Fun Is, Meaning Equals, Good
11 July, 2008
The other day we had a kid here in the studio with us: Abby, 9-year-old niece of my sister-in-law. In addition to being bright, friendly and astonishingly energetic, Abby reminded me of something I’m embarrassed to admit I’d forgotten.
She was drawing with Penny, exploring all the paints and supplies at the art table. She eventually decided to draw a Pokemon character. Abby did a great job with the outline, and even got most of the details drawn in nicely, but paused when she came to the eyes.
“I’m not good at drawing eyes,” she said flatly, and I winced. I didn’t say it out loud, because I know enough to know that my Gems of Old Man Wisdom are not what kids are dying to hear, but I thought loudly in my head: “What?! You’re nine! You’re way too young to declare yourself “bad” at anything!”
Penny did a better job handling it, of course, and showed Abby the tips and techniques for getting the eyes looking right. Abby was attentive and patient, of course, and ended up satisfied with her art. Meanwhile I went back to my work, thinking how glad I am to have figured out that not every moment is a teachable one.
But maybe it was. I started to learn a little something, as I made a mental note to prevent my kid, when I have one, from selling him- or herself short. I’ll insist that we say instead, “I’m not very good at that yet.”
Always add the “yet.” That way, you leave room for improvement. Nine years old is just way too young to shrug and dismiss something as “Ehh… not really my bag. Maybe I should take up something easier.”
I’d read that this is why so many kids give up art, you know? Think about it: we all drew as kids, but only a few of us still do. At some point — and Abby’s right about at the most common age — we hang it up, heading off to pursue other interests like sports or video games or trying to get your saliva to dangle almost to the ground, but not quite.
The article I read said that it’s an unfortunate stage in the process: as kids we start drawing because we like to see the lines form, and then keep it up because we’re fascinated that we can now represent things, real or imaginary. We experiment with colors and mediums, maybe venture into a little lipstick-on-drywall muraling. It’s fun.
And then, one day, we stop. The article said it happens when we progress enough to judge our own work, and evaluate it against the objects we were trying to represent. “It doesn’t look right,” kids usually say. “It’s just not right.”
Now, even though our art is far better than it was when we started — when we loved to create it — it’s not good enough. It doesn’t look like the real thing. Sometimes at this stage we notice that other kids (like Penny) can draw a convincing bird, or truck, or mountain, and we get discouraged.
We decide that those kids are good at art, and we’re not. Our artistic career is over before it started.
And this is normal. We can’t all be artists when we grow up, right? And after all, as long as you find some other interest — some other thing you are “good at,” by your own estimation — you’re okay. But why should we give up on art? Even if you can’t make a living at it (maybe even especially if you can’t make a living at it), it’s still fun to create things just because you can, and because you want to see how it turns out.
Being good at it really isn’t the point. Under ideal circumstances I write because I like to; when I do it only because it pays the bills and I can’t see any other marketable skills in my repertoire, I don’t enjoy it, and what I write isn’t very interesting.
It’s all mental, just assembling words to fit the assignment — solving the puzzle instead of creating something new. Often I don’t even attempt to create anything new, rather just looking for the answer within the question. That’s not because I don’t want to create; it’s because I don’t think I’m “good at it.”
We give up on ourselves, in ways we’d never give up on somebody else. Even the daughter of the sister of the wife of my wife’s brother isn’t allowed to down herself like that around me, and even though I told you I bit my tongue it’s not entirely true.
“Look, Abby,” I finally sighed. “If the point of art was to make your drawing look exactly like the Pokemon, then why not just take a picture?”
She didn’t have an answer, but it didn’t matter. I hadn’t convinced her, any more than I’m usually able to convince myself. However, I’m happy to say that Penny did make some headway. She showed Abby some of her work, which doesn’t look just like the thing it’s a painting of. It’s beautifully, colorfully, gloriously inaccurate, and it goes off to hang in “fancy galleries in New Hampshire,” as Penny explained, and no picture I’ve ever taken is half as perfect as any one of her artworks.
