Pig Zen

I never run out of those “two kinds of people” lines.  Two more kinds of people: those that eat to live, and those that live to eat.  This one is more of a continuum, though.

I am entrenched on the live to eat camp.  I love food, and I love pretty much the whole continuum of food, from greasy spoon breakfasts to multi-course feasts.  It is a minor miracle that I do not weigh twice as much as I do, because I can’t stop eating.  It’s an unhealthy compulsion, especailly considering I never had to clean my plate as a kid.

I have a couple of hang-ups though.  The biggest, and probably weirdest, is that I won’t put butter on bread or toast.  Cooking with butter is fine, but I always order my toast dry — all I notice is a sort of greasy texture that gets added rather than flavor.  There was one place that served infused butter and I did smear that on breadsticks, but I think I was mostly tasting the chives or whatever.

The next is sausage.  Meats in casings, or meats that look like they’re in casings, weird me out.  The origin of that is simple: I saw a kids’ TV show where they went to the hot dog factory, and I saw the little sausages getting filled up and tied off in a rapid fire fashion.  Completely creeped out.  Still shuddering a little as I write about this.

I eschew the weird fake meat stuff herself gets from the religious grocery store.  It comes in a can, and some of it is in some kind of sauce.  Tinned meat and meat-like products are a non-starter for me.

I love food, I love hearing about food, I love dreaming about food.  I do not love cooking it.  When I cooked for myself, it was usually pasta.  Easy to shop for, easy to prepare, and easy to clean up.  No planning involved and little multitasking. Anything complicated quickly overwhelms me — I can’t manage two parallel cooking processes at a time.

I have no will power when it comes to food, either.  I indulge my gastronomic cravings more than anything else.  Diets and budgets don’t work for me because food is my drug of choice, and I’m probably an addict.  I dress in lame clothes, do without vacations, and am perfectly fine with an old TV in the living room.  We’re usually out at dinner instead of watching it anyway.

What are Tuesday nights supposed to be like?  I’m not so certain anything is all that different now than from when I was a kid.  I come home from work (school), have dinner, waste time, avoid chores, argue with myself (my mom) about going to bed, and end up staying awake long past a reasonable hour.  The only big difference is that I have to get my own dinner and carry on the conversations of reproach without any help from a parent figure.

I guess I’m always struggling with the fact that I’m a grown-up now.  I don’t feel like I always expected a grown-up should feel, like I’m missing some key component that would legitimize me.  But when I look into the faces of college students, or even worse, high schoolers, I don’t feel completely like them either.  I can’t find that sense of responsibility that an adult should have, and I don’t have any of the naivete, optimism, and inhibition that kids enjoy.

The problem must be that I’ve moved beyond the age when I’m discovering more new things than I’m repeating on a daily basis.  While I still try to learn something new every day, it’s always in a very repetitive context.  School is good for breaking that up; alternating classes on different days and changing topics and teachers a few times over the year mixes things up.

Following an academic calendar also gives a pronounced topography of peaks and valleys that went with the passage of time.  Gearing up for the start of school and being relieved when the end of it is in sight has a distinct impact on one’s mood.  Accountants have this with tax season, farmers have planting and harvesting, and the guy that produces the Academy Awards has a build-up to one big thing every year.  While there’s periodicity in our lives, the rest of us don’t get to enjoy that sort of predictable yet dynamic ebb and flow.

I think I’m just looking at my youth through rose colored glasses.  I hated that I got such a brief period of quiet in the summer and winter when I was in school, and that I could only travel at the same time as everyone else.  But having an outside force create a little irregularity throughout the year has its beneifts when all the days start to run together.

Herself and I had dinner with a former coworker tonight, out from the Old Country to take her son to band camp.  We had fancy tapas and made small talk and gossiped a little.  It was nice.

I miss my old colleagues sometimes, and not in that “I’ll aim better next time” sort of way.  They were personally likeable and since I’d been there so long, I knew them pretty well — that’s important form someone that isn’t good at making contact with others.

I worked there for what seemed like a million years, and that culture is a big part of who I am professionally.  I miss the autonomy I had there; I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted to do magically lined up with the priority of the day as determined by some combination of magic buzzword 8-ball and slips of paper drawn out of a hat.  Maybe the randomness wasn’t so much.

