Going Keyless

Now the story can be told.

So anybody who knows me, which is everybody reading this, knows that in periods of mild distress, the first thing to go is my keys. Which is why there was a period in early 2006 when I had a crush on my locksmith.

Friday night I was walking home from work, when I got honked at by some co-workers, and spent a couple hours shooting the shit, being fed, drinking a beer or two. Then I got dropped off at home. The person dropping me off asked if I had my keys. I cheerily said I did. But, in fact, I did not.

Here we come to the part that, for me, seems inextricably linked to living in a smaller town, but probably isn't. In L.A., when I locked myself out the locksmith was my only friend. Here, I had left the window open, which meant that with some surprisingly deft manipulation of the screen, I was in like Flynn.

It was the weekend, and I had left my keys in my office, which is locked on the weekend. I have the key, in theory, but, at that moment, obviously not in the particular.

And so I spent the weekend without my keys, and went in on Monday leaving my apartment unlocked (it can only be locked from the outside, although I can lock it if I'm in it) and then on Monday I forgot, again, to bring my keys home with me.

It was, I'll admit, kind of annoying and mildly nerve-wracking. But it was disorienting to realize that it wasn't that big a deal. Nothing in my life was that different without my keys, especially given that I do shit like leave my ground floor window open.

There is no real point to this anecdote, but it felt like a parable of some kind.

A Bar-Raiser From Way Back

Me. I'm a bar-raiser from way back. That is, I raise the bar.

When I first started graduate school, it was basically to get health insurance and reasonable work. When I switched to studying philosophy at age 30, I thought, well, whatever; I'd rather have a loser job and a degree in philosophy than a loser job and no degree in philosophy. At that time, I was about 15 pounds heavier than I am now -- quite plump -- and I never exercised. I smoked.

I remember the first time I went to a professional conference on my department's dime. The conference was in the Hilton, or the Hyatt, or something; I hadn't stayed in a place like that ever in my life. "Oh My God," I thought. This is the life. I might even get to do this again!

Sure, well, now I go to our professional conferences three times a year: we have one in the West, one in the East, and one in the middle. I go to all of them. I have a research fund. And I'm all, "What do you mean I gotta pay extra to work out? What? There's no hot tub?!"

I don't have a loser job; in fact I'm a philosophy professor. I live in a fun big city. I've lost some weight; I exercise; I don't smoke. I never dreamed things could turn out so well.

So. Do I spend my days in goggle-eyed amazement and happiness? No.

What I do is compare myself to people who are way ahead of me -- teach at better places, have written more stuff, have other accomplishments like children or speaking five languages -- and I say to myself, "Why am I so behind?"

Poor me! Waah! Time is running out and I'm so behind, boo-hoo!

It's completely ridiculous. But I can't help it: I'm raising the bar. If I've got a good job, I want a better one. If I look pretty good, I want to look great. If I travel to France every year, I want to go to Italy.

It's moronic. All I can say in my own defense is that almost everyone else is just as bad, as far as I can tell.

So there.

Some Thoughts While Watching Basketball

It's something really hot here in Bakersfield, CA and I've got the air-conditioning going, and the Hornets are four points down to the Spurs, and it's all a little strange. A minute ago the Hornets were on a perfect cinematic run against the always semi-villainous Spurs and I was getting really into it, but now it's turned back into a normal basketball game.

I haven't blogged in a while; I haven't done Sudoku and I'm feeling a little adrift, because I have a deadly habit of identifying myself by my activities. I am someone who puts numbers in little boxes or I am somebody who roots for the Lakers in an active and semi-knowledgeable way or whatever. But you get into stuff and you get out of it and all you're really left with is the knowledge that Dell Curry was that player with the little white patch of hair.

One of those new WNBA commercials just came on, in which the various WNBA players mouth the most commonly held opinions about the WNBA, with footage that contradicts the words. E.g. "girls don't play defense" and then you watch the player in question knock somebody down.

Chris Paul just made a buzzer beater, we think. I don't know. There's so much about the world that I don't have a clue about, and it bothers me that it just keeps moving and changing and there are even more things that I won't know, like just how good Chris Paul is.

There Ain't A Decent Yodel In The Bunch

I thought about throwing the towel in on the blog altogether, between the Secretary's merciless dissection of my structure and another regular commentator's cruel verbal imitation of my word tics. But instead, I will rise above it. I will overlook it. And when I get my hands on the secret treasure, certain parties should watch their goddamn backs, is all I'm saying.

So I miss being young, sometimes. Having undergone a super-stereotypical version of the college years for my age and background, I miss it. Not really, you understand. It's actually more fun being my age now and leading my life now. More interesting, more rich and fulfilling, all that stuff.

What I miss is not really knowing that much about the world or myself or anything. What I miss is moving in a pack with a bunch of people that you maybe don't actually like that much, but that you think you might like, given the chance to just have one real, serious, intimate conversation. What I miss is not knowing the odds.