Even Abby could see that. I hope she keeps making art. She starts ballet next year, and I know that can be pretty intense, so maybe art will fall by the wayside and dancing will become “her thing.” But maybe one day she’ll come back to it, and draw something just because she wants to, and not be mean to however it turns out. Maybe she’ll even like it — the drawing, and drawing itself.
I do hope so. I wish I could have said the right thing to her, the thing that would have ensured this ultimate outcome, but I didn’t. I knew I didn’t know much about kids or what to say to them, or — really, given my many humbling realizations over the past several years — about life at all.
I don’t see things I ought to see when they’re in front of me. And I don’t always know how to put them into words that make sense, so I can remember and learn and help other people understand. I don’t usually recognize when I’m reasoning through all my projects, and abandoning the creative discovery that got me into this in the first place. I don’t know when I’ve got something to say, or when I just need to ramble until I get there.
I try, and I like trying, which is important, but I guess I’m just not very good at that stuff.
Yet.
Stronger Than Before
7 July, 2008You might not know this, but I’ve got a broken index finger. On my right hand, which I do favor. It’s healed now; don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t want you to think I was typing this with a crippled appendage or anything, but the fact remains that it was once broken, by Penny in fact, and thus will always be a “broken” finger.
We were having a rubber-band fight, you see, which is nice because it makes the injury as trivial as it could possibly be — seriously, I’ve given this some thought, and still can’t conceive of any situation more uncritical and utterly absurd for a broken bone than an impromptu shoot-out with little rings of elastic. How I wish I’d been confronting a whale shark or something, perhaps hauling my shipmate aboard during a brutal snap monsoon (for some reason it’s always at sea tha my manly fantasies situate themselves).
But no.
We were shooting rubber bands at each other across the office where we met, probably dodging assigments as well.
A stray rubber band — valuable ammo, you understand — fell to the carpet and I lunged for it with my most dexterous hand, my right. Penny, my future wife, saw this lunge and interceded, determined to prevent me retrieving the rubber band, and STOMPED mightily on the tiny object to claim it as her own.
Unfortunately, I’d already grabbed it in my fingers. Penny’s mighty stomp crushed the bones in my index finger in three places, impressing even the radiologist who looked at the x-rays, because it is indeed an unusual injury to sustain. There just aren’t that many opportunities to have your phalanges crushed above the second knuckle by a violent compressing force.
I bring this up now not to blame her again, nor to make her feel guilty. In truth, I’ve forgiven her completely — pledged my life to her, as a matter of fact — and only thought about this just now because I happened to glance down and notice how my right pointer finger is just a *little* twisted when you compare it to the left.
Nothing noticeable. But I remembered the doctors telling me I’d have arthritis in that finger someday. They said the bone would heal, because I was young and healthy, but that technically it would never regain the structural integrity it had before. And one day, when I was bent and old, that finger would most likely give me trouble, pain when it rains, I theorized, reminding me of the day when Penny and I went for a rubber band at the exact same time and she stomped me.
Okay.
I can withstand that, I bet. In fact, it’s really sort of a fond memory for me. A reminder of the days when I knew I liked her, a lot, but wasn’t sure or even very optimistic that she’d ever like me back. And every conversation, every email, every shared glance over a meeting table was another chance to win her over.
Well, I’ve won her over. She stood in an old outdoor pagoda on a chilly May morning in 2004 and said she loved me, out loud, right in front of lots of people. They even declared us married, and she wears the ring I gave her, most of the time, when she’s not mucking up her fingers making a new painting.
And now I like my broken finger. I like knowing it’ll ache one day. Even something as seemingly unlikeable as a twisted, shattered-and-reglued index finger can be a pleasant reminder when it reminds you of the best thing that ever happened to you.
We were shooting rubber bands at each other across the office where we met. Trying, I think, to inflict a sudden sting of recognition upon each other. I wanted to just get her to *notice* me, even if only with a fleeting welt. And it worked.
