Outer Life

Book With Legs

I read a lot. So much, in fact, I wonder whether it’s too much.

I live surrounded by books. Books I’ve read, books I want to read, books to which I refer, and too many books I borrowed or bought that I will never read but, in the interests of filling my newly expanded shelves, will probably continue to live with me.

I read more than books, of course, spending an hour or so every morning harvesting content from the internet that I read throughout the day. (As I recently detailed, I have a semi-automated typesetting apparatus that transfers these harvested articles from electrons into paper, permitting me to read them safe from the distracting allure of my flashing computer screen.)

There’s always something to read. I’m never satisfied. My brain’s a bottomless pit with a limitless capacity for more words. I feed it every chance I get.

I read instead of watching TV, preferring word consumption over image viewing.

I read while waiting, a practice that walls me off from the rest of you during my rare forays into the real world, such as waiting on line at the bank. Head buried deep in a book, oblivious to life, the bank could be robbed and I’d never know.

I read while walking, a sometimes dangerous practice that has, on occasion, torn my clothing, stubbed my toes and caused internal and external bleeding. For me and others.

I used to read while driving. Then I nearly killed myself by glancing at an article instead of braking. I reacted just in time. One more second, and who knows? So I started taking the bus and subway. It lengthened my two hour roundtrip commute to nearly three hours, but freed up two more hours each day to read.

I used to read while eating with others but, I since learned, this is rude to your eating companions. So I try to eat alone.

I used to read late into the night but this kept my wife awake and left me feeling groggy the next morning. So now I go to sleep one hour earlier and wake up two hours earlier, magically gaining an extra hour of reading each morning while avoiding the grogginess. I suspect that extra hour’s coming out of my life expectancy, but so long as I spend it reading who cares?

I’m a chain reader: on completing one piece of reading material my immediate reflex is to reach for the next piece instead of contemplating what I just read. I regret that, but there is so much to read, so little time to do it, so I must move ever on. I hope I’m sorting it all out in my subconscious.

In rare moments of repose, brought on by the temporary out-of-reachness of my next read, I wonder why I read so much. Is my reading a means to an end, or is it just an end in itself?

Perhaps I’ll find the answer in my next read.

Uni-tasker

Our office went multi-monitor a few years ago, shortly after the flat panel price crash made it economical for everyone, even the lowliest assistants, to put two or three monitors on their desks, making us all look like masters of the universe trading currency futures.

To the extent there was any thought behind this move to surround us with pixels, that thought went something like this: “In this multi-tasking age we need to craft a desktop cockpit environment that enhances the end-user’s multi-usability by presenting multi-graphical interfaces with an always-on click-operable inter-utility.”

And indeed there was a certain click-operable inter-utility to the set-up, what with my emails open on the left, my internet phone interface to the right, my task list floating above somewhere, and my various documents scattered all over the place. My whole digital life splayed out in full multi-monitor dimensionality in front of me—a data cornucopia!

The problem is I was incapable of resisting the allure of the flashing pixels. With all those windows open and active, something was always flashing, seeking my attention, pulling me away from whatever had distracted me the minute before. I wasn’t getting things done like I used to. More troubling, I wasn’t thinking much either, just lots of pointing, clicking, navigating and noting, signifying nothing.

So I unplugged the extra monitor. I resized my default windows to full screen, so now I can only see one at a time.

That helped, but I have to say it wasn’t enough. It was still too easy to switch back and forth between programs, toggling with the ALT-TAB combo, so I had to take a more drastic step: I returned to the land of paper.

Now I can’t eliminate the computer from my work life, and I don’t want to, but I have come to the realization that my little mind is incapable of multi-tasking and, more importantly, incapable of realizing that it is incapable of multi-tasking. So to avoid getting sucked into the void I have to treat my computer like a limited-purpose tool, basically just a card-catalog to the library of the world and a communication delivery device.

Each time I find something to read, or receive an email I need to read, I print it out. Once I am finished finding and printing, I have a stack of paper I can read offline, preferably far from the blinking allure of my computer screen.

It’s old school, and it’s not environmentally friendly, but I find reading on paper suits my uni-tasking mind very well. I have no problem focusing on one page at a time, and when I look up from my reading material I see a blank wall, which is much more conducive to reflection than a flashing screen.

It helps to have access to a good printer, preferably one that can print out two-sided sheets, as there is so much good stuff to read that transporting it can be a problem.

Another practical problem is typography. Simply put, articles you print from the web look terrible. Many websites, such as Outer Life, are formatted exclusively for the screen and provide no printing tools at all. Those that do allow for printing rarely pay much attention to the formatting.

My solution was to cut-and-paste these articles from the web into Notepad, a program that strips them of their formatting, then cut-and-paste the raw text into a pre-formatted template in my word processor designed to produce easy-to-read text that looks professionally typeset. My template is anchored by Adobe Caslon Pro, a typeface specifically designed to look good when printed (unlike the fonts included with your computer, which are designed to look good on the screen). I widen the side margins so that the column of text I read is a little more than five inches wide, which I find optimal for avoiding eye fatigue. A few search-and-replaces ensure that quotes are curly and dashes are wide enough. All this takes me about a minute per article.

