Do you really want to know the future?
Once again, hanging out at my local café has tossed someone fascinating into my path. This time it’s a middle-aged Eastern European guy who goes by an extremely American name, does entertainingly deft card tricks, pleasantly allows me to practice my rusty French with him, and can put on half a dozen fairly good accents, from Texan to Scottish. Oh, and he’s kind of psychic.
I know, I know. According to the stereotype, I should assume he’s a con man and keep my guard up and my hand on my wallet. But I’m also a decent researcher, and I remember small details that people tell me, and, well, he is who he says he is, and he doesn’t need my money, that’s for damn sure. So I enjoy talking to him — about language, about magic, about tai chi and yoga, about cities each of us has visited. And about what he sees when he looks at people.
The first day I met him, he turned to the woman sitting at the table next to mine and said, “Your name is Audra, isn’t it?” She blinked in surprise and said, “It’s Audrey.” The next time we met, he pointed out someone sitting on the other side of the room and said, “He drives a truck or a car for a living.” I happened to know that the man he was pointing at is a retired cabbie. I once asked him to tell me what he saw when he looked at a friend who was standing at the counter ordering coffee; he rattled off a few sentences that were accurate and perceptive and pretty damn surprising, considering that I knew for a fact my friend and my new acquaintance had only met once before, and that very briefly. Psychic? Intuitive? A champion eavesdropper? All I know is, it was fascinating. So you can understand why I couldn’t resist asking him to draw a bead on me.
He got a couple of things wrong. For example, he assumed, as many people do, that the name I go by isn’t the one I was given, that it was a middle name or a nickname or something I adopted in adulthood. (For the record, it is my real name, on my birth certificate and everything.) But he nailed a few extremely specific details that someone who barely knows me really shouldn’t know. Then he said, “The only thing that really matters to you right now is love.” That’s a reasonable assumption when you’re talking to a single woman of a certain age, right? Except that he immediately added, almost apologetically, “You’re going to find him, and it’s going to happen in three years. He’s 35 right now, so he’ll be 38 then. He’s the love you’ve always been looking for. But it will only be temporary. Two years, maybe three.”
He was so specific, I couldn’t help asking: Then what? He breaks up with me? I break up with him? One of us dies? He shrugged and moved on to another subject.
I’m not saying I believe that that’s how things will happen. I don’t; I can’t. But it turned a cliché I’ve parroted mindlessly into a Zen koan I’ve been pondering ever since. If you knew, without question, that you could have the relationship you’d always dreamed of, but that you would have to relinquish it it after just a short while, would you still be willing to embark on it in the first place? Or would you pass up the pleasure in order to avoid the heartbreak?
In other words, if you knew in advance that the loss was inevitable, would it be better to love and lose than never to have loved at all?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (4)Phobias
Everyone has an irrational fear or two. I am, for example, afraid of spiders, even though I am much bigger than they are and have big stompy shoes with which to squash them. Tonight I spotted one in my pantry and froze in fear while it scuttled away under the cabinets. Now I keep thinking that it’s going to sneak back out tonight, make the long trek down the hall and through the living room, climb up into my bed, and…what? Wrap me up like Frodo in Shelob’s Lair? At worst, it will bite me and leave an itchy welt, and then I’ll roll over in my sleep and adios, arachnid. I know, logically, that I don’t need to worry about it. But I see something with eight legs and my animal hindbrain screams EEK EEK EEK RUN RUN RUN.
In a similar vein, I’ve only very recently overcome a years-long terror of thunderstorms. When I say “terror,” I mean “full-on anxiety attack” — shaking, sweating, racing heart, the whole deal. The house I grew up in was at the very top of a hill, in a part of the country known for thunderstorms, and not very long after we moved into it, the house next door got struck by lightning. Our house shook, and we all thought the shingles flying by outside were from our own roof, until we ran out and saw a hole the size of a compact car in the neighbors’ roof. After that, whenever it started to rain — even after we got lightning rods — my mother would insist we all gather in the kitchen, the room with the fewest windows, until the storm passed. She would even wake us up in the middle of the night and herd us downstairs, telling us it wasn’t safe to be in our bedrooms. And so my thunderstorm phobia was born. It’s taken a decade of living in San Francisco, where lightning is rare indeed, for me to stop trembling at the sight of dark rainclouds.
Today, I still don’t think I could sleep through a storm, but I do think I could manage to stay in my bed instead of wanting to crawl under it. Of course, that depends on whether there’s a spider down there.
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What are your irrational fears?
Filed under fears | Comments (3)The littlest big city in the world
Some people hate New York City. They find it cold and unwelcoming, overwhelming and intimidating, maybe even scary. I, on the other hand, just spent five days there, and my time was chock-full of happy accidents. It started when my flight arrived a full hour early, which allowed me to get to where I was staying in Brooklyn in plenty of time for dinner and gossip with my hostess, and it just got better from there.
I stumbled on a food cart in Midtown that serves excellent tamales for $1.50 each.
I found a cashmere hoodie in a thrift store for twelve bucks.
