Tag Archives: life

Divorce #2

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My recent foray into dating came as a result of a separation last fall from husband number two. It’s been a long, long time since S and I decided to see other people (yeah, you read that right – we were stupid enough to try an open marriage). Our decision to file for divorce came in March, right before my 40th birthday, and after much angst and heartbreak on both our parts. It was clear to both of us that things weren’t working; we weren’t on the same proverbial page.

S and I were – and still are – best friends. There is no one else on the planet that I love more than him. And yet, something was missing on my part. I could not get past the idea that I didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved.

In other words, this is not going to be a blog about a woman scorned – although I am not judging any of the women who have been trampled on out there who also want to write about it. In fact, to a large extent, every single relationship breakdown that I’ve experienced has been at least 50% and sometimes up to 90% my fault. I have walked away from two marriages and a couple of long-term relationships over the past two decades of my life. In that time, I’ve learned that a part of me is a lot like Dickens’ depiction of Estella in Great Expectations. I was built to conquer and, ultimately, to wound.

And yet, I am not immune. My heart has been broken so many times, in so many different varieties of ways, that I often wonder how I have anything left to rend. But, still, it’s possible to wound me deeply. (In fact, two men have very recently caused me bouts of tears – the stories of which will be retold here in the weeks and months to come).

And yet the thing that tears at me the most now is guilt and regret over hurting S. No one has ever captured the nuances of romantic pain better than Dorothy Parker, so I’ll just let her express what I’ve been feeling about this divorce:

A Very Short Song – Dorothy Parker

Once, when I was young and true,

Someone left me sad -

Broke my brittle heart in two;

And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,

Love is but a curse.

Once there was a heart I broke;

And that, I think, is worse.

Our divorce becomes final this Friday. A single day after Thanksgiving. I cannot decide if this is high comedy, an example of what the Chinese call “eating bitter melon”, or fitting. A combination, perhaps.

And in the past year, I think I have been dating men to: 1.) figure myself out; 2.) avoid the pain of separating from S; 3.) have a lot of therapeutic sex; 4.) avoid thinking about turning 40; 5.) decide what kind of man – if there is one – that might be able to both put up with my very special brand of bullshit and make me feel content and secure and happy. The reason I think I need to write about these experiences publicly is because I have found – through talking with my friends – that it helps all of us to share our stories. It’s a way to feel less alone and to start to collectively work things out.

I honestly believe that there is a cultural shift going on out here. Women are more empowered than ever before. And yet, we don’t know how to navigate the shifting social worlds we all inhabit (and this is true of men just as much as it is true for women). We are embracing our sexuality and yet are still a little scared of it as well. In essence, the old rules of dating and marriage are not working for a lot of people, but we don’t know any other method of going about relationships. I guess this is my small contribution to the discussion. And my own shared effort to work out the ultimate question we all ask ourselves:

What do we WANT in a relationship and how do we get it?

The Stars Club – Membership of One

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I must have blown up 100 balloons myself. Long ones, short and fat ones, red ones, blue ones, yellow and pink. I carefully looped pieces of tape around my chubby finger – a jerry-rigged double-sided tape – and affixed one side to a balloon, one side to the ceiling. It took me hours of gingerly stepping on and off one of our kitchen chairs to get everything to look “just right.”

I was 10-years-old and hosting my first party. It wasn’t my birthday and it wasn’t a holiday. It was a party for a “club” that I wanted to start called “The Stars Club.” It was 1982 and I had just seen the movie Grease. The Pink Ladies with their shiny satin jackets just blew my mind. An exclusive, fun club for girls. Surely that would be my ticket to popularity.

For weeks, I labored over the invitations. I cut colorful pieces of thick construction paper. I glued. I glittered. When the invites were done, I marched them into class and boldly handed them out. And then I anxiously awaited the date of our first club meeting.

There I sat, on the first Saturday of summer, on one of the four chairs I had arranged in the middle of the den (one for president, VP, secretary, and treasurer). I nibbled from bowls of Doritos and Cheetos, listened for the sound of feet on the gravel driveway or a knock at our front door. Nothing. The minutes ticked by interminably and still nothing.