So today I’d like to say something, using this damaged appendage of mine, celebrating the fact that it’s not yet arthritic, and not yet bothersome, and to in fact celebrate the fact that one day it will be, and I’ll remember all over again:
jjjjmmfjjnhuhkknhiujhhumhukjnhjkjkkhhmhjuiuk. Jeez Louise, Lope, I’m justifiably, jury-convicted, jumpin’ jehosophat in love with you. To the ends of me.
They’re Always Addin’ To Me Lucky Charms
19 May, 2008I saw it right away, there on the Lucky Charms box: NEW MARSHMALLOW.
It said they’ve added little hourglasses now, though why anybody would want to gaze down into his breakfast cereal and contemplate a bobbing reminder of time’s inexorable march to oblivion is beyond me. Perhaps marshmallow yawning graves didn’t test well.
Still, I was excited. A new marshmallow? That’s big news. I can still remember vividly when they rolled out the purple horseshoes, back in the 80s. (We liked purple food back then; I don’t know what to tell you.) No longer would our Complete Breakfasts be limited to pink hearts, blue diamonds, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. The Charm Canon had grown by one. The universe had expanded. It was a major media event.
There was the rollout of rainbows, sometime in the multihued years around the turn of the millennium, and we all accepted these novelly striped semicircles on the boxfront, along with the colorful trails they would inevitably leave in our milk, but we figured they were just short-timers.
And so a true, authentic, honest-to-sucrose new marshmallow was really pretty shocking to me. I mean, it’s no secret that the ‘mallow count has gone up since Lucky Charms’ invention (in, what, 1955 or something?) but overall the recipe hasn’t changed much. How could it? You can’t add a new marshmallow (or “marbit,” as General Mills calls them) very often, or pretty soon the whole box will be filled with the things, the whole shebang weighing half an ounce or less and swiftly restationed in the candy aisle.
Conversely, savvy snackers won’t stand for a scarcity of marshmallows, either. The concentration must be exact and precise — about 1:5, by my calculation. Tinker too much with the sacred ratio of toasted oats to marshmallows and you risk blowing the whole thing.
Besides, how many truly “lucky” charm shapes are there, really? Clovers, sure; stars and moons I can allow, being celestial and portentous of something or other, generally. Diamonds are a little gamey, in the sense of cards and stakes and whiskey, but still very much aligned with good fortune and luck. Marshmallow spades would have been pushing it.
And horseshoes, well, on that one the folks up at GM headquarters must have been slapping their heads wondering why they hadn’t thought of it sooner. Say what you will about the purple-friendly eighties; horseshoes were a great addition. Especially for a cereal promising 25% of your recommended daily allowance of iron.
Hourglasses are no horseshoes. Let’s be clear on that. But they’re still new, and that makes them news. I wondered why I hadn’t heard anything about this sooner… surely there was a press conference or something. I made a mental note to pay more attention to broadcast media. I could easily imagine a little blurb or something, right there at the end of the evening’s news.
“…And that just about does it for Sports. So Tara, what’s this I hear about a change to my favorite breakfast cereal?”
“You heard right, Clyde, it seems Lucky Charms is rolling out a new marshmallow! Yes, for the first time in more than a decade, the fabled cereal box will include an all new ‘charm.’
“What kind of charm is it, Tara?”
“Well, Clyde, you’ll have to pour yourself a bowl and find out!..”
Thanks, Tara.
It wasn’t until my curiosity got the better of me (and I’d argue that my curiosity may well *be* the better of me) that I finally looked into the matter and learned what had actually happened. According to Wikipedia,
“as General Mills introduces new shapes, older marshmallows are phased out.”
Ah. So that’s how they can add a half-dozen new marshmallows during my cereal-eating career and not reach saturation. Apparently the yellow moons and blue diamonds were the first to get the ax — just as well, perhaps, since nobody ever wished upon a *moon*, anyway, and the only naturally occurring blue diamond I can think of would be the Hope Diamond, which is not lucky at all but in fact famously cursed.
