Jingle Bell Time/It's A Swell Time

So in theory I feel like there's too much stuff in the world, an impression borne out by the fact that Pottery Barn is selling fake fur throw blankets for over $100, which blows my goddamn mind. And the exchange of presents is in some part responsible for this excess of stuff, because it means that people are buying things for other people that those other people do not particularly want, and also our financial constraints means that we are buying each other lots of cheapish stuff, which seems even more wasteful.

Nevertheless, I am pro-present.

Getting someone a present that they really like is the best way I know to show you care. It involves effort and attention and comprehension. Also, in some ways, being given something you really like feels like a compliment. This other person saw this cool thing out there in the world, and when they saw it, they thought of you. There's something really nice about that.

This is why gift lists and telling other people what we want is so much less fun -- it brings presents back into the world of autonomy and decisions and choices.

But I understand that the risk of the kind of present-giving I am advocating is that you will get things that you don't like, things that feel, even, a little insulting. "You thought I would like that?" Etc. We've all either been in that position, or we've seen it on tv. The thing is, though, it allows for a different kind of generosity, the kind where you assume that your loved ones are doing the best they can, and mean nothing but the best, and, operating on that assumption, you fake thrilled surprise.

Also, none of this means that I am opposed to the sheepish gift-card giving mode of exchange, although I have been known to joke about people waiting in line for mall gift certificates. Because we are out there trying to be generous to our loved ones, and make their lives better and richer and fuller, and if gift cards are the best way you can think of to do that, that's not so bad.

So that's why I think gift giving is a good thing for being part of a human community. But also I just like shopping for things for people. I like seeing what's out there; I like trying to match gifts up with people. It's like a puzzle. There is that bad moment after you've bought everything when you think the gifts you're giving are crummy, but then you get to rely on the generosity of spirit of your family, and that's pretty nice too.

It's an imperfect world, and there's something great about those moments when we try to compensate the ones we love for that, when we try to snatch out of the darkness a fifteen dollar alarm clock where a hunter shoots a deer, hoping that maybe that will make it all better.

More Things I Miss About Being Young, But Not Really

I was probably seventeen, and it was Friday night, and we were going to go out to dinner at one of the really good places, which meant that it probably cost like $8 a person, but everybody had other complicated plans that had to be pursued first and it was in the pre-cellphone era so nobody could get in touch with each other and everybody got all pissed off with everybody else, for slowing things down, or for being impatient, or something, so then we weren't going to go, and in that simmering stew of tension I decided that I hated everybody and everything and I went storming off and took the last BART of the night to Fremont, which was the end of the line, and I had this idea that I would go walking moodily along the streets of Fremont and never trust anybody again, but then I wound up calling my friends from Denny's and we talked it all over on the phone, and we made up and our friendship was better and stronger for it but I was still stuck in Fremont until 5 a.m. and I read the East Bay Express at the station and learned that this Brazilian martial art called capoeira was all the rage.

So this is kind of related to this post, and particularly to Noko Marie's comment on it. Because I remember those years, from my late teens to maybe twenty three or so, as the glory years of fighting.

You get older, and you only fight with people that really are your near ones and dear ones. And mostly you try not to fight with them. I mean, that's not really true, but nowadays I mostly think of fighting as something to avoid. I know how much of a jerk I'm capable of being, past experience has taught me that in retrospect I will think I was at least somewhat in the wrong in a situation, and, last but not least, you realize you're not going to change anything by going off to Fremont for the night.

But I kind of miss that mood. You get upset, part of the reason you're upset is things other people are doing, and so you really need to explain to them how they are upsetting you. And you do, and they explain to you what you've done to exacerbate the situation, and you see that as deeply unfair and totally harshly critical. And then you repeat it. Hopefully, you both draw in allies.

I think I miss it because it seems, in retrospect, both so light-hearted and serious. Serious because, while the direct causes we fought about were mostly mind-boggling stupid (an epic and drawn out feud over the loss of some rubber duckies being the best example thereof) we were fighting about real things, about how much you can expect from other people, about where the boundaries are. Light-hearted, really, only in retrospect, but light-hearted because you have to have an inordinate trust in the world around you to think that you can scream and yell and storm out and expect to be able to go out to dinner the next night.

I don't know. There are a couple of pretty good friends from that period that I actually wound up losing in fights. It changed the mood of it all. But it's hard to say. Other people that I fought with just as bitterly are still my friends. Some people that I never dreamed of fighting with aren't.

