Buddhist Marketer

05 CLS

I still feel guilt about that March 1997 spring break afternoon.

Coach Willie had arranged for a practice regatta against two other schools (lingua Indiana: scrimmage). Looking back I recognize the coordination that must have gone into organizing the row. Which schools were training down in Tampa? Which ones had the same spring break schedule as us? Which ones were also bringing down novice boats? Willie must have done all of this behind the scenes.

But that wasn’t on my mind as we started paddling towards the starting line. What was on my mind was that I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t row, there was no way in hell I was going to race that day. I buried myself somewhere deep within and completely shut down. Maybe it was a panic attack but all I can remember is telling Maggie in front of me that I didn’t feel well, that I was sick, I couldn’t row, I couldn’t do it.

Had Willie been more like the chair-throwing basketball coach I had in middle school, he might’ve raised his voice and told me snap out of it. “Quit your lollygaggin’, Patrick!” was what Coach Hutton used to bellow, all the more amusing since I was a record-setting sprinter. And who knows, maybe yelling would have helped. Maybe if Mags had been able to turn around in the boat and put her hands on my shoulders and talk me off the ledge, that could’ve helped. Who knows.

But Willie had the mild demeanor of an ultra marathoner, so he simply stated, “It’s too bad I didn’t know sooner. I could have brought an extra rower out on the launch to swap you out.” And so I curled down into my oar, head into my knees, the five seat behind me likely watching her oar flap and bounce and slap along the water as the rest of the team paddled back to the boathouse. Willie looked quietly on from the launch.

I crashed onto a couch at the boathouse and passed into blackness for a few hours, not knowing why I’d shut down and certainly unable to switch myself back on. The bright Florida sunshine and boisterousness of the rowers buzzed around me, but there I was, a lump on the couch. Broken. Down.

I had disappointed my entire boat. And to this day I am not entirely sure how or why that happened.

*  *  *

The Sunday after New Year’s Day, I broke one of Pablo’s wine glasses while washing dishes at his apartment. When he returned home from the gym, I stood up with mock seriousness and announced, “I have some bad news to report.”

He blinked at me with expectation. He looked nervous. My acting chops must be better than I thought!

I reported the broken glass, but assured him, “Don’t worry, I have dozens of wine glasses so it shouldn’t be a problem once we theoretically cohabitate.” He’d been talking about getting married and having babies and moving in together since practically the moment we met, after all, and we’d recently agreed to move in together when his lease expired in March.

“Well,” he said, turning to put down his bag, blinking, “I have some bad news too.” He paused, and suddenly the air felt like gravy. “I renewed my lease. I’m not ready to move in with you.”

And so there it was. We were at the starting line, and yet, he couldn’t row.

And so I looked down at my luggage, opened it up, filled it with my belongings, and rolled away.

* * *

“Well, there go my 2010 goals!” I thought, huffing the six blocks or so to my own studio. “And damn, I just blogged about them, and then published the post to my open Facebook feed. Argh!”

And then, “This is what I get for trusting someone!” But I quickly batted that mosquito-thought away. Humans are humans; they’re not predictable lines of IF THEN code, and just as I discover new and interesting things about myself each day, so too does everyone else about themselves. So what if he had claimed he wanted to get me pregnant? Man, every dude with half a brain probably “thinks”, on some level, that he wants to get me pregnant.

But the river moves, and the moment you try and freeze-frame it, it ceases to be a river.

I was sifting through some papers in my office the other day, attempting to declutter that thing so I can open up a think tank co-op of sorts, when I happened upon a print-out of a blog post from a few years ago.

But now the streets of Brooklyn, once pure, have been tainted with the sour hue of failed relationships. The Park Slope photographer, the Park Slope film director, the unemployed guy in Greenpoint, the social worker in Prospect Heights: fits and starts, the engine stalls, fifth gear is never reached.

I’m a high octane woman. I can do better than this.

“Wow,” I thought. “What a bitch.” Better than? And the only data points provided are the careers of the men in question?

Good gravy. It made me squirm to face up to those words I’d written just two and a half years ago. And yet those were mine, and there’s the time stamp, and, ugh.

Of course, the lens through which you see other people illuminates the lens through which you see yourself. Of course I would say something obnoxious about being “better than” a man of “insert job title here.” Because my value as a human being was woven into my job title. So his was, too. QED.

* * *

And then this weekend I heard myself telling the story of the night I lost my virginity. I said the nickname of the V-card bandit – a name that had easily rolled off my tongue for years – and something inside me recoiled as I said it. Now I heard a derisiveness in the moniker, a cutting tone to which I’d been deaf before. I don’t think I’ll ever say those words again, not like that, and it’s curious to me that I once used to toss them around like a softball. Cherry Poppin’ Jew. Egads, even typing it makes me itch. Of course, Cherry Poppin’ Philosopher doesn’t have quite the same poetry to it, but hey, perhaps I no longer need to bundle humans up into tidy, clever bows. Perhaps he can simply be the guy in college that introduced me to Brad Mehldau, Ravel’s La Mer, and actual Webster’s definition sex.