I met one of my favorite editors in person, walked into her office with no story ideas, but walked out with two assignments and the distinct possibility of a third.
I randomly encountered two Gutenberg Bibles in as many days.
I had a great subway conversation with a German man who lives in London and is making a documentary about a group of black lesbian rappers from Tampa.
I discovered shortly before arriving that I was going to be in town at the same time as the New York Pen Show, and learned the day after I arrived that I would be in town on one of the few days each year that both Marble Cemeteries are open to the public, and I managed to make time for both.
I walked into one of the cemeteries and someone said my name. it was a friend I originally met in San Francisco years ago who had no idea I was going to be on the Lower East Side that day.
I discovered that another friend lives right around the corner from the other cemetery — as in, I called her from there, and she waved a window squeegee on a long handle over the wall to show me where she was, and I walked around the corner to meet her.
I discovered that the Met is open late on Saturday nights, with a bar and live music, and in rambling through it, I found an entire room of Renaissance art I’d somehow never seen before. Then I had prosecco and listened to classical music.
And this morning, when I went out to get coffee before heading to the airport, I bypassed the place with the long line and discovered that the place across the street, which was empty, had much better coffee and friendlier dogs.
Of course, I enjoyed some planned pleasures, too: meeting friends I hadn’t seen in a while, seeing a long-planned taping of the Daily Show, eating a corned beef sandwich the size of my head… But for me, the magic of New York is that anything could happen, and probably will, and that I’ll accept it when it does. I need to figure out how to bring that magic home to my everyday life.
On walking the talk
Not too long ago, I got email from a former client who wanted to know if I was available to take on a project. I’d worked for this person for a long time, but I’d stopped several years ago because it had become an increasingly difficult relationship. He got into the habit of calling me to say he was sending me email, then sending the email, then calling to see if I’d received the email, and calling me again a few minutes later to ask why I hadn’t answered it yet. He started calling and emailing me late at night and on weekends, then getting angry at me when I didn’t respond until business hours. (I note for the record that no lives depended on what I was doing for him.) I tolerated this boundary-busting until the day he called me on my personal cell phone…on a Saturday afternoon…and yelled at me for not being more easily reachable. The thing is, I was on vacation, and he’d known about it for weeks. And that was the final straw. When I got back, I told him I would not be working for him any longer.
He was astonished. Honestly, so was I. He made up the majority of my income stream; I was afraid I couldn’t replace it. I’d taken so much crap from him that I think we both assumed I would never walk away. But I had finally reached the point where I would rather have taken a minimum-wage McJob than deal with him any longer.
He reinforced my decision by refusing, for about six months, to take no for an answer. He called me every few weeks, trying to lure me back. At first he tried flattery: he had a ton of work and I was the only person he trusted to do it the way he wanted it done. Then he tried passive aggression: he was overwhelmed without my help and it just wasn’t fair of me to leave him in the lurch like that. Finally, he tried bribery: he would double my pay. (I’m not sure how he thought that revealing he’d been significantly lowballing me would endear him to me.) I was steadfast in saying no, no, and no again. He eventually seemed to get the message; his recent email was the first time I’d heard from him in a couple of years.
I don’t ordinarily turn down work — expecially not in the current economy. But my answer to his latest offensive was still no.
In my work life, I’m aware that I’m damn good at what I do, and I expect to be treated as the hot commodity I know I am. And part of this journey I’m on is learning to apply that same attitude to the rest of my life. I confess that I’ve dated half-assed asshats who blew hot and cold, because I didn’t trust I could do better. I admit that I’ve accepted disrespect from people who claim to love me, simply because they’re family or because I’ve known them for years. I suspect that being a writer makes me more easily swayed than most by pretty, pretty words. But as one of my favorite bloggers frequently says, “Love is an action.” And the words need to match the actions.
And that’s as true for me as it is for the people I allow into my life.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (4)Click. Click. Click.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about wanting to focus on my photography (sorry, I’m a punster). Now I have an opportunity to do exactly that, and to push myself to do it well. In a nutshell, I have an assignment to write a magazine article about San Francisco’s coffee roasters. I’m supposed to provide the artwork, either by paying a photographer out of my own fee or by acquiring photos some other way. And I realized that I have the equipment and the know-how to do a decent job of it myself — maybe not as well as someone who takes pictures for a living, but certainly well enough to satisfy the needs of this particular magazine.
And so today, when I took my laptop to one of the city’s leading coffee roasters, I also had my DSLR in the bag. And after I interviewed the owner (who was, incidentally, a lot of fun to talk to — I love when a workmanlike interview suddenly turns into a real conversation), I took a bunch of shots of the cafe, the stacks of beans in their burlap sacks, the beans whirling around in the big roaster. I wrapped up by getting permission come back on another day to take more if I need to. And I’m going to do the same with the other folks I’m interviewing.
I still have plenty of time before my deadline to arrange for a pro photographer if I need to. But so far, I’m pleased enough with my results that I’m hoping I won’t need to. If all goes well, these will be my very first published photographs.
Filed under progress | Comment (0)