I sat there for over an hour, well after the start time on the invitation, hoping that someone would show up to the inauguration of The Stars Club. I made up excuses for my friends. I imagined that I had gotten the date wrong. I pictured car accidents and last-minute sicknesses. I ate more chips.

When my mom finally came into the den to check on me, I had already elected myself as president, VP, secretary AND treasurer of the club. I don’t remember what she said to comfort me, partially because I was far too humiliated to actually listen to the words coming out of her mouth. Even in front of my mother, I never wanted to cry. I never wanted anyone to know that I was hurt or injured, ever. (Point of fact: I once  ripped off the entire nail on one of my pinky fingers at a church bake sale and yet managed to calmly ask one of the ladies where my mother was with blood dripping off my hand.)

But I was hurt. Deeply. To the core. Being an outsider isn’t easy, never mind your age. We’re all acutely aware of our “status” in social circles and to be left out of things is almost always injurious to our sense of self-worth.

My friends eventually apologized and made their excuses and we all moved on, but I never forgot what sitting alone at my first party felt like – the sting of it. I never really got over it. To this day, whenever I throw a dinner party, I secretly expect that no one will show up. I steel myself to sit all alone with my crudités and party favors. It has never happened again, the dreaded sequel to The Stars Club disaster, but one never knows.

I still throw parties – despite the fact that my first one was such a resounding failure – because I have a desire to connect to others, to befriend people, to know them a little better. It’s who I am. It’s true that I’m not always successful, and that people don’t always like me or want to attend, but sometimes they do.

P.S. I remain the president elect of The Stars Club, but the VP, secretary, and treasurer positions are still open. Did I mention that we have cool jackets?

A Good Neighbor Policy

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I first met the older woman who lived next door when her son inadvertently parked in our space in the shared garage of our apartment building. Frustrated, I knocked on her door to complain, but when Pearl answered, she was hobbling. She had just broken her ankle and she needed the space. I felt like a big jerk. It shouldn’t matter, after all, whose parking space was whose. We moved to another empty space in the lot. A few days later, Pearl slipped a handwritten thank you note under our door expressing hope that we might continue our “good neighbor policy.” She invited me for tea, but I never went.

In the months that followed, I saw Pearl in the hallway or on the stairs. Her ankle had healed and she began walking around our neighborhood in her brightly-colored sun hat and dark glasses. After the parking incident, we said hello to each other in passing. Then, slowly and hesitantly, we started to exchange pleasantries. She asked me what I did for a living, since I was home during the day. I told her I was a graduate student and writer who studied science and medicine in China.

“I am from China,” she said. “And I am a writer, too.”

A few days after we discovered our shared mutual interests, Pearl knocked on my door with a book in her hand, an autobiography of her life growing up in a village during the Chinese Revolution. Her latest book, she said, was the story of her time as a famous revolutionary’s wife. Then she asked if I might accompany her to a reading of her work in San Francisco.

“You see,” she said, “my son cannot attend. He is too busy. And I am afraid to come back to Berkeley at night by myself.”

“I’d be happy to come. We’ll drive you home,” I replied. “Good neighbor policy.”

Months, then years, passed as I struggled with my degree requirements and the onus of writing my own memoir. Pearl and I became closer through our chats about books, China, life in California. When she asked me what I was working on, I explained that I was trying to craft an account of my own childhood, about learning to survive the separate early losses of my brother, my mother, and my father. Unlike most people who heard my story and either felt sorry for me or were simply shocked by all the tragedy, Pearl placed her small, wrinkled hand on my arm as we stood in the bare stairwell of our building. She looked up into my face with sharp eyes and said: “I know what it is to lose people, to have a difficult youth. We are a lot alike. You are strong, so I will not worry about you.” Whenever I saw Pearl after that, she asked me how the memoir was coming along, what I was reading in my classes, when I would head back to China.

Then one afternoon Pearl left me another handwritten note – almost identical to the first in its brevity and formality – asking me to stop by. She was moving to a smaller apartment and wanted to give me some things. When I entered her home, books were everywhere – on shelves, on tables, on her desk, on the floor.