Clovers bought it next, but later came back, and the general millers have since seen fit to plop in several others while I wasn’t looking: leprechaun hats (makes sense), pots of gold (ditto), shooting stars (traditionally considered harbingers of doom, but ok) and briefly, for reasons that were never fully explained, The Statue of Liberty.
And as I slurped my cereal and considered the ever-shifting palette of marshmallow goodness I was at that moment sampling, I realized that General Mills is onto something.
Change is life’s only constant, and the act of living is in some ways the process of accepting and embracing change. And, as the philosophers of Semisonic told us back around the time we first spotted Lady Liberty floating in our two-percent, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
It seems the ever-new-yet-constantly-balanced contents of the Lucky Charms box have something to teach us. Or me, at least. You can’t hold on to your yellow moons and blue diamonds forever. Wait and cling and amass and accumulate and your sweet life becomes *too* sweet — and not as delicious.
But if you *can* let go, well… it’s wide open. If you want, you can always have things in your life that are NEW! and EXCITING! and even outlined in purple and presented by a leprechaun, figuratively speaking.
And if you look at it like that, then parting with an old marshmallow isn’t really losing anything at all. If anything, you’re giving yourself a gift: the joy and privilege of bringing something new into your life. Maybe even something that will leave pink, yellow, and blue trails in your milk.
Collateral Benefits
2 May, 2008I like things that do things. It would be more complete and more accurate to say I like things that do *extra* things, things that are beyond the original things’ primary purpose or reason for being, but which are still nice things to have happening.
It’d be more accurate still to say that I like things with these “collateral benefits,” as I’ve joyously heard them called, so much that (or perhaps because) I *despise* their opposite: stuff that wastes stuff.
For instance, I like my laptop and all, and feel good about it because it was the cheapest Mac they sell, and I got it refurbished and all, and it’s absolutely as much computer as I need. Maybe a little more. Nice ‘n tidy.
But then, of course, I found out about all the resources used in my laptop’s manufacturing, all the chemicals released by mining and forging and shipping and packaging the battery alone, and my heart sank. Not because I’ve become a raging eco-weenie (though I have), but because something deep in my heart has just abhors waste. Always has.
I remember as a kid liking — really enjoying, in a way I couldn’t quite articulate — the idea of Levi’s 501s. I’d heard somehow that they were made differently from other jeans, in some proprietary and time-honored tradition, perhaps with some fantastic fabric beyond run-of-the-cotton-mill denim, and actually *improved with use.* Every time you wore them, the story went, they broke in a little more, got a little bit softer, contoured to your butt a little more precisely, and thus became more your own.
Compare that to the only other item I gave a second thought to purchasing in those days, which was shoes. You whined and moaned and lobbied your mom for weeks on end to buy you some outrageously — really, the Nike guys should have been ashamed of themselves, but definitely were not — overpriced tennis shoes with little bubbles of “AIR” under the heel, and sometimes even a window through which you could peer and see the little capsule of nothingness you just paid for.
Air Maxes were only cool the first time you wore them. After that they were old, and stinky, and probably flecked with mud from whatever puddles you tromped through on the way home from school. Everyone had seen them already, and peered through the window, and nobody cared. Not even you.
Even then, years before I ever heard the acronym for Return On Investment (me in the meeting: “Roy? Is she saying Roy? Why do we have to worry about Roy? Is he sick?”) I knew that cool shoes were just way too expensive, which is another way of saying not worth the trouble. (I’m reminded of the Dean Martin quote, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”)
Oh, I tried some 501s once, too, and they pretty much just seemed like regular jeans, only more of a pain to get in and out of.
But man, the *idea* was solid, and ever since I’ve harbored a secret affection for anything that improves with usage, instead of just plain wearing out. Don’t get me wrong; it’s okay if things wear out eventually, as all things must, myself included, but I’d prefer not to be able to draw an equals sign between using something and destroying it.
And so few things are like this. The jeans were an illusion, though I’ve had a couple beloved t-shirts that fit the description over the years, bringing me more happiness (tinged with a bit of wistful awareness that One Day They’d Be Gone) each time I wore them. And, naturally, as naturally as any process can transpire, One Day they were Gone.
