Choosing to love

The other day I came across a meditation track that talked about how the things we find annoying about our friends, relatives, and partners are simply another facet of the very things we love about them.

Let’s say you live with someone named Jill. (I’ve never lived with someone named Jill.)

Jill comes home from work, hangs out on the futon, and takes off her socks. Maybe one’s on the futon and one’s on the floor. Maybe both are on the floor. Maybe both are on the futon.

But the socks are off. Unless you pick them up, point them out, or wait till Judgment Day (which you personally don’t subscribe to), they’re staying where they are.

Nowhere near the laundry.

Do you know anyone like Jill? A roommate, a partner, or yourself perhaps?

Imagine you can feel one of two ways about Jill and her discarded socks:

You can see them as positive, perhaps endearing (Oh, that Jill just can’t sit comfortably unless her feet are breathing) or even inspirational (When Jill decides she wants to do something, she does it right away).

You can see them as negative, perhaps annoying (Why are there socks everywhere? Is it that hard to carry them five more steps to the laundry?) or even disrespectful (She never even thinks about the mess she’s making or that I’m always the one to clean it up).

The thing with Jill is, sure, she has an annoying set of habits, but she’s everything you want in a friend. She’s nice to come home to. She listens well. Even when you don’t give yourself the benefit of the doubt, she does. She gives good hugs, and she likes experimenting in the kitchen. With recipes.

Ahem.

She’s not actually brainstorming ways to make your life difficult.

The futon-area sock removal? It’s probably subconscious at this point. And you can point them out, so she’ll pick them up, or you can joke about them, so she’ll laugh and then pick them up. She’s got a great sense of humor, especially about herself.

So what do you gain with the negative interpretation?

Extra baggage, on special order just for you. And excellent practice at getting angry, faster and more efficiently than before.

And with the positive one?

Just thinking it makes you happier. You like Jill more. You appreciate her. And she can feel it, too.

And don’t you both deserve that?

(Note to self.)

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For Sale: Saturday Morning Gathering Place

You have a dining table that seats eight. A couch with spacious seating for five. A comfortable rug. A yoga booster.

Not to mention the beds: The kids’ beds. The guest bed. The fold-out couch.

And yet, on weekend mornings, your little housemates clamber out of their organic sheets, across the furniture, and into the only place that will do: Your bed. Which happens to be where you are. Pretending to sleep.

You could embrace this. You could say to yourself, “This will only happen for so many years.” You could think about how adorable they are, how sweet it is that they want to play with you, how contagious their energy is.

But there’s an elbow in your kidney and a couple toes pressing on your eyes, and—is it even 6AM?—you can’t bear to check.

You. Need. Sleep.

Introducing: The Saturday Morning Gathering Place.

A bed, like parental beds should be.* Designed by parents who’ve been there.

Triggered by jumping children, the bed expands three feet on each side. As you roll away from the epicenter, you’re protected by a rising barrier that keeps the kids in, and you—safely cocooned—out of their reach.

It’s a bed. And a bomb shelter. A haven from the missiles of children’s toys. A sound barrier against screams that Gertie took a doll from Josephine and against screams for the perverse joy of screaming, filtering all sounds except those indicating legitimate terror, mortal danger, or a need for emotional support.

Yes, you’re still a good parent.

Now available at your neighborhood furniture store.

Give them their trampoline. Give yourself rest.™

*Down blanket sold separately.

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Pause

I’m tense.

I write. I study writing. I go outside; rinse, repeat. I stare at the screen. I take notes. I try to think.

A yellow ladybug lands on my screen.

She clambers over my keyboard. She strolls across my hands. She retracts her legs, then extends her right feet first. Her shell lifts assymetrically as she prepares to move. She spends minutes on the underside of my wrist while I study some more. She’s in my palm as I pick up dinner supplies. She lets me shield her from the sun and breeze.

We spend an hour and a half together.

I don’t need to write. I don’t need to think. My job is to notice.

I breathe. I watch. I smile.

I’m happy.

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And somehow we keep learning about what already was

The other day, A. decided he was curious if he remembered correctly: What had actually happened during chemo?

He opened the app that documents his medical records and scrolled back over a year and a half to the first time he was hospitalized. He’d had a fever that cycled up and down, up and down. He spent over a week in the hospital. It took days for doctors across several specialties to figure out what was happening.

Eventually, he was diagnosed with PCP pneumonia, which affects mainly people with HIV, blood cancers, or otherwise weakened immune systems (the rest of us manage to fight it off).

We remembered that he saw a pulmonologist. An infectious disease specialist. His hematologist.

But what were they thinking, before he was diagnosed?