“I can’t take everything, so I want you to have some books. As many as you like,” she said as I started combing through the titles. She had original editions of Jonathan Spence’s famous works on China, all of Van Gulik’s mysteries set in China, and a host of old, dog-eared paperbacks of classics – Gide, Gogol, Flaubert, Kafka, Beauvoir, Herodotus. I was in heaven. As I piled up stacks to take with me, Pearl talked to me about losing her husband, about grief, about aging, about living alone.

“The time comes,” Pearl said, watching as I flipped casually through her reading life, “when you have to let go of the past. It is too much to carry into the future. I love these books, but it is time for me to let them go.”

Pearl moved out and I forgot about her books for years, buried as I was in my own reading and the writing of my dissertation. But as I prepared to relocate, I started going through my books, Pearl’s books. They are filled with underlines and scribbled notes. As I read her underlined passages, I realized that Pearl had not given me books, she had given me her intellectual history, a roadmap of her thinking, a key to becoming a better writer. In her last act of good neighbor policy, Pearl had given me a part of her past so that I could use it to write my own future.

Divorcing Duran Duran – Series Introduction, Part Two

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In college during the early 90s, I lied to guys in my co-ed dormitory about Duran Duran. I told them that I had once turned down an invitation from Simon LeBon (as if) because I thought that made me infinitely “cooler” somehow. Ordinary women didn’t turn down rock stars, that’s for sure. And I never wanted to seem ordinary, even if I was a textbook case of late-teen insecurities and low self-esteem. In public, I started listening to more “dangerous” or more popular bands – Red Hot Chili Peppers, NIN, Living Colour, GnR. To fit in, I abandoned Duran Duran, but still listened to their CDs and tapes obsessively in the confines of my room.

I developed a secret Duran Duran habit.

When their Wedding Album dropped, I was ecstatic. For a cultural minute, I could once again revel in the band. I could listen to their songs openly. Heck, I could blast Ordinary World on the radio. (Side note: The radio waves had been bereft of Duran Duran songs for a few solid years after the original group split and their second 3-member album tanked.)

Like they had done in my early teens, Duran Duran got me through the terrible awkwardness of my late teens. Something about the music soothed me and made me feel like it were possible for me to grow into the impossibly gorgeous, talented woman I had always wanted to be – but wasn’t yet. I was chubby (truth, though none of my friends ever believe me now), I was sheltered (my dad had banned me from dating, so my first kiss was at age 18), I had no idea what I was doing (by 18, I was living entirely without family).

Fast forward to 1998, and John Taylor on the phone with me, and the tape of our conversation that I now hold in my hand.

It had been nearly impossible to get John on the phone. He was touring as a solo act in the late-90s; Duran Duran was in the throes of what then seemed to be an interminable hiatus. I had several phone calls with his PR agent as we tried to schedule a time for us to talk for 15 minutes. In the midst of all this, John’s mother died. The PR agent was profuse in her apologies, but the interview would have to wait. My own mother had already been dead for 12 years, but I still felt the pinch of a sincere empathy. It was never easy, I knew all-too well, to lose your mom. So, I waited.

When my phone rang at the appointed time, I was too nervous to immediately pick up. If I had a dollar for each time I had imagined the moment that John Taylor would call me up, I would have had enough money saved for a better apartment in NYC. And yet, I never imagined it like a business call. I had to force myself to ask him normal questions, not Duranie questions (which, like Star Trek questions, can be overly specific). I was petrified of saying “I love you!” at some point in our conversation as a non sequitur.

What was supposed to be a 15-minute interview ended up being a 40-minute long talk. John was funny, thoughtful, and inquisitive. There were pauses where he would ask me questions and I would answer. He told me what movies I should go to see. And then, unexpectedly, I told him that I had to go. Something made me feel like I had taken up too much of his time; I almost felt guilty about it.

