friendship

the real deal

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If she were a less intoxicating person, it would be easy to envy her. To envy the effortless and easy flirtation that she uses to bend virtually everyone to her will. She is open, gregarious, social, saying everything and anything that comes to her mind, still coming across as hilarious, charming, self-deprecating and beautiful, and she gets her way. But no one ever feels manipulated or put upon, as she flashes a giant smile and peals of her infectious laughter float behind her as she walks away from her every encounter.

It’s in this way that she gets the inside track and makes connections that pay off in one way or another.

I have realized, though I have always suspected, that this “charm offensive” brand can also be a handicap. She can never truly read another person; she can never really get to know them. Me: No one is trying to snow me, get me into bed, impress me or flirt with me. It’s all very business-like and serious. It might not be fun, but I quickly get the real read on the people I meet, talk to and work with. When she comes to me and rhapsodizes about how helpful, nice, smart, funny, “moral” or great someone is, I take it with a grain of salt and have often already got the goods on how they really are. As a team, she and I are unstoppable because I can suss out exactly who we are dealing with and their strengths, weaknesses and what they have to offer, and she can go in for the kill – either with sweetness and light or with her brilliant “I don’t realize I am being bulldozed by this smiling woman, but I am and can’t help it” tactics.

In just minutes, I have seen how weak in the knees some go, melting around her, softening like butter, becoming overly tactile octopi when they had been distant, prim characters only moments earlier. She has that effect on them. But as honest a reaction as they display to her, they certainly do not show her their true colors, real selves or what their intellect offers (or doesn’t). They are always putting on a show for her and rolling out their best. And I get the unvarnished truth.

know thyself

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Selecting poems to share as National Poetry Month starts to wind down, I also came across a note from a phantom from the past – someone who was startlingly insensitive in the ‘heyday’ of our acquaintance but occasionally comes up with something both sweet and thought-provoking now.

On relationships/sharing space and time with someone: “I think it’s more about understanding the necessity of being able to share and sustain the vital moment-to-moment microbial details with someone, which has nothing to do with the legendary impacts of romantic impressions that soon become questionable – perhaps not finding this in someone is where your ‘incapable’ lies presently. After all, your details are lovely – slow, patient and kind – whether you recognise it or not. One of those sayings that has given me access to a different perspective has been floating over me lately, ‘Above all else, know thyself’.”

And who will guide us back to friendship with and knowing of ourselves? …

 

Impossible Friendships
By Adam Zagajewski

For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.

Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden

porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.

A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).

The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.

Faces flashing by
in local trains—

the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.

And friendship with yourself
—since after all you don’t know who you are.

じゃまた

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Many random thoughts today. Where, indeed, are the transparent palaces we were meant to build?

Friends (-Adam Zagajewski)

My friends wait for me,
ironic, smiling sadly.

Where are the transparent palaces
we meant to build—

their lips say,
their aging lips.

Don’t worry, friends,
those splendid kites

still soar in the autumn air,
still take us

to the place where harvests begin,
to bright days—

the place where scarred eyes
open.

Signals

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“A signal is what you use in your car, dude. Not a way of communicating with someone who clearly needs direct answers.”

I only get through things and process them by writing and thinking. It does not work to talk about things, not only because I don’t know how to say or explain things without introspection and processing first but also because I am so bloody concerned about how things will affect other people. Like… if I say things that are not fully formed, I’m putting burdens onto someone else – and of course, in a two-way exchange, you can intuit and know when that the other person can’t handle or deal with whatever you might say, or will take it all on board and cloud things up for them, or make them feel worse or guilty. And why do that when you could suffer with the uncertainty or hurt on your own without making two (or more) people feel bad? It sounds like I am being some kind of martyr (I’m not), but I just can’t do it. It is not my nature to expose a larger group of people to harm or damage if I can take the hit myself (even when that means internalizing something). I have to work on this. Anyone who knows me knows this.

