Idle essays

What is it with people that they think everyone around them is interested in the soap opera of their lives?

Here we are, waiting interminably in the dim recesses of the Mayo Clinic, where we hope to find out why our back hurts endlessly and whether we fractured our knee the last time we fell on the floor.

And what we have here is a woman yakking on the phone, on her feet and pacing back and forth so as to share the benefit of her piercing voice with as many listeners as possible: what we must tell “him,” how we must say “it” to “him,” how we can manipulate “him” to fit our purposes, and on and on and on…

Please, lady: take it outside. Or just shut up!

Back in the Day, oh yes, the Day… We did not yap loudly in public unless we came from the Midwest, where apparently farm machinery had deafened most of the natives. Otherwise, people spoke quietly, and in waiting rooms especially, they kept their voices way down. As in a whisper. I remember my mother insisting that I barely murmur to her in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms.

Nor, of course, did we pound away on our typewriters in public.

Brought the laptop so I could continue to work on the interminable index of medieval and Renaissance history. The schedule the Mayo laid on me entails a 90-minute lacuna between the X-rays and the chat with the doctor. So I’ve spent the last 45 minutes searching out terms related to Ottonian and Carolingian fiscs, squinting to read the results on a PDF rendered microscopic on the MacBook’s cute little monitor.

By the time I got up to walk down to the internists’ check-in area, leaving a relatively quiet area near a plashing fountain, I hurt so much I could hardly limp down here.

Ah hah! This leads to a Diagnostic Theory:

The reason my back hurts is that I spend almost all my time at BORING WORK!

boring boring BORING!!!!!

Dayum. My work is literally a pain in the tuchus.

I have got to find something better to do with my life. What little remains of it.

But what?

It looks to me like my choices are

a) sell the house, buy an RV, toss some food and the dog into it, and drive away, never to be seen again; or

b) check myself into a life-care community, where somebody else will have to do the boring stuff of taking care of me and I can rot away playing mah-jongg on the Internet.

One is brought back to real estate. Would answering the phone in a real estate office be as boring as editing and indexing scholarly copy?

Or journalism redux. It was fun to have an excuse to ask people nosy questions.

Possibly, though, I’ve lost my taste for snoopiness, given the boredom factor of the conversation about steering “him” around to wherever the recent speaker wanted “him” to do. And we have just heard about all the furniture in another lady’s house waiting to be yard-saled or moved. Once, I suppose, I found the daily doings of people’s daily lives interesting.

One of my former students now occupies my former job at Phoenix Magazine. I expect if I gave her a call, she’d help to weasel me back in the door there. A nice architectural spread on some overdecorated stately home could be fun. But not, heaven help us, another round-up of night-clubs, cell phones, or movie theaters.

We’re now running 15 minutes behind, so the 90-minute stint of heel-cooling has morphed to two hours. And counting. But of course what do little old bats have to do with their time but sit and stare into the distance?

Finally got around to starting some of the yardwork yesterday afternoon. Spent the whole afternoon hacking back an overgrown plumbago and trimming a man-eating rose. And finally, now that its leaves have dropped, getting around to pruning the misshapen vitex bush into a sort of tree-like shape.

That vitex was such a beautiful little plant when it was put in. Its branch structure was downright sculptural. Then the hated devil-pod tree expanded to fill all available sky, and in its struggle to find sunlight, the vitex became as distorted as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

It kind of filled in once the devil-pod tree came down, but it’s remained lopsided, and some of its limbs have twisted around each other or crossed.

So I cut out a couple of pretty big limbs — that was hard! — and trimmed out a lot of spindly, tangled twigs and snapped off a lot of deadwood. It still needs some more shaping, which I’d planned to do this afternoon.

But now it looks like once again I won’t be able to get to that. Client sent a draft iteration of the index to the client, whose executive editor sent back a long list of frantic WHAT IS THAT??? queries.

Thank you so much, boss! I really needed to impress this guy like that…

At any rate, though most of the stuff that had the guy exercised had already been fixed, he did spot a number of anomalies. And in the course of going over and over the page proofs, I’ve found sets of entries that could be profitably reorganized and new topics that require endless digital searches through a 360-page PDF. So that job has now officially claimed the entire afternoon. And probably the evening.

Welp. I’m going to wait until 11:30 and then tell them he’ll have to call me with the results of those X-rays. I think an hour is long enough to wait, don’t you?

***

LOL! I’d barely hit the question-mark key when they called me back to the doc’s examination room. That was 15 or 20 minutes ago. When they get your clothes off you, they know they have you trapped.

So now I have to decide whether to get dressed and flee or whether to lay down on this six-foot-long sofa and take a nap.