But how interesting that I’m sensitive to my jerky ways of yore, and yet, I’m simply not feeling mope-a-dope as expected about the end of the “most serious” healthy relationship I’ve had in my adult life. It isn’t to say that we didn’t share good times and warm feelings for one another. But perhaps, too, already in the weeks apart I can enjoy a clarity that front-and-center does not always afford. Maybe I can see the 6H pencil sketch of a pattern around the edges of certain behaviors, certain comments. The pattern of someone not unlike the woman I used to be – a little bit angry, a lotta big judgy, and always. With. The clever.

Well, I know how I feel about some of the things I used to say back in the day. They make me blush, and not in a good way.

And so maybe this is why, when my friends ask how I’m doing, I can honestly tell them, “I’m doing great. I feel really content.”

*  *  *

Of course, there remains the pesky matter of 2010 goals! Fortunately, I am never lacking with things to do and schemes to execute. And so here we have my top five goals for February:

1. Cook nutritious meals!
2. Stay on top of the day to day, e.g., bills and clean socks and plenty of toilet paper!
3. Chuck it!
4. Meditate, downward dog, warrior 72.6, sudarshan kriya, etc.
5. Sublet the apartment for when I’m out of town

So there you have it, folks. I guess I won’t be marrying that boy from Ohio after all. And while I’m deeply at peace with this …

I still feel a little guilty about depriving my teammates of an opportunity to scrimmage in Tampa against those two other schools oh so many years ago.

I’m sorry, ladies.  Let me know if you want me to cook you up a nutrient-dense dinner.

xo

On Singledom’s Merits

I was lying in bed the other night around eleven and I realized, “Damn, I can totally go to a strip club right now and no one will stop me.”  And that’s exactly what I did.

Quoth one of my clients (and future colleague) en route to a cheese steak taste test.  (Geno’s wins.)

Cutting-room floor

In opposition to the conclusion one may draw upon reading my blog, assessing the material contents of my overstuffed apartment, or having one (1) conversation with me, I am a firm believer in editing, establishing boundaries, and adopting constraints.  Rivers of abundance are born from denial (R D R R!).

That said, the following paragraphs are being snipped from my work-in-progress “Camping Out”, which I’ve been working on for almost two years now (off and on).  Lest anyone suspect that me devoting 120 minutes to writing is a deviant violation of my earlier stated autumn priorities, let me go on record and state that I’m allowed a couple of hours once a month to work on personal writing in order to avoid going entirely berserker.

A few paragraphs that should illuminate that insouciance is a state that, for me, shall remain elusive until the earth collides with the moon, are as follows:

By the time I left my hometown high school at sixteen, I had the pretend-boyfriend routine down pat. I imagined an elaborate going-away party for me to be held on the beach of my hometown’s state park lake. Tiki torches, music, perhaps little white lights on a string. Dusk. A cake.

I imagined the cake in great detail. Perhaps I considered this the one component that could actually become reality. I couldn’t imagine the friends that I’d invite (aside from pen pals from nerd camp, I didn’t really have any), or how I’d get to my own party (I couldn’t drive). Let alone Tiki torches (I had no money). But the cake I could handle: chocolate frosting and a colorful design. I remember sitting in my family’s TV room (green shag carpeting, jungle print wall paper and dark fake wood panel accents) and sketching out designs on the back of paper that Dad brought home from work. I think I may have even spent some babysitting money on frosting tips, probably imagining myself practicing the designs in anticipation of my real going-away cake.

But all this obsessing was simply set design for the main show: Sean Skinner – the blonde-haired, blue-eyed jokester who sat next to me in the unfortunately named Mr. Feece’s English class and took a ball point pen to write on the soles of the Adidas sneakers into which I would never grow – was going to kiss me. He was going to be the first. And it was going to be away from the lively, energetic party. He’d walk me down the shore, music fading behind us, and then – was there a full moon? – a kiss.

But I didn’t know what to think about when it came to the details of actual kissing. Nearly a decade of imagining my first kiss and I had no concept of what it entailed. It was just nice to fantasize about it. Something. Anything.

Are humans WYSIWYG?

While waiting to see my personal coach earlier this week, I was flipping through People magazine (shout-out to Debbie; update your bio, lady!) when I happened upon a quickie interview with Sanaa Lathan, who I’ve loved since the prom scene in movie Love & Basketball.  (Apparently she also went to Yale though a query against the alumni directory came up empty set.)

Anyhoo, the interview by Alondra Hernandez was entitled, “What I’ve Learned About Love”.  From it:

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

A lot of people get into relationships hoping that somebody’s going to become something that they’re not.  The person you get is the person you’re going to have.