In the week that followed, I saw him in concert twice, and missed a phone call to meet up at his NYC venue. In the years that passed, I always regretted missing my chance to meet him in person. I filed the story on him; it was rejected because the editors felt that a story about the bass player for Duran Duran wasn’t half as interesting as its lead singer might have been. I moved on, but I kept that tape of the interview in my lock box. Until now, years later, as I prepare to listen to it again, for clues as to why I’ve held onto an infatuation for decades.

About a week ago, I met John Taylor in person at a record signing in Berkeley. I waited in a long line with other fans, slowly realizing that I wasn’t half the “Duranie” that I thought I was. No, I didn’t know Simon’s children’s names. No, I couldn’t name any tracks off of Astronaut. I had no idea that John had multiple tattoos, and I couldn’t tell you what they were. I felt like an alien in that line, like someone who looked like a Duran fan, but was a quasi-imposter. In truth, I had “moved on.” I had divorced Duran Duran slowly, over time, but I was still left with all of the baggage of a messy breakup. I loved that band and I always will. But something had changed.

This essay series will look at my life with Duran Duran, or, the band’s effects on my life. Our obsessions with bands are ultimately never really about the band, they are about us and what the band represents in our lives. For me, Duran Duran represents my youth, my potential, my future, and all the hope that I have poured into the figures of them over the years. These stories aren’t really about Duran Duran. They aren’t really about John Taylor, either. They are about a time in my life, about growing up, about discovery, about the passage of time.

We are all Duranies, in some sense of the word, even if the names of the objects of our affection and efforts change. Our affections belie our dreams. Our fandom reveals who we want most to be.

Suffering as Social Currency

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Suffering, it seems, has transformed into a form of social currency. For women, primarily, but a few men have started to see the appeal of admitting to a certain level of misery to gain likability. Is it me? Or do we all seem more likely to trot out our sad stories not only for catharsis but, increasingly, for profit?

Perhaps this isn’t really a *new* trend. Certainly suffering has been a bit more of an asset since the advent of the best-selling memoir and the ad-revenue-generating reality television show (or blog). Pretty much everyone knows – intuitively, by now – that to win anyone’s vote or garner a lot of publicity, one has to open up about life’s trials and tribulations.

I could list examples here, but they are too many and too obvious. You all know what I mean. In reading this post, I’m sure you’ve already had a few examples spring to mind. You might even have a few “real-life” examples of people you know using their troubled childhoods to explain or excuse some present-day behavior. Don’t we all, on some level, engage in a pornography of suffering?

Listen, I am no stranger to this myself. But relating tales from my childhood is a relatively new phenomenon for me. For years, all I wanted was to seem normal (whatever that is), like I had a “normal” life. As Oliver Sacks once wrote about his patients, I spent a lot of time “acting being normal.” In the past decade, however, we have – as a culture – started to be more “open” about our abnormalities, our uniqueness, our peccadilloes. That’s probably a good thing, or at least has good effects (feeling closer to others, a relief that we are not alone in suffering or troubles, etc.). However, I also feel like the memoir/reality TV craze has upped the ante. It’s not enough to share the past, we have to dramatize and enact it in order to gain legitimacy as “sufferers.”

Sometimes I feel like we’re all engaged in a contest to prove Who Has Suffered the Most. Like there is an award for this, outside of life experience and insight. (Well, maybe there is. I know quite a few people – myself included – who got literary agents due to an interest in their abnormally sad tales.)

I remember when I first realized that my painful childhood could be an asset. It was while reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius. He had taken this awful thing in his life and turned it into a best-selling narrative. “Hey,” I thought, “I can do this. I’ve got a heartbreaking tale.” Clearly, I was not alone. In many way, Eggers’ and Frank McCourt opened the floodgates to a deluge of sadness, struggling, and sickness. We read about cancer, about being widowed, about alcoholic parents, about abuse, about homelessness, about depression, about divorce, about losing a child, about attempted suicide, about anger, about self-starving, about pain of so many varieties that I have lost interest in taken a full inventory of them.

Not to sound like a curmudgeon who doesn’t care about people suffering, but lately I’ve started to ask myself: So what?