By the time anyone gets the full lowdown on something I experienced or felt, it’s because it is in the past – over, done, processed and packaged neatly into a box and tied with a bow. Then after the fact and all the acts, curtain closed, I can reveal all the feelings I went through – but it is like I have to finish going through it before I can show it… which is not the healthiest way to go about it. I write, think, feel my way through things, and then revise, think and finally come to a peace with even the most painful of things. Then perhaps I put the ‘incident report’ in some form or another into blog posts, but by the time I do this, the deep-seated and immediate emotion is long gone. There was a time when I would not even have made this much public, so I like to think I am making the most imperceptible steps forward. Sometimes the disconnect between the brain and the fingers is enough to make these moves for you. For example, deleting something that you wanted to save, hitting send before you were ready. Are these really mistakes or is the immediacy of the fingers taking action where our brain fears to go?

This is perhaps also where my own blind spots/insensitivities are. I process and publish, and because it’s all over for me, and I am just ‘clearing out cobwebs’ and more or less just telling a story after the fact, I don’t think about how the retelling and my own rendering (which is a compendium of my feelings and interpretations throughout my processing – not an objective recollection of fact) of ‘how things went’ might be hurtful to anyone else. Another thing to work on.

But at least all of these ‘operations’ provide an indication of where close partnerships, friendships, relationships and the like are actually impossible. Where you find you really censor yourself, close up and hold back – not because you can’t share but because you don’t want to unduly influence or trouble the other person – where’s the parity – or clarity – there?

It’s a little bit fucked up – when you’re adults, intelligent and seemingly capable of communication – and even talk ad nauseam about the importance of communication (thus ending up being all form and no content, which is a good way to fool yourselves into thinking you are actually communicating…) – you should be able to say what is on your mind. But it becomes one of the hardest things to do. You then detach to get to solid ground again, and that journey takes you through the full range of feeling – or elements*, as DH Lawrence would have it. But you eventually make it back to the start, to rediscover the things that made your mind race with joy and thought.

It’s a shame, too, as you end up at such a distance from, in a protracted silence with, someone who is without doubt beautiful, amazing, hilarious, messy, quirky, witty, and smart – exactly as you always believed, someone you genuinely care about and truly miss. But having communicated – or not – in staccato fits and starts, never quite saying what was going on, never quite being truly open – you may never get back to a place where you see anything but yellow caution lights in a sea of faceless stop-and-go traffic.

Most importantly, and this is my signal: I am still, and always, here, and I still love. Unconditionally. If I didn’t, it would not have been such a trial in the first place. Of course.

Elemental*
-D.H. Lawrence
Why don’t people leave off being lovable
Or thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be lovable,
And be a bit elemental instead?

Since man is made up of the elements
Fire, and rain, and air, and live loam
And none of these is lovable
But elemental,
Man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.

I wish men would get back their balance among the elements
And be a bit more fiery, as incapable of telling lies
As fire is.
I wish they’d be true to their own variation, as water is,
Which goes through all the stages of steam and stream and ice
Without losing its head.

I am sick of lovable people,
Somehow they are a lie.

Photo (c) 2006 Rachel Knickmeyer used under Creative Commons license without modification.

On the trail

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I am still marveling at what a week of extended, ever-longer days of light and constant sun (even with cold temperatures) can do for you. I knew that February was bad while in it, but I had not realized how acutely.

I’m in the middle of reading about seven books at once now, which is what happens to me when I start reading again.

I found a note I’d made to myself in 2009 or early 2010 when I first met my one of my dearest friends. It is so typical of the kind of conversation/misunderstanding that transpires between us and makes us laugh:

“Yesterday I tried to tell A. about Bill Bryson and his Appalachian Trail book. Somehow she had him mixed up in her head with… Stephen Hawking. I said something about hiking the trail, and she was confused, “He cannot even walk; how can he hike a trail?”

How I love that woman.