So I looked for something similar. I’ve found a few things so far, and I would love to hear about more.
*****
The first is a technology you may have used. It’s (in my opinion) a completely ingenious scheme in which you, well, I’m paraphrasing here, but you basically prove you’re not a computer and decipher books at the same time.
Here: instead of paraphrasing, I might as well just cut and paste from Wikipedia. Accurate description is always the tedious part of writing anyway, and since someone else has already done it, why duplicate labor? That would be wasteful, would it not? “CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing … The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. The term “CAPTCHA” … is a contrived acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’.”
If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog, you’ve probably seen this and know what I’m talking about. Well, the new “official implementation” of CAPTCHA, as decreed by the system’s inventors at Carnegie Mellon and IBM, is reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA earns my love by doing what 501s cannot: it truly accomplishes two things at once, with one occurring as a direct result of the other. It’s like if, oh, driving your car somehow improved the environment, by generating oxygen instead of depleting it let’s say, and the further you went the greater the benefit.
reCAPTCHA is a magical tree car because it takes those squiggly words you have to to decode and uses *real* words, from *real* books, books that computers have been working on digitizing. Teams working on book preservation scan thousands of pages of text all the time, and when their computers hit a word they can’t read (because the page is wrinkled or the ink is smudged or somebody doodled in the margins), they give you a shot at it. And if you guess it, they let another person try. And if you both agree, presto — case closed. “I guess it says ‘following,’” thinks the computer, and goes back about its optical character recognition.
30 million times a day. Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon all use reCAPTCHA, and their users (you perhaps among them) collectively give Carnegie Mellon University approximately 3,000 man hours of free labor, day in and day out, to help in the preservation of books. And you do it all while protecting those sites from “bot” programs that are set up to flood websites and send you spam.
Collateral benefits. A two-fer. Free lunch. Whatever you want to call it. All I know is it’s awesome.
So what else? I plan on jabbering about this all week long, and I welcome any and all submissions you’ve got. Help enlighten the world on things that do extra things, and know that as you’re spreading the word, you’re also literally warming my soul. Measurably, in degrees Kelvin. Which is a nice little bonus, wouldn’t you agree?
Do It Yourself
26 February, 2008Last weekend I helped lay a tile floor in my father-in-law’s kitchen. I had previously worked on a couple of tile installations, but only as a helper, so that’s pretty much what I set out to do last weekend — carry boxes, haul mortar, sweep the floor, and so forth. Tom and Jack handled the more challenging, calculation-intensive tasks of laying out the pattern and measuring and marking the tiles for cutting. (We had decided to lay them all diagonally, which is trickier but ends up looking much fancier.) One thing I did a lot of, much like the last time I helped out with a floor like this, was cut tile.
A tile saw, for something that hooks up to both a garden hose and an electrical outlet (!) and features a whirling, diamond-tipped saw blade, is actually pretty straightforward in use. Nothing happens too quickly; you turn on the blade, push the tile into the rotating edge and it just kind of gnaws its way through the ceramic, an inch every few seconds or so. Compared to other parts of the job, like spreading the mortar evenly or figuring out the angles in the corners, it’s almost idiot-proof. Just follow the line.
In our system, Tom was up in the house marking those lines, in black crayon, or pencil if the crayon got lost. It was up to him to determine where exactly the 45-, 30-, and 60-degree notches needed to be removed from each square. As he marked each one, sitting on the floor with a measuring tape and mortar-caked hands, he handed it to Jack, who carried it out to the driveway, to me. Then I’d glance at the tile and the faint black line, give Jack my most capable-seeming nod, pull on my earmuffs and fire up the tile saw to start the cut.
Most of them came out pretty well, I’d say. Straighter than I’d imagined, especially since we couldn’t use a guide, and you kind of had to just eyeball the blade along the mark the whole way through. Only a few of the tiles ended up cracking before they could be installed, and practically none of those were my fault. By 10 or 11 hours into day one, we were all pretty sure it would come out looking good.