Writing a memoir was the catalyst for the question. In unearthing and examining my own suffering, I started to wonder what purpose it all served. Sure, it was – in some ways – therapeutic for me, but why did I feel the need to share my pain with others? To what purpose? To what end? Then, as I struggled to find a narrative arc to the story of my childhood, I began to feel uneasy about my participation in the genre. Was I just dragging these stories to light so that I could gain readership? And if so, what the hell did that mean about me? About my potential readers? About all of us together?

Medical anthropologists are no strangers to thinking about the pornography of suffering (in fact, I stole this term). Why do pictures and narratives of people suffering move us? How do they move us? What work are they really doing? Does all this visible suffering make us numb to the real thing? (For an academic take on this, see Carolyn Dean’s article here.)

I participated in a “beauty” contest recently, and I noticed that in many of the women’s narratives of why they felt beautiful after 35 (which accounted for 50% of the judging), they often made recourse to their suffering. I am not saying I am innocent of this, since I, too, wanted to “win” the contest. I intuited, like almost everyone else, that to “win” people’s vote, I needed to relate a story that people could empathize with. Some of the contest entries are thus blatantly all about suffering and “survival.” It almost seems as if some of the women were trying to “out suffer” each other. Which is rendonkulous.

Needless to say, and especially after my literary agent quit the business last spring, my own memoir of suffering has stalled. Until recently, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue writing it. I wasn’t certain that I knew the reasons WHY I wanted to write about my life in the first place. I didn’t want to use tragedy as social currency. And I definitely didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea that I might profit off my brother, my mother, and my father’s untimely deaths.

In the end, I did decide to take up the project again, but in a different form. It’s becoming less about a pornography of my suffering now than an exploration of how we all deal with fear (of death, of flying, of losing our car keys, of cancer, of spiders, of *fill in the whatever you are afraid of here*).  I reorganized the story so that now I’m telling the history of viruses (what I study professionally), and why in the world a former journalist would ever want to spend the rest of her life writing about disease. Why? Because I want to understand fear. I’m interested in how we all get on with our lives despite the fact that we all know horrible things will eventually happen to us or to people we know. Maybe that’s why people can’t get enough of suffering; we want to know that we are not alone. I just think we need to be more introspective about our own interest in watching or hearing about other people’s suffering. Like regular porn, more isn’t necessarily better.

Why I Hate Birthdays.

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It’s my birthday today.

This event has occasioned the usual array of annual thoughts related to the future, the past, regrets, the passage of time, cellulite, and why I never seem to enjoy turning a year older. What’s worse, the day is typically preceded by a few weeks of aforementioned thoughts. It’s like tax season, only for life experiences. How much time have I spent doing the things I want to this past year? How much time have I wasted? What do I still owe and to whom?

This Seinfeld clip is funny not just because he’s trying to not be funny, but because there is more than a modicum of truth in what he’s saying.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my birthday at 16. I reveled in my freedom at 18. At 21, I had a great time. And then, at 25, it began. The worry.

The worry was – and in many ways still is – that I would never fulfill all my promise, that my dreams would remain just that, that I’d never be successful at the things that mattered most to me. My then-roommate Jenn watched me dramatically throw myself on my bed, weeping that I was “too old” to start a new career, that I had “wasted” my time in college, and that I was “doomed.” I told her that, at 22, she couldn’t possibly know my plight.

Please.

Now I realize that although I’m a tad dramatic (just a smidgen), almost everyone can relate to these birthday fears. And no matter how much I accomplish or where I am in my life, when my birthday rolls around, I feel the same way. I don’t ever feel like I’ve done enough, or loved enough, or written enough, or read enough, or gone to the beach enough. No one really does.

And every year we vow to make all those things happen.

This year is a particularly hard one, however, because I am 39. As my best friend from high school reminded me, I have 364 days left until 40. And although I used to think that mid-life crises were fake and self-indulgent, I am officially issuing a mea culpa to all those 40-year-olds I have judged in the past. I get it. I understand. Somehow this rather arbitrary life milestone just makes all those questions about how I have spent my time seem to matter even more.

It’s all just an illusion, but like any good one, I can’t help but get sucked into my role in this play.