Now I realize we are all in the process of figuring out how to manage the cognitive challenges of the information age, so my challenges with multi-tasking aren’t particularly unique or interesting, and I also realize that my reducing the content of our digital age to a sheaf of personally typeset printed documents is an eccentric response to these challenges, one that probably says more about the limitations of my mind, formed as it was in the days before any monitors, let alone multi-monitors, than it does about computers or the common human condition, but I have to say, leaning back in a reclining chair while leafing through a pile of articles typeset to please my eye, my computer blinking away behind my back, out of sight and out of mind, I feel an inordinate pleasure, as if I’ve recaptured a piece of my mind from the machines.

The Purity of the Tune

I love music, but I find it difficult to write about music. There is the whole “dancing about architecture” difficulty in reducing anything so sublime yet ineffable to mere words, but for me the problem runs deeper: music sneaks its way into my brain at a sub-analytical layer, effectively evading my higher analytical processing centers.

And that’s why I love it so, I think, because when I listen I don’t think.

I suppose I could sit at the keyboard and force myself to describe in words what I am hearing, but in doing that I fear I’d break down the barriers that have for so long protected music from my higher reasoning centers.

So I generally avoid the topic.

One thing did occur to me today, though, what with all the hubbub surrounding the death of a pop star, and that was to marvel at the sheer amount of interest in that person that had nothing to do with that person’s music. In fact, with all those extracurriculars to contend with, it is doubful anyone could even listen to that person’s music as music.

One music area I gravitate to is pre-war (WWII) American rural music, a category that includes blues, folk and country tunes. Lacking a better descriptor, I’ve decided to refer to it by the acronym PWARM.

Anyways, listening to Dick Justice’s “Brown Skin Blues,” a PWARM song that’s currently worming its way deep into my brain, it occurred to me that I know nothing about Dick Justice. All I have is his song, his voice, his guitar. So there’s a purity in his tune, a listening experience unadulterated by extraneous information.

This is common with PWARM artists, most of whom recorded a few forgotten tunes before disappearing. When you listen to them, there’s nothing to distract you.

Except news reports about a recently deceased pop star.

("Brown Skin Blues" is available here.)

We Are Not Amused

Okay, so things have been awfully quiet around here for a while. A long while. Three years since I posted with any frequency, but, hey, who’s counting?

I miss Outer Life. Many times I’ve tried to start it up again, but my attempts would end in failure, either a stillborn piece that went nowhere or, worse, a piece that got posted but should have been stillborn.

While trying once again to reignite the spark, yesterday I did something I haven’t done before: I scrolled through the archives and re-read some of the posts I wrote back when this place was humming.

I liked most of what I read. Some of it made me cringe, but a lot of it held up well, if I may be so immodest. I remembered how easy it was to write these pieces, that wonderful feeling of a long piece flowing from my fingertips in real time. A feeling I haven’t had in three years.

And reading these pieces, it became clear to me why I can no longer write them: I am no longer the person who wrote those pieces. When Outer Life started I was more self-absorbed than I am now. I’d spent much of my first four decades trying to figure out the world around me. Then, right around the time I started Outer Life, my curiosity turned inward. What fascinated me was me. While that lasted, posts flowed. Then I turned away from the mirror and went back to looking out the window. And the posts stopped flowing.

My muse left me. Very unamusing.

It’s a bit odd that a website called Outer Life doesn’t work when its author looks outside his life. But then that title wasn’t chosen because it made any sense.

I’m not sure what to do. I have the desire to do something, but I’m not sure there is anything I can do. Scrolling through the archives I noticed that my earliest posts were, if anything, even weaker than my more recent posts. Perhaps, I thought, if I embraced my current awfulness, made peace with the rudderlessness, and just got the site going again, maybe I’d find that groove again. Or at least another groove.

I also did something very uncharacteristic for me: I started an Outer Life Twitter account. I have no idea what I will do with it, but being desperate I’m willing to try anything to kick-start the creativity.

So, I’m loathe to promise anything, but if there’s anyone out there still reading this, I’ll beg your indulgence as I start throwing words at the canvas, hoping some will stick.

Little Man

     Staring out the window at ships in the harbor. In the spring of 1988, that was my job.

     My real job had disappeared with the merger announcement. Collecting data for new projects was no longer a priority, now that there would be no new projects.

     No one told us to stop. The futility was just so obvious, even to the dumbest and most in denial among us, that it only took a few days after the announcement for the work of an entire department to grind to a halt, its data-spinning machinery shut down by an informal but uniform consensus.

     The first week, huddled in cubicles, we traded internal rumors.

     By the next week, most talk turned to life on the outside. We’d started drifting apart.

     The big offices emptied first. Those with initiative and internal connections grabbed lifelines, pulling themselves out of our sinking ship. They promised to keep us in the loop, but once in safe departments, none looked back.