These days, I have friends that I actually like, that I know, that know me. We don't move in a pack. We make plans to do things that we think will be fun. If the plans don't sound fun we change them. Sometimes we make plans because we need to catch up.

In the spring of my sophomore year I shared a room and a phone line with two people. The way I remember Friday nights, which is probably not at all accurate, is a kind of round-robin of phoning, of call-waiting, of running out the battery on the cordless until some kind of consensus was reached. I was so young that I could actually be affronted when one of my roommates went to a party and didn't invite me. That seemed like such a goddamn slight.

A couple times this summer I spent time with people I went to college with. We talked about it, about how you could just go sit on the Sproul steps or the Dwinelle benches and wait for the world to pass you by and then you could attach yourself to some semi-random group and see what happened next. What happened next wasn't really all that fun, but you never knew.

I would say this is just another symptom of me getting old, but I think I pretty much felt nostalgic at the time.

Did I already post exactly this earlier?

I Am A Klutz

Last night I was walking idly around my apartment chatting on the phone and I looked down and noticed that my toe was bleeding. Kind of a lot.

I have no idea how that happened.

It did not startle me, particularly, because I am not a graceful person and am used to banging into things. When I was a child I would come back from every excursion dirtier than the children around me. Today there are relatively few occasions for getting covered in dirt, but I pick up stray bruises. I bump my head on things. I bang my elbow against walls. I trip, a little bit, walking down the street.

I am self-conscious about it. The ability to move smoothly through space seems like a desirable human attribute.
On the other hand, if it really mattered to me I could probably fix it. Be one of those people who takes up fencing or ballet late in life. Only some of my clumsiness is innate. Enough to keep me out of contention in competitive sporting events, but probably not enough to make me fall on my face.

The rest is lack of attention. I don't think about those things. I think about things that I'm good at, like smoking or sleeping. And lost in that haze, I knock over my coffee cup, and curse.


In some ways I wish it weren't fixable, that I could say, "well, I'm left-handed," or "I lacked proper training as a child." There seems something strange about deciding that I admire gracefulness in other people, think it a good thing in the abstract, but refuse, in the particular, to take the steps needed for me to obtain it.

Another Burst Of Nostalgia From Captain Colossal

To this day, when, in a fit of panic or bonhomie or sheer sentimentality, I am trying to convince someone that I am cooler than I seem, I mention my semester abroad in Berlin.

I was pretty broke in Berlin. I'm not exactly sure why; I was well-funded by my family and I paid maybe 220 DM (a now defunct currency) a month for my one bedroom apartment. That comes out to somewhere a little above $100, is my recollection. The apartment had unfinished wood floorboards, a plug-in shower, coal ovens for heating. The guy I was subletting from left me some coal, also a space heater because I worried I would asphyxiate myself with the coal. A friend christened it the Commie Hut.

I don't know how to describe Berlin, or the Berlin I lived in. In many ways, it's more like Los Angeles than any other city I know, or it was then. I lived in Friedrichshain (10 Samariter Str.). Around me were those tiled buildings put up during the communist years; they were always dropping their tiles. Everything was either very new or a little seedy in an inoffensive way. The streets around my house were full of dog shit; there was more dogshit per square foot than anywhere else I've ever seen. In my recollection there weren't that many people on the street; I don't think that's correct.

I locked myself out of my apartment once. In the end, after being plied by my bathrobe clad next-door neighbor with liquor and cigarettes (Gitanes) and coffee I made my way in by climbing over the wall separating our shared balcony and kicking in the french door that led to my bedroom. Before that, the guy working at the restaurant downstairs told me he didn't know how to get in touch with the landlord, but (after some discussion in a language I didn't know) told me I could move in with the guy at the end of the bar.

I slept on a filthy futon on the floor. I had one bowl, one plate, one fork, etc. Cigarettes were cheap in those days. I didn't have a drug habit. And yet I was always broke.

Because the thing was, I longed and longed for bourgeois comfort. Not instead of, just in addition to. I was going to school at the Humboldt. It was also in former East Berlin, but in Mitte. Mitte, I think, was refurbished in an antique private train-car kind of way. One of my classes was near this place called Hackescher Hof. Hackescher Hof served fresh-squeezed orange juice with its continental breakfast.

One of the things I could never adjust to in Germany, even in Berlin, was the generalized discomfort. I had never realized until then the extent to which my country prized comfort. If a capitalist good can be made more comfortable, more pleasant, the United States will spare no effort to make it so. I didn't know how admirable this was until I got to Germany. There was very little fresh-squeezed orange juice in Germany.

I spent my money on orange juice and opera tickets and the complete works of Heinrich Heine. I bought a fake gilt mirror for the Commie Hut. I didn't take any pictures. I took the longest tram ride imaginable out to the planetarium to see Jackie Brown undubbed. I went down to a gentrified district I can no longer remember the name of and got tuna rolls to go and walked along the banks of the Spree Canal and imagined what it would be like to have an enormous apartment with a balcony. I was obsessed with milch-kaffee and marzipan rolls coated with chocolate.

