I Like Babies

I don't have any children of my own, but I have always liked babies.

I'll tell you why. Babies have the same emotional moodiness we have, but where we cover up our moods with stupid rationalizations and hit-or-miss guesses about what's "really" bothering us, babies are honest. They just have moods.

A lot of times when grown-ups are unhappy, they're just unhappy; it's not like there's some big thing wrong that a cookie and a nap won't make better. But part of being grown up means having "reasons" for feeling bad. You can't just say, "Wah!" You have to say, "It's not fair!" And then you have to explain.

Not that there aren't things that are unfair. There are, and they're worth getting upset about. But often, people just feel bad, in an elementary way, for no reason at all. And it would be nice if, like babies, we could just say, "Wah! I feel bad." And instead of recommending that anyone who feels bad for no reason had better consult a psychiatrist and get a prescription for Prozac, we could just, you know, put them in a bouncy swing, or tuck them in for a nap with some Zweibacks.

It's weird, but most of the time when I hear and see babies crying, it doesn't really bother me. I mean as long as it's normal crying. Sometimes babies cry in that desperate way that is completely freaky and panic-inducing, and that really is upsetting.

But as long as it's normal crying, my basic reaction to crying babies isn't "Ugh, that baby is crying!" but rather, "Hi baby. Unhappy? Believe me, I know how you feel. Welcome to human life."

Toddlers, not so much. Because you know what toddlers are saying. "It's not fair!"

It's the basic transition from baby to person. It's got some good aspects, but I'm not sure this is one of them.

When Things Go Right

It's easy to feel like things always go wrong, or often go wrong, or go wrong a good amount of the time.

I figure it's partly because of that special bias we have for noticing certain things. When things go right, well, that's normal life. When things go wrong, it's like, "#@%%*! My life sucks!"

So I just wanted to pause and record something that went right today.

On my way home I got caught in the craziest more torrential rainstorm I think I've ever seen. True madness. I had to walk 1.5 blocks and it was like I'd been dipped in a swimming pool head to toe.

My main fear was for my laptop. I mean, if I were really dipped in a pool, the laptop wouldn't be doing so good.

I had only recently stopped a kind of minimal laptop-protection system, involving a snap-on plastic case and a flimsy backpack, in favor of a sturdier laptop-protection system, involving a lovely Tucano slim case inside a flimsy backpack.

When I got home, the moment of truth:

The computer was completely dry!

Score one huge point for the forces of order, planning, and good luck in the universe. It's not all chaos all the time.

And since the Tucano case did such an awesome job, here's a photo. You can buy it at the Apple Store here, should you want to share my good fortune.

Like the rest of us, it's cuter in person, but you get the idea.

I Am Not The Stuff Of Which Buddhists Are Made

Once, a very long time ago, I lived in a very small town on the border of Colorado and New Mexico and I was the reporter for the finest weekly paper in town.

This was my schedule:

Monday I would wake up at 5 a.m. Sometimes 4. I would drive over the mountain pass into New Mexico. Usually the sun wasn't up yet and I would smoke cigarettes out the window of my car and listen to Roxette or Willie Nelson and worry about the day ahead and whether or not I was going to hit a small animal. Sometimes I would brush the snow off my car first.

Then a period of hubbub and fast and frantic typing and people grouching at each other and the paper would be all ready to go and printed out and I would drive home. Smoking, again, out the window of my car. Usually I would stop at Taco Bell.

When I got home I would sit on the floor and watch old episodes of Northern Exposure which would bleed into Magnum P.I.


Tuesdays I would go to the County Commission meetings in the morning and the City Council meetings in the evening. There would always be a break in the City Council meeting where we would go outside on the balcony and smoke and shoot the shit. In between I would read police reports and talk to people and try to find things to take photographs of.

Wednesday and Thursday were all trying to talk to people, trying to find things to write about, fielding complaints and making sure the obituaries had come in.

Thursday night and Friday morning I'd write up my stories. Four or five, usually. Friday afternoon my editor would send me a sketch of how the front page should look and details on the ads for the rest of the paper and Friday night or Saturday morning I'd put the layout together.


Usually I screwed it up, which is why I had to get there so early on Monday morning.

Sunday was my day off. I had developed this fixation on the Sunday New York Times, a hobby that would wax and wane over the years. Unfortunately, the New York Times couldn't be purchased anywhere nearer than an hour and a half away. So my mother bought me a subscription, which still ranks up there with any present I've ever gotten.

But since I was probably the only person in town with such a subscription, delivery was erratic. It would come one week, and you would think that the problem had been solved, and then it wouldn't come for the next two weeks and it would take endless phone calls from both me and my mother to get it to show up on the third week.