     Those with initiative and external connections just disappeared. With nothing going on, few bothered to give two weeks’ notice. They’d tell their friends and walk out with a banker’s box of pictures. If you missed them in the elevator lobby, you wouldn’t know they’d left until you saw their empty desk or called their dead extension.

     The rest of us sent out resumes. We wore our best suits each day, never knowing when opportunity might knock. We kept showing up. We hung around, ate long lunches, left early, wondering all the time what the hell was going on.

     After a month or so, so many had left that we abandoned our cubicles and grabbed the vacant offices. Mine had a nice view of the harbor, a couch and a huge desk.

     The desk was too big for me, its vast polished wooden top a constant reminder of the work I wasn’t doing. A desk needs to be cluttered.

     The couch was a constant temptation to loosen the tie, shut the door, lie back and sleep the day away. Everyday I thought of doing it, but I never did.

     What I did instead was stare outside at the view. I’d recline in the ludicrously large leather wingback chair, put my feet up on the massive empty desk and stare out at the ships floating in and out of the harbor.

     The office was old enough to have windows that actually opened so, as the days got warmer, my reveries would be punctuated with sounds of engines and horns and gulls drifting up on sea breezes from below.

     A dream job, I suppose, but I wasn’t happy.

     I wasn’t worried for my future. I was young enough to know that things would turn around, that I’d find something eventually, so that wasn’t what was getting me down.

     And it’s not that I missed the data job or mourned the department’s loss. Much of the work was tedious, the subject matter often dreary. I never saw myself doing it for long.

     I think I missed having a purpose. On even the most mundane tasks, I used to try to make small improvements, to achieve small efficiencies, growing as I progressed. So even though I was low on the ladder, my daily masteries made me feel much bigger.

     Now that I wiled my days away staring out the window, my only task figuring out how to keep my feet elevated without having them go to sleep, I lost my sense of mastery, of progress. Sunken into that huge chair, dwarfed by the vastness of my empty desk, I looked like I felt: a shrunken little man.

     The window staring gig ended a few months later, soon after the merger closed. We scattered, losing track of each other, our time at the department reduced to a line or two on our resumes.

     I eventually found a new path, and started growing again, but even today, over 20 years later, a part of me remains permanently diminished, haunted by that little man. 

A View From the Top 2%

     Last year my family’s annual income exceeded $250,000. As a result, we will be one of the 2% of American families required to pay for the new spending proposed by our President.

     I am struggling to figure out how I should feel about this.

     My initial thoughts were dark, I’ll admit. If there’s anything I like less than paying taxes, it’s paying more taxes. And if there’s anything I like less than paying more taxes, it’s knowing that 98% of my fellow Americans will not be sharing this burden with me.

     In a democracy, anytime you find yourself in a group of 2% paying for a group of 98%, you’ve got a problem. How do you persuade the 98% to switch from a program in which you pay for their government benefits to one in which they pay for their government benefits? Assuming they hate paying taxes as much as I do, I’m not sure how one does this.

     My income dropped last year, and I expect will drop even more this year. At this rate, someday I will drop out of the top 2%. I suppose that is one solution, but I’m not too excited about it.

     In any event, our fiscal hole is so deep it can’t possibly be filled by the top 2%. The President can tax us up to 100% and he’ll still need more, lots more. So someday my pain will be yours.

     I work hard for the money. Even in the halcyon rich-friendly days of Bush I and II, when I was permitted to keep slightly more than half of what I earned, I often dreamed of working less hard. Too many late nights in the office. Too many lost weekends at the office. Too many interrupted or cancelled vacations. Now that my state and federal governments would like more than half of what I earn, my idle daydreams of quitting the rat race are shifting to active plans.

     But I can’t just quit. While I earn a lot, I don’t have nearly enough to retire. I think of myself as one of the working rich – the minute I stop working is the minute I stop being rich. A few years ago I thought I’d have enough to retire in my fifties. Now with my house value plunging, and my 401(k) awash in red ink, it looks like I’ll be working into my seventies. So stopping work isn’t an option for me.

     Instead I need to be more tax-savvy. In exchange for its burdens, a job offers a bundle of benefits. Some of these benefits are taxed, while others aren’t. Taxable benefits include salary, bonus and stock grants. Tax-free benefits include job security, time off, status and the freedom to do what interests you. As tax rates increase, the value of taxable benefits decreases, and the relative value of tax-free benefits increases. So if I can shift my compensation away from salary and bonus and into free time and freedom to do what interests me, my tax bill will be smaller but my life may be richer.

     A classmate of mine from graduate school is now a professor. Every so often the green-eyed devil possesses him, usually in spring when his best students leave for starting salaries that exceed his. This seems unjust to him, but that is because he is only looking at one benefit to the exclusion of all others. Sure his students make more money than he does, but is that all that matters in comparing their jobs to his? Of course not. Tenure gives him complete job security, while his students are struggling to prove themselves in sink-or-swim environments. He has huge amounts of free time, including three months off each year, while students rejoice when they have a clear weekend. He enjoys the elevated status of a professor at a prestigious university while his students are grunts scrambling to hold on to the lowest rung of the ladder. And, best of all, he has almost complete freedom to pursue whatever interests him, while his students must toil away their youths serving their masters.