Other people are always far happier about my birthday than me. I dread the “Happy Birthday!” phone calls, the ones in which I’m expected to be happy myself.  I also hate the fact that people want you to make a big fuss out of it. “What are you doing?” they ask. I don’t know. Playing Dragon Age II all day while eating a bag of Cheetos? I don’t want to make a fuss this year, though I’ll still take the presents. Keep the presents coming, I say.

Next year my birthday will be a BFD. I will officially make a big fuss, fo sho. My plans involve going to Antigua and remaking the Rio video. And no, I’m not kidding. I’m serious. Because that is one of my biggest regrets, that my life didn’t turn out more like a Duran Duran video. So, for one week, I’m going to make it a Duran Duran video. (You’re welcome to join me, fellow Duranies and 80s fans and people turning 40 who want to do something crazy for the occasion.) Then, maybe, I’ll stop hating birthdays. But somehow, I doubt it.

Divorcing Duran Duran: Series Introduction

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I have an advanced degree in anthropology, so I might be forgiven at first for assuming that I had a slightly better understanding of why human beings act the way we do. And yet I quickly realized that this couldn’t be true as I prepared to press the play button on an audiotape that I hadn’t had the guts to listen to for over ten years. It’s physical evidence, basically, of me semi-stalking a member of the 80s band Duran Duran.

I’ve tried, over the years, to come up with a nicer-sounding label for myself than “semi-stalker”. I’ve tried out “Duranie” and “really big fan”, but they never quite captured the essence of my fascination with the band’s bass player, John Taylor. The trouble is, that even at the height of the story I’m about to unfold, I never felt like anything was amiss in feeling love for a man I had never even met. Everyone I knew had, at one time or another, been infatuated with someone. My best friend in high school used to break into the soccer star’s locker to read through his notes and leave him Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups anonymously. My best friend in college dragged me to every hockey game and after-party because of her obsession with the team’s goalie. She also bought him sweatshirts and baseball hats as gifts (and she was NOT his girlfriend). Girls did things like that to express their, well, great affection. Or something. Maybe it reflected an adolescent need to be closer to someone, to know something intimate about someone else, or possibly even to know something deeper about ourselves.

The fascination with Duran Duran began in the early 80s when I was twelve-years-old and they were at the height of their career. Imagine the scene: me and my best friend, C, sitting on the carpeted floor in my den with a pink ghetto blaster nestled between us, an open Tiger Beat magazine on my lap, the tape recorder running. We are flipping through a special issue and taping ourselves talking about Duran Duran. Using seventh-grader logic, we have decided that Duran Duran would naturally be fascinated to hear what we are saying about them, so we are planning to ask my mom to send the tape to Duran Duran’s fan address. *

What I am about to listen to now, however, is not that tape. The tape we made in 1984 would have been cute or funny or more easily forgivable. The tape I have here, that I’ve been afraid to replay ever since it was recorded nearly a decade ago, when I was 27 and living in New York City, is far less adorable.

The British voice in the recording belongs to none other than Duran Duran’s John Taylor. In 1998, and after months of scheduling and rescheduling with his PR manager, John Taylor finally called me. Our conversation, an interview for an article I was writing about him for Time Out Magazine, lasted a total of 30 minutes. There were only two problems with this scenario: I wasn’t a reporter anymore and I didn’t work for Time Out Magazine. To be fair, the interview wasn’t based on a total lie. I did have a degree in journalism, I had once been a reporter, and I did know an editor at Time Out. But the article I was writing hadn’t exactly been accepted. I was writing it “on spec.”

Whenever I think back on my not-so-logical reasoning for prevarication to get an interview with John Taylor, I always end up asking myself the same set of questions: Why did I go to such extreme lengths just to talk to him? What is it that drives us to do things that we would never otherwise do? Obsession? Desire? And, maybe even more importantly, why was I holding on to a mirage? It was 2011 and I was still purchasing Duran Duran albums, going to their concerts, and wearing their t-shirts (occasionally in public).** Why do women, in particular, seem to form such strong attachments to one member of a band from their youth and then hang onto that infatuation for decades?*** What is it, exactly, that we are holding on to? I was hoping that listening to this tape might provide me with some answers.