My sphere of influence was concrete — when I had a bad day at work, as many as 56,000 other people were having a bad day (to a lesser degree) with me.  It wasn’t the kind of bad day that meant there were power outages or people dying, but it was definitely the topic of mild dinner table bitching and backseat driving at houses throughout the area.  I miss that what I did made a difference, even if people only noticed when things were going wrong.

The list of things I don’t miss is longer, though, and more frought with hair-pulling and bottle-opening.  So I’m grateful for the opportunity to stroll down memory lane because that means I’m not living it every day.

We went and saw our friend’s band play today.  They’re good players and performers, but the way things worked out, they’re weekend warriors rather than full-time musicians.  I wonder how often they wish things had worked out differently.

Music is the stuff of dreams.  I never wanted to be in a band when I was a kid.  Seriously, my goals involved growing up to be some sort of corporate success.  It was kind of horrible for my mom, I think — she was a flower child that begrudgingly drifted into office work because the extra money made things easier, and because in the end, that’s what grown-ups just did.  She drifted back out because the way it made things easier wasn’t really all that easy.

Selling out wasn’t a dream, though, it was a goal.  Being the CEO of a monolithic company seemed to be perfectly attainable; some days it still seems possible if I could learn to be more outgoing, more selfish, and more full of shit.  While I had detailed plans for a dream bedroom in a dream house in a dream life for right then, I don’t think I had any dreams for the future.  I don’t remember ever thinking that maybe someday I could be an astronaut or a movie star.  I was far too clumsy and asthmatic to have any professional sports aspirations.  The actual possibilities of my life seemed good enough.

I have flights of fancy now, of course.  Escapism becomes necessary when that universe of possibilities shrinks.  I have some pretty ordinary big dreams:  of traveling regularly and eating kind of like Anthony Bourdain did on A Cooks Tour.  I dream of being a better photographer and writer.  I dream of being coherent and eloquent enough to come up with a good book.  I dream of working on a screenplay and maybe directing it.

With maybe one foot on the top rung of the ladder of reality, things get more prosaic.  I have some sort of obsession about going to graduate school to prove to myself I’m as smart as my friends that went.  I regularly wish for the money fairy to show up so I can afford a house here and a cushion to provide for my mom as she gets older.  I dream of finding more motivation so I can use the skills I do have to change the world, even just a little.  I dream of getting over myself so that last thing is no longer a dream.

And every now and then, I dream of being able to play the piano and having people cheer for me.

We were out late last night with other people doing what people often do on Friday nights: we were at the bar.  Herself is not one for the sauce, and I practiced restraint.  The rest of our party, maybe not so much.

Elsewhere on the internet I’ve read that if it wasn’t for cigarettes and alcohol, the hospitals would be empty.  What drives people to chemical-induced debauchery and self-destruction?  My standard answer is, of course, “we drink until the pain goes away.”  As the modified version of the cliché goes, “we drink to remember, we drink to forget.”  I think the real answer is simpler.

Booze wasn’t really associated with good times during my formative years.  The only time that was different was one Thanksgiving night or post-X-mas dinner when my grandfather had a bunch of strays in (he was wont to do that around the holidays, try to find people that had nowhere else to go), and they were sitting around the folding table, playing poker.  I’d bring them beers, and they’d give me quarters.  No one was really fighting or getting their feelings hurt; it actually seemed like a good time was had by everyone except my mother and grandmother who were not used to so much traditional male obnoxiousness all at once.

That seemed like a fluke to me, though, until I started hanging around with other adults that drank.  I was pretty young, 14 or 15, when some of my then-BBS friends had a party.  I was invited and my mom didn’t even mind; she trusted some of the other adults that would be there.  It was at the house of a woman well known for her boisterous nature, and her convivial side only came out when her practicing Mormon husband was out of town.  I don’t think anyone offered me a drink and I didn’t ask.

They were drinking Southern Comfort and Blue Kool Aid.  It looked horrible and smelled almost as bad.  People were sneaking off to have secret conversations and stolen cigarettes.  They were calling up the radio station to make requests, and then not paying attention when the song came on.  I think a rather raunchy game of Pictionary was played.  There were drunk dials to those that could not be present.  Much junk food was consumed.  While there was some drama, it was the typical caused-by-miscommunication variety; nothing truly hateful was said nor anything dangerous done.