     His students may earn more money, but who is richer?

     My friend, whether he realizes it or not, is extremely adroit at tax avoidance. Clearly I have much to learn. And I feel his green-eyed devil possessing me.

When Trouble Came

     When I was in first grade, we “wrote” our autobiographies. We did this by filling out a questionnaire that asked questions such as: “What is your favorite color?” and “How many doors does your house have?”

     Not the most scintillating stuff, but my parents nevertheless preserved this sample of my early autobiographical writing for two reasons: (1) I pretended I grew up in Texas when in fact I’d never been there and (2) when it asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” I responded: “A milloinaire” [sic].

     I remember thinking if I had a million dollars, I’d have the freedom to do pretty much whatever I wanted. But my parents thought this was evidence of a budding taste for the good life, often referring to me as “The Big Spender” (my allowance was 25 cents a week) and joking that I’d somehow developed champagne tastes in a powdered milk family.

     What made that funny was we really did drink powdered milk. And eat food from dented cans. Perhaps all this ruined my taste buds – by the time I got older and could afford champagne I found I didn’t like it. Same with caviar. Alas, no champagne wishes or caviar dreams for me.

     But I never lost sight of my desire to be a millionaire, though with inflation I’d now need to be the Six Million Dollar Man in order to give me the same buying power I would have had in first grade. I’m not at the Steve Austin level yet, but I still hope to get there someday.

     In fact, I need to get there, for I’ve come to recognize that a bleak sort of financial insecurity gnaws at the deepest levels of my being.  Call it my fear of powdered milk. In good times, I worry that things will go bad, and in bad times, I simply worry. My wolf is always at my door.

     Always looking on the dark side has insulated me from get-rich-quick schemes and the manias that repeatedly infect investors, thereby preserving my capital, but, of course, there is also a dark side to my dark side: my fear keeps my own investment returns down in the passbook savings range, barely beating inflation.

     Seared into my mind is an panel discussion I witnessed many years ago on TV in which a bearish money manager made a convincing case that the then-current investing craze was an ill-conceived bubble that would soon burst. One of the other investors on the panel retorted: “You may be right, but for a long time now a lot of people have made a lot of money being wrong.”

     I agreed with the bear – clearly things at that time were headed for ruin – and I agreed with the other panelist – clearly a lot of money had been made by being wrong. Probably most of the money that’s made is made by being wrong. Maybe only a few isolated geniuses seem to do well by doing it right. And even then, I have my doubts about most of them.

     So these days I’m left betwixt and between: Just as my worst fears are being confirmed, and for the first time in my adult life I’m in the right, I recognize that if I’m going to make any money at some point I need to leave the shadows behind and walk in the light.

     While I await my conversion experience, I can at least console myself that there’s no chance I’ll ever go back to powdered milk: I’ve become lactose intolerant. And until I get that infusion of faith, I’ll keep reciting the following verses from Housman:

     I to my perils
       Of cheat and charmer
       Came clad in armour
         By stars benign.
     Hope lies to mortals
       And most believe her
       But man's deceiver
         Was never mine.

     The thoughts of others
       Were light and fleeting,
       Of lovers' meeting
         Or luck or fame.
     Mine were of trouble,
       And mine were steady,
       So I was ready
         When trouble came.

The Sage

     I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I like the way they think.

     Now I realize that’s a gross generalization, that your average old person probably thinks little better than your average non-old person, and that there’s no fool like an old fool, particularly one with his pants pulled up to his armpits, but here I’m talking about the tip of the tail, the smart old people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking and learning, compounding their understanding in a way that I, with my comparatively fewer years and my shallower well of life experience, cannot yet hope to do.

     There’s one old guy I admire so much I think of him as the Sage. I first met him at a charity tribute dinner, one in which we’d both been dragooned into attending to bolster a powerful CEO’s curiously fragile ego. We were seated next to each other. I introduced myself, he asked me what I did and before I knew it he’d skipped the chit chat and was interrogating me, determined to drain from me any knowledge I had that he didn’t. He doesn’t do what I do, but he already knew inside stuff that even I didn’t know. But what really impressed me was how easily he integrated what I gave him with what he already had, spinning interesting theories and fitting disparate pieces together in ways that had never occurred to me.

     It was like I was wearing blinders and he wasn’t. I felt stupid yet exhilarated, as if the clouds had parted and revealed, for the first time, how incredibly high a mountain I had to climb just as I realized I loved climbing.

     Over the years I’ve seen him at a few more public events. He still interrogates me, but I’ve managed to ask enough questions of my own to learn a little about him.

     His formal education ended in high school, but his real education never stopped. He has a fanatical devotion to lifelong learning. He needs to figure things out. He’s always reading, always questioning people, always mastering something new. Like all wise people, he knows what he doesn’t know, and it drives him nuts. He can’t accept “I don’t know” for an answer from himself.