On the weeks where the New York Times came, no matter how bad and bleak things were looking, I felt better. The New York Times was something to cling to in a dark and menacing world.

The names change. Sometimes I really want coffee from a particular place, sometimes I want this one kind of potato chip and no other. It makes me feel safe, to be invested in a brand name, a certain product, it makes me feel autonomous and in control, a person of discrimination and taste.

And when that product is not available, there can't be a substitute. If the New York Times is the magical object, what goddamn good is the Denver Post going to be to me? Even if I really like the comics?

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.

Cleaning

Right now, I'm not working.

When I worked, when I was working very hard, I had this dream of a non-working life. Not a completely ridiculous dream: a dream of croissants and tea for breakfast and regular reading of the New York Times and a brisk swim in the pool. Also a clean apartment. I pretty much knew I was making it up, even at the time.

My non-working life is in fact a lot like my working life, but more leisurely. My house remains approximately as clean as it was when I worked. Maybe a little less clean, because there's not the same urgency. If I don't clean today, I can always clean tomorrow.

That's not very clean. I am tidy, but not particularly clean.

I wasn't thinking about it very much, when I came across this comment on this blog, which, by the way, I totally recommend. Especially in conjunction with the Big Mango bloggers.

Context: the bloggers, who appear to have stopped blogging, but who had the tagline "We're not here to lose the weight, we're here to gain your hearts," had put up an ad on Craigslist asking if the guys there would date a "fat girl."

The comment reads as follows:

I've dated fat girls but there are some issues.. they are too overweight or out of shape to make love with and that them being fatis not the issue but it's a reflection of themselves (unable to takecare of themselves, etc.) One of the ones I've gone out with had amessy apt, never cleaned the coffee maker... that kind of thing (I rarely see it with thin girls)

Let's leave the weight issue to one side. Which is hard to do, because the weight issue is pretty compelling. Let's think about cleaning the coffee maker instead.

It didn't surprise me, particularly. We know from tv, both shows and ads, that women are cleaners by nature, always trying to tame their unruly (and impish and charming) menfolk, who have no sense of cleaning, and can't even be brought to see that cleaning is important.

And even I, who am not very clean, have lived that dream. In college I shared a room with a girl and a guy. (It was a big room.) The phone (this was in the pre-cellphone era) sat on the guy's desk. One morning, sitting there, talking to somebody, I glanced over the desk and found a) a large hairball and b) a cup full of mold. Later that day I suggested that maybe the hairball and the cup of mold should go. He was with me on the cup of mold; the hairball, he said, he had wanted to keep because it was pretty.

Is it a bad stereotype? Cleaning, on balance, isn't a bad thing -- it can make life more comfortable and cozy-feeling. There are certain pleasures to it. I'm not anti-cleaning, despite my disinclination to do it myself.

Only a woman totally lacking in self-respect would fail to clean the coffee maker, the commenter seems to suggest.

That strikes me as a bad thing.

I once emailed a friend about trying to shove my duvet into the post-laundry duvet cover. I have a duvet cover because top sheets are the work of the devil. It is easier to make a bed without top sheets and you are less likely to wind up in a cocoon of sheeting with a duvet. So when my friend wrote back, saying, in essence how cute and girlish I was for having a duvet cover, I was surprised. I felt, I guess, as though because I was a girl all the things I did for my personal comfort were shoved into a box of cute girlish fussiness. I was both taken aback and flattered; I felt like a real girl.

The idea of women as a repository of physical comfort, as charged with bringing cuteness and cleanliness into the communal life, that strikes me as a bad thing.

I generally don't clean my coffee maker, by the way.

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.

Vices

So I'm trying to quit smoking, right. And I'm trying to quit smoking because my lungs finally were showing signs of unhappiness and damage and I couldn't make it up a goddamn hill.

It was all very sad.

It's sad because I love smoking. I love everything about smoking, from the smell to the social disapproval. I love the five minute breaks that take you outside the normal flood of life. I may love that most of all. I love the feeling of doing something self-destructive in a small, self-contained way. Cigarette packaging is a work of art; playing with your lighter is always fun; smoking is great. My life was miserable before I started smoking at 17 -- you can't convince me that's only because being younger than 17 is miserable, although it is.

It's also sad because I hate giving up bad habits. I hate it when other people explain their victories over vice to me; I hate when people describe the internal struggles of giving something up. People who try to give up bad habits and fail sadden me; people who try to give up bad habits and succeed irritate me. We have a model of the "healthy life"; I hate watching people try to achieve it, whether they make it or not.

I hate even more trying to do it.

(For better writing about smoking and giving it up I refer you to Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo. And thanks to n. marie, for initially directing me there.)