to the top name on the list, then to remove that name, copy the letter over again and mail it to 10 other friends. In a week, the letter said, I’d get a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars! Math has never been my strong suit, so how $1 mushroomed to $100 was beyond me. But still, I thought it was a brilliant way to support oneself, copying letters at home in front of the TV. Later, my mother described the letter as “illegal,” and she made me throw it in the trash. She wasn’t swayed by the last line, either: “Do not break this chain or you will be sorry!” I was left with a feeling of unease that persisted for weeks: If I complied, I was a crook. But if I didn’t, I was doomed in a different way. [Read more →]