I don't actually miss the fights. I do miss the idealism, though, the belief that the air could be cleared and everything transformed if we just talked at each other long enough. Also, I still feel like I would be cooler now if I had jumped on the capoeira bandwagon back then.

It's A Tribute To Dear Abby, As Well As A Tribute To Somebody Else

Confidential to N.M. in Western NY:

Happy Birthday! You're a hero!

Pretty Girls And Rudeness

I don't have anything all that interesting to say about this column (the second letter) by Carolyn Hax, but I'm going to say it anyway.

It's a self-described "friendly guy" who "routinely strike[s] up conversations with random strangers" but "get[s] the rudest responses" from "'attractive'" women. He "find[s] it more humorous than anything else -- as well as an excellent 'don't date me' filter," but nevertheless is writing in to an advice columnist about it. You may have been able to detect, from my use of phrases such as "self-described" and the over-use of quotation marks, that I am not crazy about this guy.

I am not crazy about this guy. I suspect he has a wrong idea of rudeness. I cannot currently find the relevant Miss Manners column, but anybody's obligation to respond to the overtures of strangers is pretty limited. As long as you don't yell or pop the stranger one, you're allowed to respond with a small tense smile, a nod, and an immediate turning away. I can't prove that the letter writer would class that as a rude response, but I have a hunch. Women's intuition, probably.

But let's ignore my gut telling me that this guy is the sort of proto-sexist who tries to enforce a standard of womanly niceness on all of those who fall within the range of people he would fuck. Instead, let's think about the claim that he routinely talks to random strangers.

I don't believe it. I think he talks to strangers that he finds attractive. Not just women he might want to sleep with, but people who are, on some level, appealing to him. Now part of the reason I think he doesn't want to admit that is because it weakens his rhetorical position. If he is talking to people not randomly, but because he finds them appealing, "'attractive'" women maybe should be able to get away with talking to him only if they, in turn, find him attractive.

So there's that. But I think there's more than that preventing him from saying he talks to people un-randomly, but on the basis of some personal choice.

Because I've seen that kind of thing go the other way, too. A year ago I was back up visiting Berkeley and I went to lunch at the place I always go to lunch and somebody had written in the women's bathroom something about how you should talk to strangers because you never know what you might learn. And there was definitely a class of girls up there who loved things like that, who would tell you at great length about the awesome conversation they had with a homeless guy who wrote poetry, or what have you. And it all came flooding back to me reading the graffiti on the wall.

Those girls, I think, really were talking to people randomly. They didn't, I think, really care all that much about whoever's awesome poetry.

And that bothers me too in a lurking kind of way. Best I can put my finger on it is that I generally try to talk to people that seem like people I might like. And in admitting that, I am forced to face the fact that people that I think I might like might not feel the same way about me. I am forced into the embarrassment of admitting that I am talking to someone not because I'm just a friendly person who likes to talk to all sorts of people and not because I'm open-minded, but because I actually think I would enjoy talking to this particular person. And that's why I would want people to talk to me.

We're on a sliding scale here. I'm not asking the people on an unmoving bus or my coworkers to talk to me only to the extent that they think we could become best friends forever. Also, I've been told there's some virtue, some learning opportunities, in talking to people that don't appeal to you right up-front.

But I do think it's weird and maybe bad to go around acting as if you're only talking to people at random, as if there's no actual hope of human connection behind your conversation.

It's Lunch At Lutece Or Nothing, Baby

I don't usually read the sports news. But the great thing about reading The Times online is that you see things you might not see in the print edition.

Right on today's online front page there's a featured story illustrated by a photo of an older, very buff woman. I'm like, "What's up with that"? So I click.

The headline is

At 51, Establishing a New Body of Work

And the story is about Eva Birath, a Swedish woman who got laid off from a good job and decided to change her life. She rediscovered her love of painting. And she became a competitive body-builder.

I'm a sucker for stories like this, probably because of my ongoing fear of growing older. I love knowing that at pretty much any point in time, you can just up and change what you're doing, do something else, start a new series of life projects.

Eva sounds really happy.

In this the story bears a close resemblance to another recent Times feature, "Life Changes, With a Latte to Go." Here, a guy with a good job gets laid off, gets a brain tumor, starts working for Starbucks for the health insurance, downsizes his life, and lives happily ever after.

In both cases, The Times emphasizes the money aspect: isn't it amazing that a person can go from making lots of money to making a little money and actually be happier? I don't blame them for taking this angle: it's probably what Times readers are thinking. I think it too.

But both stories also contained a strange, sad detail: The bodybuilder and Mr. Latte say that when they changed their lives, they changed their circle of friends.