Here I should mention something about laying tile: it basically sucks. The results are nice, of course, but there’s no getting around the fact that you’re hauling thousands of pounds of rock, trying not to get dust and glop everywhere, and spending the better part of a weekend hunched over on the floor. To be honest, I had been secretly hoping Jack would change his mind about the whole project, or perhaps just put it off a couple months longer. And when the time did come to get started, I resigned myself to a forfeited Saturday and Sunday and just hoped the job went somewhat smoothly.
A few hours later, as I stood soaked in cold water, hunched over, pushing the 90th or so tile into the whirring blade and hoping against hope that I wouldn’t chip this one, I had for the most part gotten exactly what I expected. Hand me the tile, let me cut it, here you go, give me another one. Let’s get this over with.
*****
In the late afternoon of the second day, Tom cut his arm pretty badly. I knew something was wrong by the way he called my name from the next room — there was something in his tone that told me this wasn’t just another “Hey Colin, can you give me a hand with this?”
Sure enough, the utility knife had gotten him good, and he knew he’d need a couple stitches. And, because he’s Tom, he elected not to go to a local clinic and pay the insurance co-pay, but to instead drive himself the three hours back to Beaufort, bleeding, and go to the free Naval hospital.
I realized I wasn’t going to change his mind, so I wrapped a few loops of electrical tape over his makeshift bandage, gathered up a few of his tools and wished him luck on his drive.
I knew he’d make it just fine. I also knew there was still the better part of one room and a section of hallway left to tile, and I went up into the house to see what he’d been working on when the accident happened. (I didn’t spot any blood spatters that needed to be cleaned or anything; he must have closed the wound as soon as it happened.) It was good; he had accomplished quite a bit since the last time I had come in. But still, there was a ways to go. I sat down on the floor, stared at the open space that would have to be finished, and started measuring.
It was slow going — about three or four times slower than when Tom was doing it — but eventually I figured out how to mark the tiles accurately. And since Jack was still at the store, I would carry my marked tiles out to my station in the driveway, fire up the saw, pull on the earmuffs and cut the line myself.
As I pushed the tile into the blade, and started the first half-inch of cut, I noticed that it felt different. As the saw dug into the ceramic, the tiny gouge following the line I had drawn back in the house, I could picture how the tile would lay once it was cut. I could see where the edge defined by my line would go, and I remembered how I had drawn it — a little generously, actually, so that if I cut too much it would still fit well.
Knowing that, it was much easier to make the cut. My mind focused on following the line, and on holding the tile steady, and not rushing the blade. (If you push too hard, the saw blade binds in the tile and slowly grinds to a stop as the electrical motor emits a low, loud hum that sounds a lot like one of those “wrong answer” buzzers.) And when I was finished, I toweled off the tile, carried it up into the house and set it into place. It fit nicely.
That made it easier to measure the next tile, and I realized that the marking part wasn’t so hard after all. Besides, if I made a mistake, no big deal. I’ll just cut another one and try again. And each time I carried another freshly-marked tile out to the driveway to make the next cut, my mind was already envisioning not only the cut, and which side of the line the blade should follow, but the next tile I’d be cutting, and how many tiles it would take to finish the room, and how well the overall job was coming out.
The last 40 or 50 square feet of floor took me almost six hours.
Tom had done the rest, several times as much area, in not much longer. And even though it was the end of the project, and my hands were tired, and my back hurt, and I was covered in crusty tile adhesive, those six hours went faster than any other part of the job. I actually knew what I was doing.
*****
The next morning I went into work, still a little sore in my legs and back, and got going on the week’s assignments. We get daily “traffic sheets,” which list all the pending projects, and mine listed three or four ads, brochures and other things to work on that day. After the morning meeting I went back to my desk and started writing.
It was a fairly productive day. I made some client-requested edits, made some creative-director-requested edits, re-saved and reprinted some documents, and wrote a few headlines I liked. It was everything they had asked of me for that Monday.