Extremely Disappointed: Tout de Suite

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Why is it that we place outsized expectations on things that only feel like they portend something amazing – but forgo the things we know will be amazing? You know, bundled up in hope, we impetuously run off to faraway cities, skipping seeing our beloved, warm and supportive friends there, for the remote promise of something else? Are we addicted to the almost inevitable disappointment?

As a near and dear darling said, the disappointment of whatever we tried to do is only the first layer of disappointment – the even bigger layer comes later – the disappointment in ourselves because we “Should Have Known Better By Now”. Oh, she is so, so right (right down to the all-important capitalization). We DO know better, but as she goes on to ponder: what is life, though, without hope? And I say, “Yes, you never know.” That’s why we keep beating our heads against a wall, repeating likely failures (insanity): we never know. We know better, but we never know at the same time. A fleeting chance exists that hope will lead us to something transcendent or real, even if ephemeral.

We do it, against better judgment, because we need to feel alive. As she said, to shake things up, to shake herself up. Maybe just going on a vacation would accomplish this, but sometimes we need a deeper shake. What, more than disappointment, makes us feel more alive (even if it briefly makes us wallow in wishing we weren’t)? We are almost certain before we even embark on these ‘adventures’ that they will yield visceral, howling disappointment accompanied by a self-walloping chastisement. But the hope! It might not disappoint at all. It might turn us around, lift us up, restore our faith!

Or not…

On Hope – Sándor Petőfi
Man, what is hope? …a horrifying whore
Who doles to everyone the same embrace.
You waste on her your most precious possession:
Your youth, and then she leaves without a trace!

Revisiting Divorce

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I cannot believe that I am writing about a show like Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce – again. I would have, when it began, sooner shot myself than watch it. And watching the first season, it was as bad as I feared. It was one of my big hate-watch shows. But in the subsequent seasons, it has sometimes knocked the wind out of its characters – shown them and their glitzy lives as being far from perfect, shown some struggles and shown the consequences of the girlfriends’ frequent poor decision making. It’s still totally unrealistic and the characters are a bunch of self-absorbed assholes. But there are tiny glimpses of realism now and then that humanize the nonsense and fluff.

And occasionally it hits some nerves. In the final episode of the latest season, messy, selfish protagonist Abby is newly entangled in an affair with a guy who is in the midst of a very fresh (as in, he has not even moved out of the house or started divorce proceedings) divorce. She tries to overlook all the warning signs, her constant string of hurts and wounds, his tendency to shut down and completely avoid her, because their connection, as she herself says, “It’s great, it’s rare, and that’s why we should stop now.” She had been through a divorce that dragged on painfully (as breaking up, particularly in a long and messily intertwined relationship, does) over the course of the first two seasons. The guy, Mike, tries to insist that he is solid and ready, but Abby knows from experience that he is wrong. She argues that everyone told her that you can write off the first full year after a divorce because you are and will be “certifiable”; she tells Mike she ‘ruined’ a man because she was so raw and not ready. Maybe the timing is wrong, they tell each other, so maybe the door is not shut forever, but for now, she has firmly closed it.

At the very end, I was relieved and uplifted, actually, by the fact that instead of chasing the man or relationship or changing her mind about closing the door, Abby has her ‘epiphany’ and runs to her former colleague and friend to enlist her help in launching a website for women their age. Not that love – or whatever – is not important – but it’s no more important than deciding you’re not taking any more shit, not going to answer to anyone else, and will not get tired of waiting while you’re being jerked around.

Contact melt: Habits and confidence

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“I’m sad, sad… and I see you”

Yesterday it was bright, sunny and warm and the snow and ice that had covered everything completely melted. It promptly refroze around the time I was driving home in the evening. Once more I encountered the salt truck along the road, flinging salt pellets onto the glistening road surface and onto the car.

Otherwise it was a day of unexpected contact – hearing from people I don’t normally speak much with or write to. Some got in touch to comment on this blog; some got in touch to ask for a confidence boost; one even got in touch to subject himself to inspection (as though he were a race horse for purchase or I were a flight surgeon assessing his fitness for flight).