     With all his knowledge, he doesn’t come across as a know-it-all. Partly that’s because he likes to focus on what he doesn’t know, because that’s what interests him. Partly it’s because he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of him, so he feels no need to put on a show. Mostly I think it’s just his extreme intellectual honesty. Even his declarations sound like they have question marks, as if he’s inviting us to correct him if he’s wrong. “Help me get this right,” he says before he teaches.

     Listening to him, I wonder time and again why he’s so unusual. Why isn’t everyone like this? The world is such a fascinating place, there’s so much to learn, yet so many of us run from its knowledge. We don’t want to know. Nuggets of knowledge are just lying  there for the taking, but we pass them by, never looking down, lost in our own little worlds.

     He has other qualities I appreciate. He’s not a dreamer. Too old for that, he says. What you get from him is unvarnished realism, sometimes very painful realism. No sugar-coating: that’s fuzzy thinking. When your head’s in the clouds, he brings you back to earth. “Listen: It is what it is. That’s all I know. You can figure out on your own time what it should be.”

     He’s thrifty. Or cheap, depending on how you look at it. Drives an old beater of a car, something that simply isn’t done in Los Angeles. I don’t know where he lives, but I expect it’s the same house he bought in 1950 when he was first starting out. What’s odd is I suspect he may be rich, but he’s not saying, I’m not asking, and there’s no telling from looking at him. I like that.

     He’s not a particularly nice guy. Small talk and other social graces elude him. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in getting to know me, or anyone else I’ve seen him with. When I see him at an event, he usually recognizes me and remembers what we spoke about the last time we talked, which could have been months or even years earlier, but he’s never bothered to remember my name. That part isn’t important to his learning project. What’s most disconcerting is the way he ends a conversation – he just turns away without a word. The first time I wondered if it was something I said but, having had it happen time and again, I’ve figured it’s just his way.

     One trait he shares with many of his generation is a deficiency of entitlement. He’s said that every day he wakes up wondering how he’s going to justify his existence for another 24 hours. He also says the world owes him nothing. I trace this back to his formative years in the Great Depression and World War II, a time when many had the entitlement knocked out of them. They take nothing for granted. My parents were like that and did their best to strip the any sense of entitlement out of me. Modern psychologists and self-esteem advocates would say that’s a bad thing, and I’ve certainly suffered for it at times, but overall I find I can connect best with people who share my lack of entitlement.

     He’s currently justifying his existence by writing a treatise on life and a few things he’s learned about fishing. He says this jokingly, but I think he’s serious. It’s just the sort of thing a Sage should do, bequeathing his most valuable asset, his knowledge, to society. In case he is serious, I’ve offered to copy edit the manuscript to ensure that I get my hands on it.

     I really hope he’s serious.

The Wealth Effect Mirage

     It’s a wonder my relatives still call me for economic advice. When they start throwing themselves a pity party, bemoaning all the money they’ve lost as house values crater, or stocks plummet, I can only reply:

     You’re not as rich as you think you are. You never were.

     Over the past few years people bid up the prices of your homes, stocks and other assets, but now it turns out those people never really had the money to pay for those assets. They were just borrowing and flipping with funny money, a game that allowed them to pay way more for these assets than anyone would using real money. If I offered you $1 million for your house, payable in Monopoly money, would that make your house worth $1 million? That game’s over. Why are you still playing?

     As I said, it’s a wonder they still call. Yet for some reason they do. Strange times.

The Mess Explained

     I work for a company, and sometimes I wear a suit and tie to work. In my extended family, this qualifies me as a business expert.

     So in times of economic crisis, like these, I often hear from distant family members wanting an explanation of what’s really happening.

     I’ve learned over the years that, in explaining economic matters, I must avoid jargon and assume no familiarity with any concepts. Further, I must be prepared on those rare occasions when my explanations result in a flicker of understanding for instinctive hostility to both the economic concepts and to me.

     So I tread carefully, using plain language and simplifying wherever possible.

     My extended family’s been calling a lot lately, wanting to know how we got into the current mess. It’s simple, I say. People wanted more than they could afford, so they borrowed more than they could afford to repay. Both borrowers and lenders assumed house prices would continue to rise, allowing borrowers not only to repay any shortfall out of their real estate profits, but to borrow even more than they could otherwise afford to repay. For ten years this act of faith worked. Last year, it didn’t. Now borrowers are buried under loans they can’t repay, and lenders are figuring out they’ll never get paid back, and those who lent to the lenders are wondering if they’ll ever get paid back, and those who invested in the lenders are wondering if anything will be left for them. So borrower are worried, lenders are worried, investors are worried, and the government’s going to make everything better by borrowing more money.

     Is that clear?

Outside Interests

   Years ago, in an attempt to humanize us, an enterprising staffer in our HR department added an “Outside interests” data field to our personal contact pages on the company’s intranet.

     So now when you click on Carl in payables you learn not only his phone extension and office location, but also that he likes movies and Italian food. Before, you’d just call Carl and ask when he was going to cut your reimbursement check. Now, armed with this outside interest data, you can ask Carl for your reimbursement check and whether he’s had any good spaghetti lately. Before you know it, Carl’s not just a dilatory check cutting functionary, he’s become a real human being.