Mr. Latte just says he stopped hanging around with the same people, and now spends a lot of time listening to classical music. The bodybuilder says, "You know how you have those circle of people who are your friends? Suddenly, I wasn't invited to those parties anymore. I think they thought I was strange, but I don't care."

I know people hang out with people they have things in common with and all, but still, it seems sad. It's consistent, though, with recent findings that people are closer with family now and less close with friends. A 2006 study at Duke showed "Americans' circle of confidants has decreased dramatically in the past two decades." I guess a circle of friends is now more like to be a circle of co-workers or co-squash players or something. Once you don't lunch at the same place, you can't really be friends any more.

While you're raising a toast to Ms. Birath and Mr. Gill, don't forget to raise a glass to The Times, for dismantling its paywall. No more Times Select! Archives for everyone! Hooray!

Why Should You Feel Bad?

I was in fifth or sixth grade and I had this girl over to my house. She was blonde with a perm and her parents were Christian and ran a bookstore.

I didn't really have any friends in elementary school; kids generally accept invitations even if they don't like you. I think it's a curiosity thing. I don't know for sure.

So I asked her why I didn't have any friends -- what I was doing wrong. We're running around my backyard; it's been a pretty good time, actually. She says, "I don't know. You seem all right to me."

It's a while later, months, long enough for me to forget the initial question, when she comes up to me with a group of friends. The girl has done research. She tells me exactly why each and every member of our class doesn't like me.

What's surprising is that they all had reasons. I would list them, but they still make me cringe.

The worst part is I had no idea that those things would make people dislike me. None of the things she reeled off for me had crossed my mind as bad things to do.

Mostly, I guess, it's funny in retrospect. They walked away; I stood there cringing in the corner of the playground, my mind spinning. Imagine the end of the Usual Suspects: flashes of anecdotes coming back to me charged with new force and meaning.

I don't raise this just to invite pity for the young Cap'n, although pity is always welcome. I raise it because of the tension it illuminates in my own thinking about embarrassment.

My view, generally, is that you make choices about how to behave, what's acceptable and not as far as you're concerned, and then you refuse to be embarrassed by those choices. Or, at least, the ability to make your choices unfazed, which I pretty much lack, seems like a good thing to have. A kind of Cool Hand Luke quality: this is what I'm going to do for my own reasons and the rest of you can shove it.

But my fifth grade self didn't know that choices were being made, was acting not out of defiance but out of ignorance, and somehow that seems the essence of embarrassment

One example. It was the era of leggings and bike shorts, and I had worn a pair (lime green, Benneton), and you could apparently see a panty line.

I hadn't even heard of the concept.

It's a minefield out there.

Consistencies Or One Size Fits All?

N. Marie's recent post about fashion reminded me of that one-time staple of the fashion magazine.

Some male (sometimes female) fashion designer (or artist or architect) being interviewed would turn out to wear the same thing every day. Not the identical thing -- his closet would be full of custom-made white shirts bought from one tailor who works only on an island off the coast of somewhere that I had never been and would never go. Same deal with pants -- Levis, some kind of bespoke shit. You get the idea.

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read these articles very earnestly. They told me how adult life should be lived.

I would read them and then I would look at my closet, full of remnants from one phase or another. A slightly dirty sheer floral print skirt would be on the floor and, in despair, I would throw myself on my bed, consumed by longing for a better world in which I wore the same thing every day.

I'd imagine for myself one thing to wear every day. It would expand outward (what about bathing suits? sometimes I might want to wear a skirt) and then I'd be thinking of the things I already owned that I really liked a lot and it would all, once again, fall apart.

You get older, and generally more tolerant of yourself. I don't feel that bad anymore about my lack of fashion consistency.

You also do, sort of, get mysteriously more consistent. You like the way you look in certain things, you buy more things that look kind of that way, people start saying things like "Those shoes are very you."

"You" in that sentence is actually "me."

You lose, to some extent, your belief in dramatic wardrobe change as an agent for change in the rest of your life and you feel sad about that. I want to believe there's a better haircut out there for me.

It doesn't all go away, though. One of the things I liked about the one-outfit designers is that it felt like they were saying, "This is me. This is how I look in a coal mine and this is how I look at a nightclub. This is all there is."

Because I am sometimes struck (like everyone else in the known world) by the fact that not only do you talk about different things to different people, but you act differently too. This frightens me; it feels like deception.

I have become tolerant of my style inconsistencies. They are all unified by me; I am the unifying force in them. But my inconsistencies of persona still worry me in the same way my style inconsistencies once did. I do not want to give up my option of gossiping and giggling hysterically, although it does not really go with my tendency to speak seriously about the right way to live or my (abstract) belief in discretion.