I was surprised about hearing from people regarding my blogging. Not because I think no one reads it but because I have no idea who is reading it. When you write a blog, you are mostly doing it for yourself. At least I am. If you are like me, it’s kind of an extension of your interactions with dead platforms like LiveJournal. Except that a standalone blog is not really part of a community and, being a disconnected ‘thing’ as it is, I am not hoping for or writing for an audience. Nevertheless I have had so much feedback from people about whom I had no inkling that they were “following along”.

A few weeks ago a friend recognized the slightest reference to her and wrote to me at length to explain and help me understand her better. A few days ago a friend commented, something about how much she related to what I had written. Yesterday, two friends (a longtime pen pal and an acquaintance from the LiveJournal days) wrote encouraging words about how they were helped by or even inspired by what they were reading. Well, one guy said it made him a bit jealous because I made it look easy but he knows from experience that it isn’t. I responded with something about just starting to do it – forcing yourself to do it. Ultimately it is about forming a habit. I have made this be a habit for me – arguing with myself about how I need to write something every single day, even if there is not something to write about – to keep the habit going. There are days that it won’t happen, but approaching with sincere intent is the point. I did not write a word after the mid-November death of my uncle. It was almost six weeks before I wrote again (sure, there was too much going on in the silent interim; also though, I felt tired and the loss depleted my ability to share). But even those long lulls/breaks have to be temporary – and I think we all know that this same thinking applies to anything that can be hard to stick to – writing, exercise, healthy eating, or any other promises we make to ourselves.

About forming habits, though, I come to another conversation I had yesterday. Someone I have known for more than half my life called me to get a boost of confidence before he went on a date. It’s been a long time since he dated, and he had all kinds of nerves and anxiety buzzing around in his head. His turning to me in his personal crises is a habit he formed as far back as 1990. Once we had covered his dating anxiety and how bad he is with small talk, he asked me something about my personal life and predicted that if I don’t have a relationship with someone who is obsessed with TV, it will end. Yes, scientific data. I argued that maybe there are other things to do than watch TV; he countered: “But what about when you are old? Like 60, 70, and like most older couples you will just want to sit and turn on the TV.” Perplexed, I said, “Well, maybe a couple could… take a walk? Or read?” He was incredulous, “Do you really think you will read when you are 60?!”

WHAAAAAAAAAAT? Do people just stop reading, suddenly, when they hit a certain age? Why wouldn’t I read? Yet once again it’s about habits formed. Most people in my life are stubborn, lifelong readers. My grandmother was obsessed with reading until she lost her sight completely (by then she was well into her 80s) and even then others read for her. Not a single person I know (other than people who never formed reading habits) will ever sacrifice reading. I’ve always been a binge reader, inhaling a book every day for several weeks and then dropping reading for months, or in the case of recent times – even years. This year I am trying to be more methodical and balanced, folding the habit into my daily life consistently. (Especially because I did cut out my obsessive TV viewing and am only watching a couple of shows that are actually interesting to me now. I don’t miss the meaningless noise.)

As for habits, good and bad, another contact got in touch to get my opinion on whether I thought he could handle a social engagement that would be, at best, challenging. The guy is fairly freshly sober but for the first time in all his attempts at sobriety seems to take it seriously, understanding it as a life-or-death matter. A group of his old friends contacted him asking him to meet up at a pub. He has lamented for years that he has lost touch with this group of friends. He felt 100% sure he could handle this – the pub environment, the being surrounded by friends drinking excessively, the potential, “Come on, mate, one beer won’t hurt” pressures – and that he could control the situation/set boundaries, i.e. take a limited amount of money, visualize drinking Diet Coke, plan to attend an AA meeting that evening (meaning he would only stay with these friends for about an hour) and inform his contact at the meeting that he planned to attend, and then come home immediately after the meeting to call me on Skype so I could hear and see him (the aforementioned “inspection”) to prove that he had not succumbed to drinking. I expressed my doubts and reservations; he decided to go anyway. I felt particular doubt because he claimed he did not want these friends to know his business so did not want to tell them that he is an alcoholic.