I don't know. It all seems like a pretty standard response to ego-depletion, in retrospect.

I was wandering around Hollywood this morning, thinking about ego depletion, eating a breakfast burrito, letting my neighbor, of whom I am fond, take my picture for a t-shirt he's making for his Landmark Forum course, and somehow it made all that come back to me.

Dear Whoever

I'm obsessed with advice columnists.

It's a little strange that I'm obsessed with advice columnists because I hate advice. I never give advice. Nor do I take advice. In fact, advice makes me angry. If you give me advice, particularly good advice, I will call to mind all the (even debatably) stupid things you have ever done, and I will say nasty things about you behind your back. I may do this if I even think that you are diagnosing and solving my problems silently to yourself.

Nevertheless, I regularly read Miss Manners, who is a genius, but makes me feel bad about my failings, Carolyn Hax, who falls in the "basically right-minded but a little traditional category," Dan Savage, who falls into the Miss Manners category as far as I'm concerned, Slate's Dear Prudence, who drives me absolutely insane (the linked column suggests that a couple might want to reconsider their decision not to have children), and Slate's old Dear Prudence, Margo Howard, who's Ann Landers's daughter and pretty good, although too prone, like many advice columnists to suggest therapy. While many letter-writers should contemplate therapy, I think the advice columnist has an obligation to offer some substance beyond "go get advice from somebody else." I also read Sars on Tomato Nation, who's great, but can strike me as smug (that seems to be an occupational hazard, and in this case probably has more to do with my own anxieties than her actual tone) and Cary Tennis on Salon, who suffers (apparently uniquely in the annals of advice-giving) from what may be the opposite problem.

Also one summer a couple of years ago I went through the entire back archives of Breakup Girl.

This list, frankly, is both incomplete and embarrassing.

Why do I read advice columns? It's not to figure out what I should do in a particular situation. I don't take advice. There's just something about the range of human situations that people write in with, mostly. It's nice to know that we're all out there swinging, in our strange and elaborate ways, for the fences. Also I like to find out how well my instincts match up with the advice-giver -- do I think the way other people think?

Sadly, though, I think underlying my compulsion is my hope that these people will find solutions, that a switch can be flipped and the lunatic sister will fall into line, the racist uncle will not spoil the wedding, and the money-grubbing party thrower will be sternly rebuked.

And clinging to that hope, I now return to my program of trying to fall asleep and scratching morbidly at my poison oak pustules.

Has Britney Spears Lost It?

That's what MSN was asking me this morning as I signed out of my hotmail account.

I think I've already mentioned that it would give me great great joy to see Britney
Spears turn it around.

Not that I want to see Britney Spears buy a lovely Los Feliz estate and marry some non-trashy guy and put the excesses of her youth behind her while not eating white flour. Screw that.

Also, I'm not, like, in love with Britney, although "Toxic" is one of the all-time great pop songs.

I just happen to have gotten tired of this division of our celebrities (and by extension ourselves) into the saved and the damned. And, just like in Calvinism, the one sure way to distinguish the saved from the damned is to see how it ends. Angelina Jolie might have seemed like a troubled youth, but now she's got a family and a beautiful husband, and all that goddamn modern architecture, so we know she was always all right. She was fundamentally sound.

Not that I have anything against Angelina Jolie.

Look. Some of my favorite books fall into a category I think of as chick-lit-but-for-real. I am talking about Heartburn by Nora Ephron, who has made vast sums of money off of movies that invariably end happily. Or Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. Also, The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy.

Now, since Heartburn came out in 1983, and Fear of Flying in 1973, and The Company She Keeps in 1942 (this much I have garnered off the internet), and since I don't have any other examples ready to mind, I have just created a (historically speaking) pseudo-category of book. Also The Company She Keeps is much much better than the other two books, and would do just fine in a more heavyweight literary category. But I think about these books together because they manage to remain light, remain bearable, while depicting a world in which being adult means both betraying and being betrayed, behaving badly and behaving very well, and surviving it all.

A middle ground, you might say, between the Mill on the Floss (where every misdeed is paid for in blood and Pride and Prejudice (where all is forgiven, and wasn't that bad to begin with). Things happen, people behave badly, people behave well, people are funny and adult about it and people are heartbroken and childish about it, and then other things happen.

Other cultural artifacts that give me that feeling: the movie Manhattan, the books of Richard Russo, the essays of Gore Vidal. But I can't help feeling that there's not enough of it going around, not enough light-hearted realism, not enough grace seen in real behavior, to counteract the tidal wave of self-help telling us that perfection is obtainable, and that falling short of it can only mean disaster and the grave.

Britney Spears has obviously fallen short of perfection. I think we can agree on that. And her public behavior at the moment seems designed to give the impression that disaster and the grave await her. So, you know, I'd like to see her turn it around. Not apologize, not dress better. Just not give way to melodrama. Keep going, in whatever teetery fashion. Turn it down a notch. Raise her kids, eat her Cheetos, whatever.