     I’m all for humanization, and I got the memo instructing us to update our intranet profiles, but I nevertheless had a hard time figuring out what outside interests to list.

     On one hand, I have too many interests. The whole world, and everything and everyone in it, is potentially an interest of mine. They only give us room for three interests. How do I choose?

     On the other hand, I have too few interests. While the whole world is open to me, at any time I am intensely focused on one interest to the exclusion of all others. So if you ask me today, my only outside interest is pre-war American rural music. If you asked me last week, my only interest was compiling an anti-thesaurus exploding the myth of synonyms. And the week before that? I can’t even remember anymore.

     This is a problem, both because it isn’t practical to change our outside interests on a weekly basis and because I don’t want to become too associated with interests I will soon ditch. For instance, a distant branch of my wife’s family knows me only as a golfer, an interest that was burning brightly about 15 years ago when I first met them. The interest extinguished shortly afterwards, but every time I see them it’s all about golf. Every Christmas and birthday, I get golf cards and gifts. I suppose I should tell them I no longer play golf, but then they may figure out I’ve been lying to them for years (you didn’t really love that testicle-shaped golf ball holder?) and I’d have to divulge my current interest to them and that would just set us off on a new spiral of awkward misguidedness, particularly if I have to explain the anti-thesaurus.

     All this assumes the point is to list my own personal outside interests which, of course, is completely not the point. This is work, not play. My real interests are irrelevant. The only interests to list are those best calibrated to advance my career prospects.

     So, to take an easy case, my interest in surreptitiously surveying the curve of a woman’s breasts is one of my few long-standing interests but, if listed, would not further my career prospects.

     Jocks seem to do well here, so I considered inventing a sporting interest. The problem is, it’s hard to fake it. Major spectator sports are out – day in and day out, their fans demonstrate a granular expertise I can’t come close to faking. I toyed with some obscure sports, but there you’re taking the chance that someone in the office will actually know something about rugby and demonstrate it on you in the hallway.

     Getting perhaps a little too meta, I considered but quickly rejected interests such as “God and mammon,” “truth, justice and the American way” and “making my boss look good.”

     In the end, I settled on a simple but effective “None.” That one word does double-duty, assuring the gunners that “I’m a workaholic” while winking “I’m too cool for school” to the ironically detached.

     Unfortunately, it also conveyed “malcontent” to a higher-up. He instructed me to get with the program, intimating that the program did not accept “None” as an outside interest.

     So I debated once again what interests to list. This time it was even more difficult, knowing, as I now did, that at least one higher-up with a finely calibrated smart-ass detector would be scrutinizing whatever I wrote. It paralyzed me.

     Realizing that cooking up more palatable interests would take some time, and that I couldn’t leave the “None” just sitting there, I called HR and asked the chirpy associate to delete the offending “None.”

     “You want us to just leave it blank?”

     “Yes.”

     “But isn’t that the same thing?”

     I tried explaining that it wasn’t the same thing, at least to one higher-up.

     “Well you have to have an interest. The system won’t accept a blank. So what are your interests?”

     Long pause while I conducted a furious internal rewind of the outside interests I’d tried and previously rejected. I thought I’d have more time!

     “Everyone wants to noodle over those interests. How hard can it be? Just tell me your interests and I’ll input them now. Do you like movies?”

     Desperate visions of “movies and Italian food” tattooed forever on my forehead scrambled my mind long enough to resurrect a previous reject and shoot it out my temporarily mad mouth:

     “God and mammon.”

     “God and Mammoth? So you like skiing! I’ll just write ‘religion and skiing’ and we’re good to go. See, that wasn’t so hard.”

     Click.

     It’s not so bad, actually. I don’t know how to ski, or, for that matter, anything about skiing you wouldn’t learn by watching the Winter Olympics, but I’ve successfully deflected a dreaded ski invitation by pointing at my knee and ruefully saying “ACL.” Too painful to discuss.

     And the religion part earned me some cred with the not insignificant God-fearing segment of the office population. Like everyone else, they used to think I was an anti-social asshole, now they see me as an anti-social asshole with a halo. Makes a huge difference to some.

     And now, at last, I’ve been humanized.

Ear Candy

     When my pre-teen daughter’s peers get together, the first thing they ask each other is: “Who do want to win American Idol?” The next thing they must know is: “Who’s your favorite Jonas Brother?”

     On the basis of this data, they forge their self-identities and begin to socially sort themselves, much as an earlier generations of girls sorted themselves on the basis of their favorite Beatle or New Kid or any of the numerous other non-threatening post-pubescent all-male but still-sorta-feminine singing groups who perform this valuable identity-building and social-sorting role for our pre-teen females.

     Until recently, my daughter couldn’t answer these questions, as we don’t watch American Idol and, though we’ve heard the Jonas Brothers on the radio, we’ve never actually seen them. And seeing is the whole point of the Jonas Brothers experience, or so I’m told, so she really can’t pick a favorite.