But I would like to have one manner. Preferably one crafted by a tailor you can only find off the coast of an island that nobody else knows about. Classic, but with individual flair.

Shopping

A.k.a. another post where I discuss stereotypically female behavior. Only I like shopping.

I enjoy going into a store and trying on lots and lots of different clothes, despite what I said here.

I don't enjoy shopping for things I need. I don't enjoy shopping by myself as much as shopping with somebody else. I don't enjoy shopping in an environment where there are fifty different versions of the same thing. I don't enjoy shopping when I am broke (you need the possibility of buying) and I don't enjoy shopping when money is not an issue (hard choices add to the intensity of the experience).

The rules continue: Your companion has to be capable of enthusiasm for ridiculous items of clothing (taffeta skirts, plaid shorts) but also of pointing out real ugliness. Both parties have to have equal luck finding things -- it is depressing to get worked up over an article of clothing when the person you are shopping with hates everything. Or vice versa. You need a wide vista of time. Time to reconsider, to try things on over and over again and stare at your own reflection as though you've never seen yourself before.

I went shopping on Monday. All the necessary ingredients were there, including a $300 coat by a designer I'd never heard of that looked better on me than anything ever had before or ever will again.

I could not buy the coat for reasons ranging from the Southern California weather to the coat itself, which was unlined and had no zipper.

It didn't matter. The possibilities were enough. The coat was untouched. It had no associations with my actual life, only with a world where everything would be sleeker, cleaner and better.

So I bought a skirt and left.

If I didn't like shopping, like I don't like cleaning, I'd wonder why my own physical appearance in a revised and improved format seemed to offer me the hope of a better world.

Dear X: U R My Favrite Riter.

Some novels make you feel like you absolutely must become friends with the novelist. You start to daydream: I know, I'll write a letter. The letter will be so charming and funny, so insightful and interesting, the novelist will write back. We still strike up a correspondence, and eventually meet. We'll finally have a chance to discuss the really important things in life.

I get this feeling powerfully about some living writers. I never get it about dead ones, which suggests I have absorbed the non-existence of an after-life pretty deeply. Generally, I only have the feeling while I'm in the middle of reading a novel. Let me be clear: I've never actually written a letter to a novelist at all.

The impulse strikes me as benign, even good, except for one thing: if you want to be friends with someone these days, and you don't know them, what's the first thing you do? You google them. Before you know it, you're inundated with information: biographical information, interpretive information, critical studies, information about things the author said in interviews, and, of course, contact information.

Some of this may be stuff you just didn't want to know. But, you know, you can't go back.

The novelist who first gave me a powerful feeling in this direction is Philip Roth. Roth's first-person, highly emotional, ranting narrative style gives me an inescapable feeling that I am getting Roth himself, right there on the page. When I encounter some familiar feeling or thought on the page, as I frequently do, I think, "Oh! Yes! I know what you mean! I'm like that too! Let me tell you all about it."

I had the feeling recently with Alicia Erian, whose book Towelhead has lingered in my mind. I was overwhelmed by the feeling reading Julie Doucet (not exactly novels but close enough; see previous post here). And my recent literary infatuation with Michel Houellebecq has this quality, too.

I had a stranger reaction recently to Bret Easton Ellis: reading Lunar Park last summer, I felt not that I wanted to know him but rather that I already did. Very strange. I can't explain.

The feeling doesn't correlate with my liking for a book, necessarily: there are books by Don DeLillo that I love, but I've never had the impulse to invite the author to cocktails. And I know, rationally, that the self on the pages is not the self of the author. Obviously. This knowledge, though, doesn't make the feeling go away.

Through Herculean self-control, I've managed to google each of these folks only once or twice, ever, and to have read very little of what I've found there. So nothing bad has happened.

"What bad things could happen?" you ask. I've always thought that there was danger in too much curiosity about a novel-writer. Once you get thinking about the author and his life, it's almost impossible not to think about the events in the book as they relate to events in the author's life. And then it becomes impossible to really experience the novel in its proper form: as its own little made-up novel-world.

This mix of the biographical and the fictional detracts from the power of the fictional, by creating false explanations, and making the artwork into a kind of commentary. In the worst case, the biography and the fiction fuse in one's mind, and the fiction can no longer exist there.

So there's reason not to know.

In a purely practical sense, the internet has made such ignorance harder to maintain, since the knowledge is all right there.