Probably the latter.

What a weird experience!

Around 2 in the afternoon I fixed a full meal — wonderful piece of steak, salad, pile of garlicky black beans. Along with this, I took it into my little head to have a gin and tonic.

Usually, I serve up hard liquor to myself in the tallest, widest glass in the house. It holds 16 ounces — two full cups. This habit has a couple of advantages:

First, because the glass holds so much, it takes a lot longer to drink my favorite hard-liquor potable, whiskey and water. This means I probably won’t pour a second glass.

Second, a single shot of liquor is much diluted in 15 ounces of mixer, making it a lot less likely that I’m going to get blitzed over dinner.

But yesterday I decided it would be nice to have a gin and tonic in a low-boy glass, not a long-tall-Sally sort of a glass. My short cocktail glasses hold eight ounces, half the amount the taller glass accommodates.

This meant the drinkey-poo in question used only about a third of a can of tonic water. But it tasted like a drink, not like faintly booze-flavored soda pop. That was nice.

So while the food is cooking I almost finish off a swiggle. Pour another. That lasts through most of dinner. But a third of a can of tonic remains, so I pour a short one — about half a jigger of gin, but still…more gin. Pick up the kitchen, read an e-mail from the client asking me to do still more complicated stuff on the interminable index; decide I’d better wait until full sobriety returns to respond to that. Wander off and fall into bed.

Wake up. It’s dark out. I think it’s the usual 4 a.m. wake-up. Get out the flashlight to check what miserable time of the morning it is, and see it’s QUARTER TO SEVEN!

I’ve got to be out the door no later than quarter to eight, because we have an eight a.m. choir call for today’s early service. This is a once-a-month gig the pastor dreamed up and that I personally dislike intensely — usually choir call is at 10 a.m.

Damn! Fly around, feed the dog (think i don’t think i fed the dog last night!), dunk in the tub, wash my hair, paint my face, find something more or less acceptable to wear, and FLY out the door at quarter to eight, pissed off because it’s still dark as pitch outside, I haven’t even had time for breakfast, and the goddamn paper’s not here.

Pretty Daughter’s son has got his car-repair workshop, locally known as his mom’s garage, open and he’s fiddling with a neighbor’s car, which evidently wouldn’t start this morning. Amazing neighbor who can get a teenaged boy out of the sack at this hour on a Sunday.

Streak down Seventh Ave. Shoot into the church parking lot to find…

no. one. there!

I’m totally mystified. I’m sure this is the morning we’re supposed to be there for the dratted early service, because yesterday Joan said “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I must either have the wrong time or she and I both must be wrong about the early service day.

Puzzled, I drive home. I’m thinking I need to tell the choir director I’m just not gonna do these 8:00 a.m. choir shindigs, because I hate hate HATE getting out of bed with my feet running.

The paper still hasn’t shown up. Pretty Daughter’s kid has gone indoors, and there’s no one around. It’s still dark as pitch. On Thursday, SBA Prez Marshall remarked that the longest day of the year was coming up. He wasn’t kidding, I reflect.

Not until I pull into the garage do I think…wonder if it’s actually 8 P.M. instead of 8 a.m.?….. The digital clock in the car doesn’t have an a.m./p.m. indicator; neither do the ones on the stove and the microwave. All the rest of the clocks in the house are analogue.

Park the car, close the garage, charge back to the office, turn on the computer, and…

Yup! It’s 8:10 p.m.!!!!

Sumbiche!

At this point I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep. The last e-mail I opened came in at 3:10. The next one, which I don’t think was on the server when I stumbled away from my desk, came in at 3:19, but I can’t remember whether I fell directly into bed after seeing the client’s latest round of arcane instructions (he has in mind that I’m going to do electronic searches of 300 page proofs for 25 single-spaced pages of indexing terms) or whether I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Whatever I did, I didn’t get far, because the leftover beans are still on the stove.

If I fell asleep around 3:30, then I slept for three hours. Don’t seem to have a hangover and don’t feel especially drunk (but obviously shouldn’t have been driving!).

Even after all these revelations, it still felt like morning.  To make things stranger, later in the evening when I went to make something to eat, I came across the Bombay Sapphire: not that much was gone. It was still full almost up to the top — so I was right in thinking I’d been pouring pretty short shots.

The dog and I went for a walk. We live in a neighborhood of Christmas light enthusiasts, so it’s pretty gaudy out there at this time of year. The burning bush, which slowly changes colors through the night-time hours, was mostly red with a little white as we strolled past.