A. reached the report from that appointment. And then came over to show me.

“Diagnosis: Possible sepsis.”

…

Oh.

The day I write up this story, I realize I’m close to filling up my current morning journal. It’s a 180-page five-subject notebook I started in November 2017. I took an unplanned break from writing for almost a year. Now, there’s room for five more mornings of journaling.

And so, for the first time in over a year, I turn back to the first entries in the notebook. I find documented, day by day, the second of six chemo cycles. And I read.

I read about the insanity of our lives in November 2017, about how many things were happening at the same time, about wanting to figure out rugs and wall decorations for the apartment we’d only moved into the day before the first chemo cycle. I read of trying to focus on the silver lining of having a treatable form of cancer and on the personal growth that came with it, but also of frustration at the cost of that growth, at the physical and mental exhaustion, at the fact that we barely had a chance to process what was happening once treatment started, at the destruction of the body of someone I loved. I read words of gratitude for all the help we received and words acknowledging how difficult it is to receive help. I read of resentment that we were in the position of having to be grateful. I read of attempts to maintain an emotional connection. I read of frustration with others, but also a willingness to engage on the things that mattered, to find a solution that worked well enough for everyone. I read of compassion. I read of fear and anger and a lack of confidence. I read of a compulsion to do rather than think, to get through the day.

As I read, I feel for the person who wrote these words, even as I feel disconnected, often reading with eyes wide in horror.

And yet.

In the school of Hellenistic philosophy called Stoicism, there’s a saying, “Memento mori.” Remember you will die.

The idea, as I understand it, is that being aware of death is liberating. It pushes you to live life, to have purpose and pursuits, because time is finite.

I wonder sometimes if we only say mortality, the passage of time, the changes of the season, motivate us simply because we live in a world subject to these things. If it’s like all other attempts to attribute meaning to something without inherent meaning.

Yes, there are studies that show shorter time spans increase productivity, but they all take place in this world of aging and disease and limited lifespans and changing seasons.

And yet, for myself, I find it’s true.

Looking back, I can recognize: I used to be there, even as my understanding of “there” changes with new discoveries and reflection.

And then: I have today.

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Two steps to creating new things (now featuring oobleck!)

The other day, I was playing with oobleck.

Oobleck is this wacky substance that flows like liquidy slime… until you press it. Then it becomes solid. Until you stop. At which point it flows again.

Say you want to dye it. If you add food coloring to liquid oobleck, the color will sit on top of it. If you keep kneading like with clay, the color will stay on the outside.

To dye all the oobleck, you have to do both: Knead and let go. Structure and flow.

I was doing just this when the penny dropped.

When I write, my brain is like oobleck.

Too much structure, too many expectations of what I plan to accomplish, and I freeze. My defenses go up, even when I’m the only one with expectations.

Too much flow, and I get meandering journal entries of no use to anyone.

What works best is a combination.

An objective, a reminder to focus on the interesting bits, and then letting my brain loose.

— or —

A constraint like a time limit or a prompt, and, within that, free rein.

Structure and flow.

What conditions do you need to produce your best work? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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Things people actually do in coffeeshops (besides drink coffee)

A collection of things I’ve seen, things I’ve done, and things I learned from a barista at this coffeeshop.

Go on blind dates.

Break up (loudly, says the barista).

Talk on the phone.

Meet friends.

Doodle.

Steal snack bars from the food area (-barista).

Take wedding photos (if it’s a nice-looking place).

Use the bathroom (the barista talked about a homeless man pushing a cart and wearing three layers of pants and a puffy sweatshirt even on warm days; he’d come in and politely ask to use the bathroom at the same time every day).

Set up impromptu acoustic shows.

Watch said shows.

Have work meetings (the barista mentioned one meeting where the people present had a product demo: they unrolled their company’s new sleeping bag over a co-working table, discussing and inspecting it till coffeeshop management requested they put it away because the space is for other people, too).

Co-work.

Apply for jobs.

Interview for jobs.

Pick at their skin.

Write books.

Read books.

Look for a place to live.

Leave a laptop unattended.

Talk to a barista.

Do homework.

Watch live-streamed funerals.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen—or done—in a coffeeshop?

Comment below and let us know—we’re here because we’re curious about people.

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Seeking Budding Photojournalist Looking To Sharpen Chops

The City of Jamestown is looking to hire a documentary photographer or photojournalist to work with our street team. Experience in realistic vehicular photography is a must.

Hire will be working in an interactive environment, interfacing with citizens and their cars.