And when I walked into my boss’s office at the end of the day to tell her I was quitting, I really just wanted to get it over with. I knocked quietly on the open door, asked if she had time to talk, and sat down. “I’ve decided to go freelance” I said. “Full time.”
She gave me a stunned look and didn’t say anything. I took a deep breath and explained that I had been wanting to try writing on my own for a while now, and had done a few projects here and there, but didn’t anticipate leaving until I had more steady work. But a client had just offered me a six-month freelance contract, and I’d have benefits and everything, and, well, I had to take it.
“I’m sorry,” my boss said, getting a distant look in her eyes. “You’re going to have to say all that again.”
Over the next two hours we discussed my decision, how it had come about, and why she felt it was a mistake. She explained that, even setting aside her personal interest in the situation — the agency’s only other writer had just left a week before — she really thinks it’s something I’ll regret.
“Think about it, Colin,” said the most persuasive person I have ever encountered. “I admire you for what you’re trying to accomplish; I really do. And I think it’s a brave thing to take on, but you’ve got a lot of opportunities going for you right here. It just doesn’t seem like you need to leave here to pursue your goals.”
In the end, I agreed to think it over. Cathy is a very smart person, with a lot more life experience than I have, and I truly believe she had my best interests in mind. And, being Cathy, she made a lot of compelling points.
“Why couldn’t you take more responsibility and ownership of your work right here?”
“Why gamble your livelihood on something uncertain when you’ve got a promising, secure position already?”
“Why not wait a month and see what it’s like around here without that other writer?”
But her most resonant inquiry, the one that echoed in my head throughout that evening and into the next day, was the same thing they asked when I turned down another full-time, on-site copywriting position:
“What makes you think this other situation — doing basically the same thing, except for an agency 250 miles away — will be so different?”
I never really had a good answer for that. It’s just something I feel, I guess, and truthfully, I feel it’ll be completely different. I’ve been an ad agency copywriter my whole career so far; it was my first job after graduating from college. I’ve been at several great agencies, no two alike, and learned a lot at all of them. But since the beginning, I’ve always gone into an office every day at 8:30 and sat down at a computer and did whatever people told me. I’ve always gotten a deposit into my bank account every two weeks, no matter what, and in exchange taken care of any writing the agency needed, no matter what. And Cathy knows that — it’s part of why I’m good to have around.
So when I went back into her office two days later, looked her in the eye and said, “I have to go through with it” I don’t think she was all that surprised. She sighed, and tried to wish me the best, and we briefly discussed things like what projects were pending and when my last day would be. I didn’t think of it at the time, but if I had I could have told Cathy about the tile cutting and what happened after Tom cut himself.
Then again, it may be a good thing I didn’t, since I’m sort of symbolically stabbing her in the arm.
*****
I think this new decision will be different because I’ll be more mindful. I think I’ll see what I’m doing as something I chose, not just what was set before me. I think I’ll learn things I couldn’t have learned otherwise, about project management and self-promotion and presenting my ideas and writing and even, yes, discipline. I think it’ll be hard.
But I’ll have Penelope here to help me, and I’ll get to work here with her and Vince and our cats. I’ll get to take on new clients and learn about their businesses directly from them, and not hide behind a cheerful account executive who’s paid to be more presentable and likable than me. I’ll get to write invoices myself and chase down payments myself, and listen to myself haggling over money. Reeeally looking forward to that.
I’ll get to know that when something went wrong, it was my mistake, and nobody else’s, and that when everything goes right it’s still a miracle. I’ll get to take a walk around the block when I need a few minutes to clear my head, or not take a walk and know that nobody is stopping me. I’ll get to buy my own notebooks, and get the cheapy kind instead of the oversized, hard-bound fancy agency kind I carry around now. I’ll get to know how the afternoon sun moves across the dining room, where I guess I’ll put my computer.
I’ll get to wake up early and write before Penny gets up, when my brain seems most active, and spend two hours writing my ideas and another hour writing the email that explains them all. I’ll get to meet my friends for lunch sometimes, I hope, and listen to their stories about what’s going on at the agency with great interest, and have new ones of my own to share. I’ll get to be in every meeting about my projects, for better or worse. Most of all, I’ll get to stop wondering what it would be like and actually go and find out for myself.