In the end, he did meet the friends, and telling them about his struggles turned out to be a moot point. He had forgotten that he had run into one of the group over a year ago and had told that friend about his troubles with alcohol, and that friend had told the rest of the group, so there were no surprises, and they were all supportive. He stuck to the game plan and “presented himself for inspection” that evening after his meeting. Sober. Not that I think he should be “tempting fate” in this way, but he was rather elated that he did not feel any temptation and could interact with friends without feeling he had to drink.

In letting go of old, bad habits and adopting new, positive ones, we also build confidence – which in turn strengthens our resolve to deepen and stick with the new habits.

Thoughts on Une si longue lettre: Tout ou rien

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How long have I had this novella, Une si longue lettre, on my shelf, picking at it, reading a page or two and setting it down again and again? It’s difficult to carve out the time and concentration space to focus on reading books in languages that are not my own. I have until this year packed my life with so much (meaningless) work and ‘stuff’ that I have rarely read books faithfully in my own language, let alone in other languages, except when required.

I have demanded of myself, though, that things change this year. If not dramatically, at least incrementally – and intellectually. It is not that demanding or time consuming to read a book that is just 130 pages long, in French or otherwise. In a relatively brief and personal story, Mariama Ba provides a glimpse at feminism and equality through the lens of being both an African and a Muslim woman. Many evaluations of this book will describe it as something akin to “Africa’s first feminist novel”, a “portrait of the struggle between modernity and tradition” (the story concerns polygamy and its effects on women and society as a whole).

And the bits that spoke to me most loudly:

The book, written as a long letter, takes place after the protagonist’s husband dies, and she is forced to mourn alongside his second wife. She writes to her friend, who has done what she did not have the strength to do – the friend leaves her husband when he takes a second wife. On the endurance of friendship: “L’amitié a des grandeurs inconnues de l’amour. Elle se fortifier dans les difficultés, alors que les contraintes massacrent l’amour. Elle résiste au temps qui lasse et désunit les couples. Elle a des élévations inconnues de l’amour.”

After the narrator/protagonist’s husband dies and her former suitor returns and offers to marry her, she considers seriously and declines, asking instead for his friendship. He responds, “Tout ou rien. Adieu.”

Mundane tasks as it gets late

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I didn’t think my post from yesterday about the podcast on mismatched libidos over the course of a marriage would be particularly pointed or any more relevant than normal, but then had a whole conversation with a friend who claims to be avoiding sex as much as possible. To a nearly pathological degree. Sleep is so much more important now. She may just be extending our long-running jokes on the sex lives of married people (she’s a married person; I’m not), but it’s hard to say.

She claimed, “We are old!” to explain her lack of interest, and I said, no, it’s being tired and having small children that created this situation. I am ever-so-slightly older than she is, but I don’t have kids. I am not struggling with the urge to hide from sex. It’s like with everything else – if you have obligations and schedules and are in any way confined to a certain pattern, the ability to slip easily into some … mutually aroused space is hampered, if not impossible. These things shift and change with time and the phases of a relationship. But what do I know? I am only guessing.

On an entirely different note, I finally – after literally three months of half-hearted looking around – located the correct outdoor lightbulbs for my outdoor lights. Yeah, seriously – lightbulbs. That’s what it’s all come down to. For a while I could get away with not replacing the one that was burned out, but this week the second one gave up the ghost, so it was time to ramp up the hunt (eventually had to order the pesky things online, as I do with everything). Mundane.

As I read more, I also look for more complementary music for reading. Tonight, back to reading about Congo while memories and dreams of Prague sail through my head alongside the sounds of Smetana.