Specific requirements for the position are listed below:

Extensive experience identifying when a traffic meter has expired, preferably first-hand.
Proficiency in lighting techniques to maximize numerical clarity.
Ability to interact diplomatically with unwitting clients, who may be quite irate as they credit you with their financial exchanges with the City.
Sound judgment and strong creative storytelling instinct to reward both realistic stories and highly original yarns with reduced fines.

General:

Will be working in various photography formats (daytime, nighttime, smartphone, and point-and-shoot).
Must work well under pressure from deadlines (we require 10 tickets a day) and have the ability to multitask (photography, annotation, civil discourse, etc).
Must be able to spend long hours on feet, walking, standing, and squatting for highest-fidelity journalism.
Must drive minuscule, doorless, three-wheeled vehicles.

Job Type: Full-Time.

Apply Now

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To interview well, lead with curiosity. (But only if you’re ready to learn about questionable social media affiliations.)

I recently had the pleasure of watching a performance by improv duo DUMMY, also known as Colleen Doyle and Jason Shotts.

They were so, so good. Especially with character and relationship development.

And what was remarkable was how they did this from the minute they got on stage.

In improv, you start by asking for a suggestion to inspire your performance.

Jason asked for someone in the audience who’d never given an improv suggestion to give one. “It’s easy,” Colleen said. “Just say a word.”

Silence.

They waited, looked around.

Eventually, someone—we’ll call her Z—said, “House.”

And then they probed: “Z, did something happen today that made you think of the word ‘house’?”

“We’ve been looking at houses.”

“Find anything you like?”

“No.”

“Have you been looking long?”

“One day.”

(Laughter)

“So today was the first day? Let’s HGTV this. What are your must-haves?” [let’s pretend Ophira knows what terms HGTV uses…]

“A big yard. And this exact neighhorhood.”

“Do you live there now?”

“No.”

“Why that neighborhood?”

“I somehow got into a Facebook group for moms in that neighborhood, and now all my friends are there.”

“So you infiltrated this Facebook group…”

And so on.

With close attention to detail, curiosity, empathy, and humor, Jason and Colleen uncovered a sliver of this woman’s story: She and her husband have two kids. They want a 3-bedroom house, but the kids will share—the two adults will have two of the three rooms to themselves. Their second room will probably be an office. They want to live in this exact neighborhood because of this strange Facebook group affiliation, and, by the way, after Z—the sole outsider—joined this group, they stopped allowing outsiders in.

This material. So human! So deep! So abundant!

What’s all the more impressive to me is how even their choice to have a new suggestion-giver likely contributed to the show. My bet is that it improved two things:

the prospect of getting good material in the first place: newbies’ suggestions are probably more likely to come from their lives in some way than to be a choice they make simply because they think it would be good on stage; and
the hilarity: because nervousness in newbies means either undersharing, like when Z didn’t mention it was their very first day looking for homes until asked directly, or oversharing, like when we unexpectedly learned about the planned bedroom distribution between kids and adults.

But those are improv-centric points.

For the rest of us, who want to interview well but not necessarily to turn it into entertainment, there’s a broader lesson here:

With a little bit of attention, curiosity, and empathy, we can learn so much.

Open insightful conversations with simple questions.

Listen to your interviewees’ stories.

Consider: What context or details are you missing?

And then: Ask for them, one at a time.

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Disaster averted

I’m sharing a large coffeeshop table with four other people.

I read, take a sip of water, then shift my weight against the table because my leg is falling asleep.

The table moves three inches.

I jerk up, imagining the damage:

a meticulous hand-drawn design, nearly complete after hours of work, now destroyed with a thick ink line diagonally through the center
the only copy of a last letter from a dearly departed parent, now covered in coffee (which may have also made it onto the lap of the reader)
a child close to the table, now on the floor, clutching the hip that hit a chair on the way down

I look around, eyes wide, ready to apologize.

No one else noticed.

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Sometimes, in the midst of a perfect moment, it hits us

Once in a while, A and I are doing something totally mundane.

Then, it happens.

Maybe we’re eating. Maybe we’re talking with loved ones. Maybe we’re gazing at the view.

The scene changes.

Maybe something goes flying and lands in an odd way. Maybe someone says something unexpectedly funny. Maybe we reach peak sunset.

We look at each other. Our eyes say,

I’m seeing this. Are you seeing this? Because this is silly/incredible/beautiful/hilarious.* Thank goodness someone else is here with me to bear witness to just how silly/incredible/beautiful/hilarious this is.

We smile internally. We acknowledge the moment and each other.

Then, the unspoken dialogue shifts.

Our eyes brim.

One of us expresses our joint thoughts in words:

“We are so lucky.”

Thank goodness we got to live this moment together. To experience this day.

*Sometimes, it’s all four.

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