My voice sounds strange to me, like I’m a teenager trying to sound like an adult. Talking to John Taylor has sucked me into a time and space warp. I’m desperate, at this point, to keep it together. The last thing I want to do is to blurt out something ridiculous like “I love Duran Duran.” Or worse, just “I love you.” It isn’t audible in the tape, but I know I’m sweating. By this point, I’m fighting an intense urge to explain everything to him. Not only about how I’ve lied to get him on the phone, but about how my brother died in an accident, and then my mom in another car accident, about how I went to live with my alcoholic father in a strange city after my mom’s funeral at age 14. That the only thing that made getting through everything easier was listening to his band, Duran Duran, locked away in my bedroom, staring at his pictures and dreaming about a better life.

In the background on the tape, I hear the voice of John Taylor’s small daughter.

Instantly, I cut to a memory of me carrying file folders down to the trash can in the basement. I’m crying bitter tears as I pass my dad on the stairs. “What the hell is going on?” my dad says. I snuffle and say, “John Taylor is getting married. It was on MTV News. I’m throwing out all my Duran Duran stuff.” My dad is so stunned by this revelation that for a second he doesn’t say anything at all, then shakes his head. As he gets to the top of the stairs, I hear him tell my stepmother that I’ve finally gone completely nuts.

To be continued. . . .

*[Footnote: C and I maintain that my mom never actually mailed the package, despite the fact that we never found it in her belongings.]

** [Footnote: Duran Duran recently released their new album, All You Need Is Now, and are on tour to support it. Go to their website for more info.]

*** [My best friend, C, had a serious obsession with Michael J. Fox that continues to this day, so I don't mean to exclude actors here. However, there seems to be something in particular about members of bands or singers that makes teenage girls especially insane. See Justin Bieber and "Beliebers" for a recent example.]

In Defense of Pessimism

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I am a pessimist.

This makes me very, very unpopular – especially at parties.

But it also makes me a better, or more keen, observer of the world, which I would not easily relinquish for an overly optimistic, if sunnier, view of things. It also – and here’s the rub – makes me a bit “happier” than you might think. I think this is because I know, deep down, that the point of life isn’t to be “happy,” but to do what is important, what you value. These things almost always do not make one “happy,” and they often do not make one “rich,” but they do seem to produce a sense of being content with life, and satisfaction – all in the face of certain sickness, misery, and eventual death.

See? I told you. Miserable at parties.

Alain says it all better than me, however, here:

The Crying Game of Paying Taxes

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When I was a kid, both of my parents had “problems” around tax time.

My mom cried at the kitchen table, surrounded by pieces of paper, a big-button calculator that she borrowed from her job as a secretary, a yellow legal pad, pens, and crumpled up tissues. Every March and April, she worried that we would “lose the house.” I worried, too. Maybe more, because I didn’t understand yet that checks could not be written without money in the bank to cover them. I thought checks were magic.

My dad, on the other hand, got angry. He would sit at the kitchen table surrounded by a tiny calculus calculator that he had borrowed from me, stacks of papers, a pad of paper, and a full cigarette ashtray. He would yell and occasionally go outside to smoke another cigarette and pace on the deck. He angrily threatened that he would have to “sell the house” and move into something cheaper if the property taxes kept escalating. So, I worried – again – that I would end up homeless. There was even a year that my dad had to borrow money from me – from my mother’s life insurance money – to pay his tax bill. I had to write one of those magical checks for nearly $5K. I was 16.

This is all to say that this weekend, we did our taxes. I continue in my parents’ storied footsteps.

First, I sat down and cried.

How is it that two people who want nothing more than to teach and to write find themselves constantly digging out a deep, dark, black pit of school loan debt? How could someone who earns – after tuition – a measly 19K in an entire year (me) owe nearly 4K of that in taxes? I’m expected to live on 15K a year. (This, by the way, would be actionable if I weren’t a “grad student” – or part of a growing pool of dedicated cheap labor for my university).

Then, I got angry.