The head finally clear, I started back to work on the index. Finished the latest round of changes around 1:00 a.m. Sincerely hope the latest iteration will satisfy the client.

Strange. This kind of thing has happened to me before, when I was much younger: waking up from a nap thinking it’s  morning, only to find it’s actually evening. But in those instances, the sun was still up — as soon as you can see the sun’s position in the sky, you know what time of day it is. It was solid black last night as I was racing toward an empty church. You can’t see the stars well here, this being the eighth- or ninth-largest city in the land…otherwise you’d think I might have noticed Orion in the east, a bit of a give-away.

Oh well. Second childhood: ain’t it grand?

Images:
Glassware, shamelessly ripped off from Crate & Barrel.
Orion. Mouser. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Like everyone who doesn’t have to cover events for a news organization, I’ve been stunned to silence by the events in Newtown, Connecticut.

It was, I’m afraid, inevitable that something like this would happen. Just by dint of reporting on mass killings, we glorify the demented perpetrators, who then become models for the next madman priming himself to go ballistic.

What exactly is to be done to bring a stop to these horrific events?  Locking the doors didn’t help — this one used his long gun to blast his way through a locked door into the school.

Before the stench of gunpowder had cleared from the air, the hue and cry for gun control rose from all quarters. Not surprisingly: it makes some sense to believe that if no one had guns, the insane among us would be unable to hurt anyone. And it is true that the crazies in China who have to use knives to attack grade-school children so far have failed to kill their victims.

Not enough is being said in this discussion, which understandably still borders on the hysterical, about the weak mental health care we have in this country. We closed mental hospitals and, in a well-meaning (and conveniently cost-saving) impulse did away with involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill. But we do still institutionalize the conspicuously mentally ill: in prisons.

If you’ve ever tried to get mental health care for someone who needed it urgently, you likely came up against a wall. One of my son’s high-school friends locked himself inside a bedroom and told his parents he was going to kill himself. They called 9-1-1, begging for someone to send help before he harmed himself. The police showed up. They smashed in the door, grabbed the kid (who was not very large), slammed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and roughed him up. Great treatment for a mental health emergency.

Dealing with the problem we’ve built for ourselves — violent behavior of unhinged individuals inspired by atrocities committed by other demented individuals — demands a complex response, and it will cost a lot of money.

First: Yes, gun control.

We must get automatic and semiautomatic weapons out of civilian hands. These things are now ubiquitous — on any balmy spring or fall evening that tempts me to open my windows, the tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire wafts in from the war zone to the north of my neighborhood, and occasionally I’ll hear it closer, from the hectic main drags that form borders between my area and the blight to the north and west, as people shoot at each other in moments of road rage.

No one who is not on the field of battle needs a weapon that fires continuously when you rest your finger on the trigger. This is is a weapon of aggression, not of self-defense. Nor is it a hunting tool: if you can’t hit a deer, an elk, or a dove without an automatic weapon, you are not a good enough marksman to be waving a gun around in the woods. And  as for the burglar: the weapon of choice is an ordinary shotgun.

But taking semiautomatic and automatic firearms off the streets presents an almost insurmountable problem. Many of the things are owned by bad guys. They’re freely available on the black market, and nobody who has one that’s not registered will blithely turn it in on demand. Make owning it a felony? Big deal: committing felonies is a crook’s bread & butter. Too, semiautomatic and automatic guns are expensive. Many legitimate gun owners buy them as investments. No one who has ponied up $500 to $1,000 for a semi is going to cheerfully fork it over to Big Brother.

To rein in these weapons, governments will have to reimburse owners. Thousands of Americans own semiautomatic weapons — one source claims 17% of us do. Fully automatic firearms, which contrary to popular belief are not illegal in this country, cost even more than semis: thousands of dollars. No one who has an unregistered gun is going to hand it over to a government agent for free, nor will citizens who bought their weapons after registration became the law. Many may do so if owning the thing becomes illegal and a buy-back program is put in place. But some people will simply hide their weapons in the walls.

Second: Mental health care

Everyone now knows that access to quality health care is highly problematic in this country. If you don’t have a full-time job or you can’t afford expensive health insurance out of pocket, you have a difficult time getting to a doctor.

Take that situation and multiply it by five, and you’ve got a good picture of our mental health care.

We need to stop using our prisons as mental health hospitals, ensure access to and quality of health care of all kinds, and see to it that people who clearly have mental problems receive adequate and effective care.

That also is going to cost a lot of money. In a time when political leaders are trying to cut back (or one day eliminate) Medicare and Medicaid and when half our elected leaders throw sh!tfits over anything that vaguely resembles an effective national healthcare system, it’s unlikely we will muster the political will to spend what it will take to identify and treat even the most obvious mental cases.