     In short, we’re raising a freak child.

     I’m okay with that, being a freak adult myself, but my wife, perhaps moved by some vestigial memory of her favorite Bay City Roller, is not okay with that.

     So that’s why last Tuesday night found me and my daughter planted in front of the TV watching American Idol, perhaps the last Americans to be initiated into its mysteries.  My daughter’s job: Find a favorite contestant. My job: Avoid snarky comments. Notepad in hand, she dutifully recorded the name of each contestant and distinguishing physical characteristics, while I did my best impression of a couch potato, switching off my brain and slumping back in slack-jawed silence.

     That didn’t last long. The sights and sounds of this, our most popular television show, simply overwhelmed the cultural criticism compartment of my brain, pressing each of its hot buttons, which, against my will and contrary to my explicit instructions, caused it to whir into action. It was all I could do to keep my recently slack-jawed mouth shut.

     As my bottled-up brain gathered steam and threatened to blow, my daughter earnestly jotted away, oblivious to my turmoil.

     And that’s how it should be, for she’s still just a child, with a child’s view of the world, and I don’t want to distort it with my adult opinions. As her parent, it is my duty to guide her development, not supplant it. So, let her reach her own conclusions, I kept repeating to myself, as the ravings in my head grew ever more feverish.

     I cracked only once, wondering out loud how Bob Dylan would have done as a contestant on this show, but I left it at that.

     And she ended up selecting two favorites, a male and a female, and gathered enough observations about the other contestants to carry her through the social whirl until the next week’s show.

To Serve and Deflect

     Flattery will get you everywhere. At least, that is, when you’re dealing with me.

     “We really need someone with your insights and experience,” the head of my kids’ school said when she asked me to join its board. That was all I needed to hear.

     What she really needed was my money, of course. And what’s truly sad is that I knew that was really what she needed, but my fragile self-esteem craves flattery so I said “yes.”

     Even sadder still is that I don’t have anything like the money she thought I had. So her well-executed flattery wasn’t nearly as profitable as she'd hoped.

     Ten months later, I’m sitting at a long table late at night staring hard at a piece of paper in my lap so as to make it appear that I’m engrossed in some intensely analytical exercise related to something written on the sheet and not just averting my eyes from hers at the head of the table.

     She’s just finished another “someone” plea, as in “we need someone to…” or “it would be great if someone would….” In this case, someone needs to chair the fundraising committee as it launches the school’s next capital campaign. I’m not looking, but I can see what’s happening: her eyes are boring holes in each trustee’s head, one by one, scanning back and forth, as we stare down, our minds desperately searching for plausible-sounding excuses that’ll explain why we’ll be out of town and working around the clock and tending to a dying father and unable to use a phone or the computer for the next six months.

     One glance at that Gorgon turns you into a volunteer.

     The silence is excruciating. People, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Soon one of us must crack. Please, oh please, just let it not be me.

     I don’t have to be here. Yet here I am. Not for the first time I wonder: Why do I do this?

     It isn’t the flattery, for that stopped the minute I joined the board. It isn’t my sense of duty to the school and my community, for I have none. It isn’t the contacts I’m making on this board, for my goal is simply to avoid these people, arriving just before meetings begin and racing out the door as soon as they end. And it isn’t to support my kids, who attend this school, for since joining the board I’ve seen enough of this school’s sausage-making that we’re applying to send them to other schools. We’re out as soon as we get in.

     Actually, I suppose in a sense I am here to support my kids. When applying to other schools, you must get the head of your current school to write a (hopefully) glowing recommendation for your kid. The problem is, submitting the recommendation form to the head of school telegraphs your intention to leave the school. In other words, you’re now a traitor.

     You have hope if the head of school hates your guts so much she’ll do anything to ensure you leave, even if that means she has to swallow the bile and write a few nice words on your recommendation form.

     Or maybe she thinks she has a chance to keep your youngest because the better school down the road isn’t expected to have any openings at his level next year.

     Most of all, it helps if she’s just about to launch a major capital campaign and needs lots of money from your friends and acquaintances. So if you must leave, she hopes you leave quietly. Preferably with a good word for the school if anyone asks. And preferably after making a sizable donation to assuage your guilt for abandoning the school at its hour of greatest need.

     It’s the guilt, after all, that explains why I remain on this board. She peddles a particularly potent strain of guilt, blending constant crises with appalling sacrifices, in order to cement us in our board seats and goad us into looking up when she’s looking for yet another someone.

     The school is always teetering on the brink of something, which is why she always needs someone. That’s the constant crisis method of management. It works best when the people you manage aren’t motivated. I may be projecting a little here, but judging by the deafening silence at the table tonight, most of my fellow trustees share my lack of motivation. Each of us is thinking: “If I don’t volunteer, I will destroy the school, pushing it and all our children and the dedicated teachers and staff over the precipice to their doom.” That's the guilt talking.