I raged at the machine for a few hours. I wrote an updated version of Swift’s A Modest Proposal for our age and sent it to McSweeney’s. (When it doesn’t get published there, I’ll post it here.) It didn’t really make me feel that much better. Nor did it do anything to magically produce 4K so that I could pay the government what I “owe” in taxes. I got even angrier when I read a post that claimed Enron hadn’t paid corporate taxes for two years running. So, it’s down to me? Really?

For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I understood what it was like for my parents to constantly worry about our finances. If they were still alive, I would call them up today and tell them about my memories of them at separate kitchen tables filling out those tax forms by hand in the 70s, the 80s, the early 90s (remember the pre-computer era?). Me, too, I’d say. Me, too.

So, instead, I’m telling you – my three readers – that I finally understand why my mom was so depressed and my dad was so angry about “life.” If you tear up while doing your taxes this year, or if you find yourself sputtering on about the inequity of the system, know that I am right there with you.

[Epilogue: After all the crying and the raging, I drank half a bottle of red wine and watched back-t0-back-to-back episodes of 30 Rock and Community. It helped. Thank god for the comics.]

Why the Dilettante Isn’t So “Daily” – Future Projects

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I decided to choose Daily Dilettante as my domain name for this blog for two reasons: 1.) It sounded good. Come on, what self-respecting, book-loving nerd doesn’t like alliteration? ; and 2.) I wanted to push myself to write “often.” Maybe not “daily” – but I didn’t want this to devolve into a situation where I post on a “monthly” or “bi-yearly” basis either. So, then, it was an aspirational choice as well.

This blog provides me with an outlet for writing that is not related to my dissertation. And for the past year, the dissertation project has been a 270-pound gorilla taking up space in my study. When I try to write something else, the obese gorilla slaps me off my swivel chair until I repent and promise to only write prose related to flu and global public health. Trust me, he’s serious about me finishing this damn thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my dissertation topic. I do. I just don’t want to focus on it 24/7 and slowly drive myself insane. Sure, addle-brained professors make good movie characters, but not-so-great “real-life” teachers or researchers.

In the next few months, as I wind down the first draft of my dissertation and start writing the next two chapters of a book based on my dissertation, I want to spend more time writing for the Daily Dilettante. Hell, it might even start to resemble an actual “daily.” The dilettante part, for good or for bad, I already have down cold.

Projects on deck here (for the three loyal readers I know are out there):

1.) Divorcing Duran Duran. My humorous retelling of my up-and-down, fictional relationship with the band’s bass player, John Taylor, told in relationship to the various themes running through DD songs. Really, the essays will be about my doomed search for “the perfect relationship” and a PC-version chronicle of my awful dating history.  My ex-husband once lamented that he could never compare with the fantasy of JT. Years later, I finally realized that he was right. I had to divorce Duran Duran before I would ever be able to find and keep a “real” relationship.

2.) The Rio Project. See entry number one for back story. This March, I turn 39. On that day, the countdown to 40 begins. I’m sure there will be plenty of  “not-so graceful” stories ahead. In the early summer of 2012, on the 30th anniversary of Duran Duran’s album Rio, I will be hosting a recreation of the original video in Antigua. Yep. I’m serious. I’m talking about a shot-by-shot remake of the video. Growing up, I always wanted to become Rio, and it took me awhile to realize that I could do it without the band. This is about embracing a childhood dream and crafting a new destiny – all in one fell swoop. And you, my three readers, how could you miss that?

3.) The Clothes I Throw Out Daily Booth. My closet runneth over. I have too many clothes. And shoes. So in preparation for 40 and moving, I’m going to be wearing everything – EVERYTHING – I own one final time and snapping a photo of my outfits for posterity. My mom used to let me wear whatever I wanted (within reason) with the caveat that she be allowed to take a picture of me before I left the house in the morning. I used to think it was because I looked so cool. Now I know that my mom wanted photographic evidence of my stupidity. I am continuing the tradition here. Think of it as including my mom (she died when I was 14) in my 40th birthday celebrations.

OK. That’s it. Stick with me, kids. It should be a fun and eventful 18 months.