I finally get to see what happens when I follow my own line.
Cordless Motoring
15 February, 2008Hey, it looks like the Plug-In Hybrid Coalition of the Carolinas, which works to research and promote technologies I can scarcely comprehend, has put two new posters on its website! Look in the lower right and click to see what design whiz Ryon Edwards and I came up with for the coalition. http://www.plugincarolina.org/
For Once, Alan Thicke and I See Eye to Eye
8 February, 2008Now, I’ve gone on record as taking issue with some of Dr. Jason Seaver’s decisions, particularly regarding his discipline policies with that lovable scamp Mike, but on this we’re taking a unified stance: kittens and birds who are friends are cute.
Hush Yo’ Mind
7 February, 2008On the way to work each morning, I listen to the radio. It’s weird if I don’t; I drive along a few moments in silence, start to feel strange and lonely and quickly click it back on. The NPR announcer comes right back, in his comfortingly flat, dull, midwestern tone, and resumes feeding my brain things to think about.
My brain gets fed all day long, actually, and all evening too, with emails and articles and mp3s and blogs like this one and notes to myself and client feedback and phone calls from friends and interesting anthills I pass on my walk to lunch.
If I have a moment of “down” time, when the thought onslaught momentarily slows up, a million song lyrics and movie scenes and forgotten conversations immediately flood in like unwanted guests to refill my brain. They mingle and chatter and tell boring stories and repeat themselves to no end.
It’s worst when I’m riding my motorcycle. I know it’s supposed to be relaxing and mind-clearing, but I must be doing it wrong. All I can think about, unless the road is especially twisty or hilly or unfamiliar, is how far until the next curve, or whether that’s a hidden path off the main road up ahead, or whether I should have taken a picture of that abandoned house I just passed.
I think that’s probably why I spend so much time shopping for accessories for the bike — trying to bolt on some distractions or gadgets to occupy my mind while I’m in the process of just sitting there, waiting to get somewhere.
“Should I put a compass there? It might be cool to always know what direction I’m pointing. I wonder if it’s too close to metal, and the readings would be off? Or I could just mount a GPS over… there, on that space for a bracket, and run the wire along… how long until the exit?”
They do make some pretty good headphones you can use under a motorcycle helmet, and I’ve considered ordering those. They seal out the wind noise quite a bit, which would be nice, and replace it with music from an ipod or satellite radio receiver or whatever. Part of me thinks that would fix the problem. I could even wear them when I’m mowing the lawn, and protect my hearing at the same time I’m entertaining myself.
But I’m not so sure. I really find myself envying people who can drive long distances in silence — like Penny — or do simple things like kayak down a stream without driving themselves absolutely NUTSO IN THE KABUTSO with their constant need for stimuli. I wish I could just turn my brain off, or down at least, at will, but it doesn’t work.
And it’s not like I’m insanely productive either. Like I mentioned, most of these thoughts are just stale rehashes of previous thoughts, or half-formed notions that may have been great ideas or may have been random jibberish, but it doesn’t matter either way because they’re quickly left in the dust as my brain speeds off to the next noisy nowhere.
So I’m asking: should I just get the headphones? Would that calm my brain enough to make motorcycling and lawnmowing and flying on planes a genuinely peaceful experience, and give my thoughts a much-needed rest?
Or would I just, as I suspect, be making myself worse by intentionally lading myself with one more distraction from the life that keeps slipping through my fingers?
How have I let myself get so addicted to input? Is it still possible to learn stillness and serenity? I want the feeling I see in this picture, of escape from racing thoughts.
How can I have peace and quiet when peace and quiet drive me crazy?
Things I Genuinely Wouldn’t Touch With a Ten-Foot Pole
29 January, 2008hornet’s nest
sleeping bear
core of earth
nuclear warhead
ebola
faberge egg
Constitution
Tila Tequila