In a more complicated sense, the internet has made not-getting-in-touch more difficult, too, and thus more artificial. Everyone has an email address; everyone is reachable; even famous people who live in other countries are often just a click away. This means writing that fantasy letter is not a matter of finding paper and pen, and looking up an obscure address. Instead it may be ten seconds of typing.

So the choice not to know, and the choice not to write, they have to be real choices. You can't rely on laziness and inertia to save you. Not anymore.

Men Are From, Um . . . Where Exactly?

I was the kind of little girl who basically regarded little boys as aliens from another planet. I felt basically the same way about boys I did about dogs: there you'd be, trying to play some civilized game or have a conversation, and these creatures would be jumping around, making noise, scaring the bejeezus out of you for nothing.

Eventually I grew up. And I remember in college, and for a long time after, it was almost the opposite: all my friends were guys. Not because I spent all my time with people I was having sex with, or had had sex with, or wanted to have sex with, but just because I liked guys better. I even felt more at home with them.

At that time, it seemed to me that guys were funny while girls were humorless; guys were lighthearted while girls were brooding; guys were interested in talking about stuff while girls were just interested in talking about each other.

More time passed, and now I am a little older. And I realized recently with surprise that even though my close friends are about evenly divided, the people I am just, you know, friends with, are mostly women. I even have a bit of that old childhood feeling with men: what part of the universe did these people drop in from?

At first, I thought: how weird that I have changed. And then thinking it over, it started to dawn to me that I hadn't changed, that what had changed wasn't me, or men, but just the way people interact as they get older.

When you're 20-something, and maybe for a while after, men and women share a lot of the same interests: music, movies, books, a sort of "what am I going to do with my life" feeling. And there's a harmlessness, too, to cross-gender friendship and casual flirting at that age. The desire to seem attractive to the opposite sex makes people interact. And there's no gender-baggage either: you're just, you know, feeling your way.

But in middle-age, these things seem to change. The harmlessness feeling goes away. If an attached woman goes out for drinks or dinner with a male colleague, it's assumed that something fishy is going on. If she goes out with a female colleague, no one cares.

Since a lot of people this age are parents, they're not as interested in discussing movies, music, books, and so on. And when it comes to other topics, I relate to women much more easily. I'm not into sports; I don't want to argue about politics. I do want to talk about the details of our lives, and about clothes, and I want to gossip about the people we know in common. It doesn't get much more girly than that.

Interestingly, the women I know have gotten more funny and lighthearted as they've grown older, while the men have gotten more serious. I don't know why, but I have a partial theory: women start out wary and become resigned, whereas men start out optimistic and become sad as things fail to work out.

Finally, it seems the experience of life just becomes so gendered as life goes on that it becomes harder and harder to understand the feelings of the other sex. I feel like men spend a lot of time thinking about women in a way they can't share with me, and women spend a lot of time thinking about men in a way they can't share with men.

So while I like men as much as I ever did, they've gone back to being kind of a mystery to me. It makes me sad. I miss them.

K.I.T.

If I have met you and you have made an impression on me, and you possess a relatively distinctive name and some internet presence (who doesn't, these days?) I have probably looked you up on Google. Not once, several times.

This is something the people I know and like do as a matter of course. Last night a friend said something about what if Google started telling people who had searched for them and then we both said something about how we would be screwed, unable to hold up our heads for the embarrassment of it all.

(There is a historical precedent for this. Friendster, the pioneering social networking site, switched, without notification, to allowing people to see who had viewed their profile. I spent the first fifteen minutes after I found out trying to remember who the hell I had looked at recently. Then, of course, I dove for the computer to see who had looked me up.)

This is probably something that everyone does; it's why social networking sites exist, after all.

So why am I so embarrassed by it?

(When I looked to see who had been viewing my profile on Friendster I found, strangely enough, that I assumed of other people what I knew to be (mostly) true about myself -- that they were bored and mildly curious to see what I had been up to. This surprised me; I had expected to assume that they were totally obsessed with me.)

I do take it to extremes. A friend once hinted that he might have a blog and armed with no more than what I knew about him, which was not that much, and that fact, I went hunting for that blog. Four hours later I found it.

Also, a little embarrassing is that a lot of the time, having found someone, I make contact. I couldn't exactly tell you why.

But even when I just do a quick two-minute Google search, no varying the terms, no pages viewed past two or three, no contact to be made, still I feel odd about it. Odd to be carrying around this desire to know exactly what happened to that guy in college that I never liked because he thought he was cooler than anyone. Also odd given the people I am in touch with, the people I like and fail -- why spend time on people I didn't know that well even when I knew them?