In short, they were acting like kids.  The booze was a lubricant and an excuse for letting the inner child out for a while.  This was when I first realized that adults are just children that have to be on their best behavior most of the time.  Quite a rude awakening for me; I was hoping something would magically change as I got older and I’d know what the right thing to do would be and that doing it would suddenly be easy.

I, too, am no morning person.  I have no idea what enables people to willingly wake up at o-dark-thirty, but people do it.  Some of them do even crazier things like go running or swimming at that ungodly hour.  I have the utmost respect for these dedicated souls, even if I do think they should consider a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

The only time woke up early without whining about it was X-mas morning when I was a little kid, and that was probably because all the anticipation adrenaline kept me from sleeping.  My grandmother used to get up early and have a bowl of Corn Flakes while she read the newspaper.  Corn Flakes and milk were perpetually on her shopping list, and eating that cereal and looking at that smudgy gray printing seemed to be the most grown up thing in the world.  While I always yearned to be a grown-up, I never quite managed to get out of bed in time to enjoy that breakfast ritual while watching the sun rise.

They now offer night school for high school kids.  If they had that when I was a kid, well, I wouldn’t have been tardy at least once a week to first period.  I hated high school and I hated getting up early.  Those two things together were like a perfect storm of loathing, and it was a lesser miracle that I made it all the way until the twelfth grade.

Towards the end at my old job, we were having status meetings every morning at 7:30.  It was the exact same meeting every day; we talked about all the projects that didn’t go anywhere because all of our effort was put into fighting fires.  The meetings would have been horrible no matter what time of day; any team that is forced to start each and every day with self-flagellation is doomed.  The early hour was like adding insult to injury; the meeting was set at that time half to spite me.  We eventually cut back to every other day and finally to once a week, and maybe they’re still having it and recycling the same meeting notes by scratching out the date.

I think a large part of if I’m going to have a good day or a bad one is determined in the first two hours.  Despite the fact that I’m a geek and thus afraid of the sun, I tend to be in a better mood if the sky I see out the window is blue rather than cloudy when I first wake up.  Maybe that’s why runners and swimmers get up early to work out: they have complete control over the first act of each day’s drama.  That has to beat the rushed and disjointed chaos I go through.

We’re in the middle of our challenge.  One thing I can say:  herself has been much more personal in her writing than I have.  Lately, she’s written some very personal things while I’ve been writing essays.  I think she’s writing for herself, while I’m generally writing for some vague notion of an audience.  That means she’s trying to expose something that her inner voice is trying to share, while I’m trying to write for a group of people that I can’t even identify.  I’m not comfortable writing directly about myself so I try to tell some kind of story, and I want that story to be funny or thought-provoking or informative.  She’s just been writing what’s on her mind, and I’m impressed by that, because it ends up being all three.

Acting is believable and compelling only when the actor connects with the emotions and motivations of the character.  Writing is only worth reading when the writer is connecting with the essence of the theme.  There’s a distinct possibility that my theme is to put up a blog entry every day for a month.  Since there’s not yet a market for the blog-post-a-day calendar, the value of that theme is drawn into question.

Here’s my moment of truth for today: I often wonder how many people really could connect with me.  I’m such a mash-up of neuroses and contradictions that even the best writing would still make me look like a cross between a Neal Stephenson and Woody Allen character, and lacking the good points of both at that.  I’m trying too hard to act like a coherent version of myself rather than just being me.

Lacking any interesting topics tonight, I went to one of those writing prompt databases, and after refreshing through a couple of ideas for parents and one that was a little to fanciful for me, I found this:

If you could change one thing about the town you live in, what would it be?

There are countless things I wish were different about this place.  I wish it were cheaper to live here.  I wish it was less crowded.  I wish earthquakes weren’t a constant threat.  I wish being run off the road by a jackass in a BMW wasn’t a constant threat.  I wish that the Governator’s constant hare-brained budget balancing schemes would just go away.  Realistically, though, I don’t think changing any of those things would have the desired effects.