I began to mull over this while munching on my Papaya Dog and sucking down mango juice.  She makes a good point, but life and humans are so darn complicated, that it can be hard to figure out WYS:

1. People are dynamic systems. They have so many facets to their being that it takes a bit of time and un-rosed assessment to figure out what someone’s baseline is.  For example, I’m mostly a funny, effervescent human, but I am also a total jerk at times.  If your only interactions with me are when I’m in a state of frustration or feeling ashamed, you’re going to think I’m an ass, and rightly so.  But if you talk to the homeless people that I feed at soup kitchens or while greeting in my neighborhood, you might “see” a different Anittah.
2. Our optimism can obscure people’s baseline even when it’s “obvious”:  we want to think the best of those around us.  In the face of mounting evidence of the default setting of the humans in our lives, we think back to the moments when they were their best selves:  sparkling, confident, and fully alive.  We want that version of them to be their baseline, and as time marches to infinity and gives us more evidence that their best self is an outlier and not the default, we close our eyes, shake our heads, and will it to not be so.

I guess the challenge in relating to other humans is that it’s hard to figure out who, exactly, it is that you’re getting.

Step one, IMHO:  figure out who you are.  Because the person you are is the person you’re going to have.  And if you don’t fundamentally love that person, you may want to get a personal coach.

How to have Anittah Patrick want you just the way you are

PBS (WLIW) is playing some Billy Joel concerts circa era-of-really-tight-jeans, and I just really listened to a snip of his lyrics for the first time:

I don’t want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

Wait, what?

I mean, I like lotsa folks — even some folks who get sweaty palms when so much as a sound wave from a clever conversation makes its way to their earballs.  But I don’t really like them like them, if you get my drift.

Drift not yet gotten?

From a short story by Abigail Thomas as excerpted in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

My mother’s first criterion for a man is that he be interesting. What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture.

You, to picture:  gotten.

(If not, please assemble yourself into the above diagram’s far right segment.)

Ambivalence +1

Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn…

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

And so I find myself trying to evaluate The Sum Of The Grumbly Factors vs. The Sum Of The Non-Grumbly Factors for a relationship that has long since moved past its useful shelf life. And why is this even vaguely intriguing to me? Well, the guy’s got cancer, and I’m feeling ambivalent, but I don’t trust my feelings, so I’m doing the math. You know, just to make sure. Because bar graphs = Truth, capital T!

I get out my list of events and assign two numbers to each entry: one number for giddiness and one number for grumpiness. I try to keep to a max value of 1 for either column, but, let’s be honest:

1. I am female
2. This is my chart and I am the boss

As I think of the values, I try and think, “How did I feel at the time the event happened?” So, for example, upon reading the handmade birthday card that accompanied one of the most thoughtful presents I’d ever received from a paramour, and upon seeing that he signed it with, “Love,” I must admit that at the time I got a little teary-eyed. But, upon being dumped less than ten business days later, the birthday card seen through that lens was a profound irritant, a splinter in the underside of my foot, and destined for a bitter end in a barbecue pit in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

I had to stay pure, though. I would not assign the total score for my birthday the-score-I’d-give-it-if-I-knew-that-shortly-I’d-be-getting-dumped. I would think critically about the gift, the card, the way he treated my friends at karaoke, et cetera and score the event as evenly as possible.

Similarly, I was not allowed to take into consideration the fact that his ex claims to have worn an ugly dress to their meet-up, or the fact that I ended up getting along with her possibly multiples more than I got along with him. Must! Limit! Scoring! To! Data! Available! At! Time Equals Then!

Now, the negative three of you who are actually reading this crazy blog post and looking at the numbers might be thinking:

1. Woah, Anittah, you’re a total loonball
2. Why come some events are giddy AND grumpy?

I will make no such effort to disavow you of the notion that I am a loonball and readily admit so. I should also caveat that part of my gusto for this ambivalence exercise has nothing to do with my ex, and that I don’t actually map out my reactions to events in this manner, and that all of this is admittedly hyperbolic so please simmer down and enjoy the ride. (Note that the previous sentence is mostly something that I am telling myself while patting myself softly on the head.)

With regards to giddy and grumpy:

… even a “happy” moment is tinged by dukkha. That is because neither the moment nor the experience is stable. Since the quality of happiness arises in dependence on external factors, it fades away as those factors disassemble. And in that gap is felt the trace, however subtle, of underlying dukkha. Since, furthermore, our lives are successions of such moments, dukkha is said to be “pervasive”…

… Our English term would have to have the following colorings (on an increasing scale of intensity):

faint unsettledness, irritation, impatience, annoyance, frustration, disappointment, dissatisfaction, aggravation, tension, stress, anxiety, vexation, pain, desperation, sorrow, sadness, suffering, misery, agony, anguish

… It is obvious that each of these qualities involves some degree of unease, so “unease” is how I translate the term for general usage.

- Glenn Wallis, What’s Dukkha

And so, yes, while the moment of him obliquely referring to me as his girlfriend as he drove my younger sister and I back from the beach was a happy one, there was also a “Now That It Is A Thing It Is Something That Could Be Lost” sprinkle of sadness. You can’t be someone’s ex-girlfriend if you were never their girlfriend to begin with, after all, better-to-have-loved-and-lost-be-damned.

To be continued…

Earlier:

• Ambivalence: the math