Third: The tenor of “entertainment”

Americans marinate in violence. We think it’s entertaining. Turn on the television any time after about 7 or 8  p.m. You get two choices of  viewing pleasure: mind-numbingly stupid or mind-numbingly violent. The crime dramas that fill prime time are the only alternative to watching amateur singers compete or foolish people indulge in stupefyingly idiotic “reality show” antics, and those crime shows, whose plots are often taken from the news, are so bloody and so violent as to turn your stomach.

Except they don’t. We’ve become so inured to violence that we think it’s a game. Indeed, it’s the stuff of the very computer games our children and teenagers play every day. Is it any wonder that unstable individuals are primed to descend into madness?

All three of these issues cry out for change, and in my opinion the only way we will free ourselves from increasingly horrifying outbreaks of madness will be to open the national wallet and address each issue in a big way.

So the other day I’m sitting around reading the New York Times Magazine, an article about playwright David Henry Hwang. About two-thirds of the way through the piece, the author remarks about Hwang’s father, Henry Yuan Hwang, “After running a laundry and working as an accountant, Henry found success later in life, founding Far East National Bank, the first federally chartered Asian-American bank in the continental United States. (He sold it to the Bank SinoPac of Taiwan in 1996 for $90 million).”

No kidding? He doesn’t find “success” until he founds a $90 million bank, an enterprise (we might note) that was fraught with some questionable dealings.

If you run a small business, you’re not successful.

If you’re an accountant, you’re not successful.

Sets my teeth on edge.

What does it mean to be successful, really? I have to say that my conception of “success” has changed significantly over the years–most radically in recent years. Today, I would posit that once you reach a standard of living that keeps a roof that doesn’t leak over your head and some decent food on your table, “success” has rather little to do with money. As a matter of fact, I don’t see $90 million as an indicator of success at all. Especially not when it involves the possible corruption of the mayor of Los Angeles.

When I was a truly young thing–as in about ten years old–I thought that one day success for me would be to finish the Ph.D. and become a scientist. I wanted to be an astrophysicist.

By the time I reached my freshman year in college, it was clear that family and mentoring support for that scheme would never be forthcoming–in the 1960s, women were still not welcome in the hard sciences, and a girl who said that’s what she wanted to do was regarded as not quite right in the head. So then it seemed to me that success for me would be to get a Ph.D. in anything and have an academic life.

But also I wanted to be a writer with a capital W. I dreamed of writing publishable fiction. Alas, that also was not a very viable option, or at least it wasn’t presented as one. After I began to write for publication (always nonfiction), I imagined that success would be to write something that articulated some grand and profound truth, an Insight with a capital W. And of course to become famous for having done so.

It’s not easy to do that when you’re writing business profiles, travel reports, and cocktail-lounge round-ups. Oh well.

My mother and father felt that success for me would be to marry a man who would earn a good living and support me in the style to which they wished me to become accustomed. So, I married a corporate lawyer, exactly the kind of man they had in mind. Because I was never in love with him (the men who attracted me were not what you’d call good marriage material), that particular “success” was also a shade questionable. But I lived for over 20 years in considerable comfort. I hesitate to use the “bird in a gilded cage” cliché. It was more like Sleeping Beauty: I simply turned off everything around me and existed in a sort of waking coma. To this day, there are things my ex-husband remembers that I have absolutely no recollection of.

Some else’s success is not necessarily your success.

Well, I’ve had the life of a society matron and I’ve had an academic life and I’ve been a widely published writer and I’ve edited even more widely published writers, but I haven’t founded a $90 million bank. Yet.

So what’s success, and how much money does it entail?

Yesterday Cassie and I went for a long walk down a shaded trail that runs through central Phoenix. It was lovely. And I felt truly contented. Not suffering from a lot of pressure to do anything right this minute: success. Not worrying where your next meal is coming from: success. Having enough friends to keep you company but not so many acquaintances to keep up that they run you ragged: success. Having a son whose life, despite a few vicissitudes, has not collapsed in ruins: success. Being comfortable with one’s onliness: success.

I don’t think you have to be a millionaire, let alone a multimillionaire, to qualify as “successful.” Yeah, you do need some money: I have enough to see me through the rest of my life in about the same conditions that I’ve enjoyed for the past three post-layoff years–minimalist, but not without some comforts. The things that are important to me–a pleasant dwelling place, decent food, a few friendships–are in place. I have enough that I don’t need any more. And that, I think, defines financial success.

As for the other kinds of success, the kinds that really matter: each to her own.

How do you define success?