     I said “most” trustees are unmotivated because there are two trustees with boundless motivation. Not enough to cover the board’s collective deficit (hence tonight’s need for yet another someone), but enough to subject themselves and their families to such extreme hardships in service of the school that it puts the rest of us to shame. Their appalling sacrifices, though repellent on one level, stoke strong feelings of guilt at deeper levels. How can I refuse to co-chair this year’s silent auction when last year Arthur did it all by himself, personally wheedling and cajoling free goods and services from over 100 local businesses to support a school that caters to the rich? How can I refuse to donate more when Alan took out a second mortgage on his home when the school had that liquidity crisis?

     How can I, indeed? Yet I do.

     Still looking down.

     Someone PLEASE crack!

     This is getting unbearable. She’s never held out this long before. Thankfully I have this paper in my lap, a paper so fascinating its hold on my eyes looks to be permanent. Do I have a pen? It would look even better if I was writing on the paper, jotting notes or making calculations or something, for I am a busy man, and busy men never stop working, projects everywhere all the time, the last guy you’d ask to do anything. But if you want something done, ask someone who’s busy. Damn! Surely she knows that. Wrong strategy. But if she did call on me, I’d pretend I didn’t hear her, engrossed as I am in this utterly absorbing piece of paper. And if she raised her voice and called on me again, I’d pretend I didn’t hear the original question for my mind was elsewhere, on this paper in my lap to be exact, and it would look so much better if I only had a pen, for the paper is nearly blank, a save-the-date for this year’s school carnival, hardly the sort of topic to occupy my mind, or any mind, for more than a few seconds. It would look so much better if I could just scrawl some figures on it.

     And that’s when I looked up. My pen, somewhere on the table, eluded my blind reach, forcing my eyes up long enough to find it, which was all the opening she needed to pounce, triumphantly bellowing my name for the all the room to hear that I was the someone.

     As they looked up and breathed a collective sigh of relief, some shaking their heads at their close call, a few maybe taking pity on me and my family for undertaking this appalling sacrifice, I flailed momentarily, unable to meet her gaze, looking down reflexively, hoping it would all go away, but of course it wouldn’t, and I knew that, and that's when I felt a heretofore unknown strength growing in my body, along with a backbone, for I realized then that I also knew something else:

     I’d already played the trustee card.

     Last week we interviewed at the school down the street, and my wife, per our carefully-plotted plan, let it drop in the context of something else that I had been busy at a trustee’s meeting, and at that the admissions officer perked up immediately, for she now knew two essential things about me: I had trustee-level bucks, and I was sufficiently vain and gullible to subject myself to the appalling sacrifices expected of a school trustee. We could see the visions of dollar signs dancing in her head. When the admissions officer called the headmaster in to meet with us, an honor he rarely bestows, or at least that’s what they wanted us to think, for they mentioned it several times, I knew with a high degree of certainty that whether or not the head of our current school wrote a good recommendation, our eldest would be getting a fat envelope from the new school in a few weeks, which meant my youngest would soon be classified as a “sibling of a current student,” which meant he’d rocket to the top of the waiting list, which meant I no longer needed any of this, if I ever did.

     Now looking into her eyes, meeting her gaze, daring her to blink, I cleared my throat, the room went silent, and I regretted to inform her, I said, that unfortunately we couldn’t undertake the assignment. We had just committed to another project, you see, one that may not be as important as the school’s capital campaign, but one that’s nevertheless close to our hearts: bringing clean water to West African villages. I know it’s not much, but these simple water pumps have ripple effects: They allow the village girls, for the first time, to attend school, their lives previously devoted to fetching water from distant wells. The new pumps also help eradicate the scourge of the guinea worm, a truly nasty creature that breeds in pools of filthy water surrounding old-style water holes where it attaches itself to the bodies of its victims, feasting on their innards as it grows to lengths of three feet or more, all the while inflicting a burning and debilitating pain. The pumps, and their clean water, also help these people fight off many other fatal diseases and hideous afflictions, nightmarish conditions so distant from our lives that our pampered minds can’t even conceive of them.

     If only I’d known you’d need me to chair the school’s capital campaign. But I didn’t, so now my hands are tied. What can I do? I am so sorry for this.

     Now she’s looking down. As are the other trustees.

     And now I’ve got to find me a water project in West Africa. Quick.

FYI

I haven’t posted anything in a few months. I believe the standard procedure in this sort of situation is to apologize to one’s readers and promise to post more frequently in the future. Or, if one has decided to hang it up, to apologize and say farewell.

I can do neither.

While common courtesy may require an apology to those few diehards who’ve kept the faith, continuing to monitor this site in the hope that words will flow again, I fear that any apology from me would imply that I’ve breached an obligation to you. I have no such obligation, and the minute I start thinking I do is the minute this becomes a job. If I want to keep this going, I can’t let that happen.

Of course, judging by the evidence of recent postings, or the lack thereof, one could fairly conclude that job or not, all I’m offering here is the sound of silence.

But if you listen carefully, you might hear the faint sound of gears whirring off in the distance, as the machinery in my head continues to process words for possible future display on this site. I can’t predict when, or even if, the machinery will actually produce anything, but I can assure you that I tend it assiduously in the hope that it will.