The Bay Area is what it is because of its good points, and that brings about the bad ones.  If it were cheaper, it would be more crowded.  If it were less crowded, it would probably be more expensive and less diverse.  I think earthquakes are a deep-seeded part of the Californian identity; people aren’t afraid of taking chances here because just living on a fault line means you’re always taking a chance.  The jackasses in the BMWs are probably like the appendix of urbanized California — we could take them out, but the scar would linger.

I was looking at one of those lists of “great places to live.”  Only one Bay Area town was on the list, it was near the bottom, and while it’s a perfectly okay bit of suburbia, no one’s gong to write any songs about it.  While we have a remarkable “quality of life” here: good weather, sophisticated cultural institutions, good schools in certain areas; the list was focused on good places to raise a family.  The American nuclear family has fled most of California in droves because the air here is too rareified.  Anywhere else in the country, you can work and commute less, your children can probably go to better schools, and you’ll be able to live in a safer neighborhood, surrounded by families just like yours, and you can enjoy a house with a back yard and room for a dog.  Whether or not that nuclear family idea is sustainable any longer and that level of insulation is what children really need are two different problems all together.

I think the cost of living here is part of the formula that inspires greatness.  People have to work hard just to scrape by.  Part of the reason great things happen is because they have to happen in order to sustain this place, whether it’s in technology, food, or even entertainment.

So, dearest California, don’t you go changin’.

When I was looking for places to live out here, I wasn’t having a lot of luck.  I’d go and meet the property owners, and I’d come close to begging them, and still they’d never call me back.  This was before the “economic slowdown” really started, though, and Web 2.0 staffing was still in full swing.  For a moment, I was convinced I’d been transported to New York City, except there were no cabs, decent delis, or Korean corner groceries to be found.

After I gave up on the individuals posting properties on Craigslist, I was looking at the larger commercial complexes.  Some of the places were downright dingy, and I was afraid I was going to end up someplace sketchy.  I started plugging apartment complex names and addresses into search engines.  The review sites didn’t have a whole lot of data, and almost all of the postings were bad.  I’d always wondered if love or hate was a more powerful motivator, and on the rental front, it looked as if negativity had won out.

The other thing I’d find was patent applications.  On a half dozen addresses I checked out, I would get hits back from patent filings.  People that invented things lived in places where I might live.  While none of the applications really stand out as something world-changing and you can patent pretty much any damn thing nowadays, I still thought that was really cool.  I wasn’t getting hits from the police blotter, or listings for yard sales; I was finding proof of the tradition of invention that made the greater Bay Area famous.

While the 90 miles between San Francisco and the end of Silicon Valley aren’t paved with gold, they are littered with crazy ideas and the crazier people that came up with them.  Very few other places can compete with that.

Would anything happen without deadlines?  This must be another one of those two kinds of people things: those that self-motivate and those that need a deadline in order to accomplish anything.  I will self-impose a deadline if someone else doesn’t.  That’s why this whole blog challenge has been successful: I have to get something written by midnight.

Pressure does help me; I am one of those “good in a pinch” people.  I am also good at determining something is not urgent and pushing it aside, even if it is important.  The biggest thing that falls into that category for me personally is exercise.  I have benefited in the past from taking organized classes because I have to stick to a schedule that way.

I don’t know where my ability to procrastinate comes from.  Is it one of those “I still have my whole life ahead of me” sorts of things?  Is it a visceral, hedonistic desire: why should I do something productive that will pay off eventually when I could do something that’s instantly gratifying like look at random crap on the web?  I heard a radio program on procrastination one day, but I knew I could always get the podcast of it later, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.

That’s one of the dirty secrets of the future: time shifting creates a sort of debt.  People have backlogs of email, unread RSS feeds, TiVo’d shows, and unheeded podcasts waiting for time that will never make itself available.  Now we have email bankruptcy and the like.  Since I’m always looking for short-term distractions, I’ve never had to just purge my inbox and start over, and I don’t really use feed readers because I’ll just feel dirty and shameful for never reading all the stuff that I feel I should read but manage to get along without.

Is procrastination getting worse?  I’m not sure.  Let me check with a few experts and get back to you on that.