My friend Ben, who I like and admire, recently attempted to sever our friendship by admitting to having fond memories of The Gin Blossoms. This is hard for me to accept because the band was borne from a tainted era of generic American "alternative" bands. If you lived through so-called modern rock radio in the 90s, you know the crop of crap I'm talking about — it was an endless potpourri of upbeat innocuousness sung by that annoying prick in your high school math class. The bands were generally interchangeable: you could slip a Dada disc into your friend's Better Than Ezra case and the subterfuge would likely never be discovered; if someone went to see a Marcy's Playground show and Blind Melon took the stage instead, would they be disappointed? Would they even notice? Ditto for The Gin Blossoms. Even the band's own mothers sometimes mistook them for Dishwalla.
Don't get me wrong, I will grant that "Hey Jealousy" is undeniably, even unmercifully catchy. (See the video here.) But if we measure quality by the ability to create an earworm that burrows into the listener's skull and leave them so crippled that they frantically seek out mattress-store jingles as a means of relief, then roll over Beethoven, because Katy Perry has some news to deliver. Ben's mention of the band reanimated that insidious melodic virus in my head, and after de-friending him on social media (including LinkedIn, because I could never work with someone who might say, "Hey, know what will make this workday go faster? New Miserable Experience!") I could feel old questions rising up within me, questions that confront me every time I listen to "Hey Jealousy":
Verse 1: I hate going to Jenny's house.See what happened there? Verse 3 is a repeat, but it's more poignant because of what you learned elsewhere in the song. That doesn't happen in Hey Jealousy. Instead, a drunkard tells you he's in no shape for driving, and then drunkenly says it again 90 seconds later because he apparently doesn't remember saying it.
Verse 2: I have always ached for Jenny, but she likes girls. Like, like-likes.
Verse 3: I hate going to Jenny's house.
I know The Gin Blossoms aren't the only chumps who parleyed a catchy riff into a few years of steady blasting from frat house windows; I know that the canon of banal pop lyrics is vast enough that it's hard to single out one band as special; I know that many of America's youth have succumbed to the notion that growing one's hair out is a sure-fire remedy for blue balls. The Gin Blossoms didn't invent any of that — but they are the essence of that, the overlapping center of the Venn diagram of laughable rock clichés, and I'd wash my hands of them forever if I could just get that goddam song out of my head.
©2012 wpreagan
I want to change careers. It would be a big shift, but I believe I will make a fantastic beauty consultant. Not like the animated mannequins at high-end department stores who prey on people's insecurities by demonstrating how they can mask miniscule "flaws" in the interest of so-called self-improvement, and certainly not like the plastic surgeons who multiply that make-up counter pitch to exponentially more permanent and costly extremes. No, my services will be much simpler: For the smallest possible fee that would still allow me to feed my family, I would meet with people professionally and point out every beautiful thing about them.
A career built on being complimentary? Don't be too quick to dismiss it, because there are two critical factors that make this a plausible business model:
First, I honestly think most people are beautiful. This doesn't mean they fit some preconceived template for attractiveness like the stringent guidelines employed by the advertising industry — it means they're beautiful in their own right, on their own terms. For me, it's as simple as this: When you see a person, imagine what the person who loves them loves most about them. Maybe it's the warmth in a woman's eyes or the readiness of a man's smile, the breadth of their shoulders or the grace of their gait, the confidence in their posture or the effervescence of their laugh. I don't think anyone is beautiful in exactly the same way someone else is beautiful, but that doesn't mean they aren't every bit as beautiful as the next person, and the next.
Second, so many people seem painfully self-aware of their supposed flaws. You can see it in the way they apply their make-up or use clothing as a disguise, how they cut their hair to cover their face or keep their smile tight to hide what's behind it. Maybe some of what I see is my imagination, but I recognize the ruses - I've done the same things myself, because I consider my best features to be between my ears, not on my face. I know the vulnerability one feels when a smile is met with a deliberate glance away, when we invest more effort than we should into aspiring to what only feels like adequacy, let alone excellence. In short, I know what it means to be human. And I'm smart enough to realize that being human is enough.
I would be amazing at the job, primarily because I would approach it with complete abandon. I would never lie to my clients, because I wouldn't have to — I would simply accentuate the positives that people too often deny in themselves. The real beauty, not the blueprint imposed by inaptly-named "beauty magazines."
The goal is not to convince people that they are closer than they think to some fictional ideal they have set in their sights. Pursuing an external definition of attractiveness is the opposite of what I want to achieve. My aim is to expose that fiction as a fraud, to reveal to them what is obvious to me: they are already beautiful, and any time spent worrying otherwise is time wasted. I don't presume it will be an easy conversion, but I believe I have the facts on my side.
While I really do believe that almost everyone is beautiful, there are still ways that people make themselves unattractive. Arrogance is a genuinely ugly trait, and no amount of make-up can cover it up; ditto on hatred, because drawing ugly lines in your heart also creates ugly lines on your face. (I know no one who finds scowl lines enticing.) But as for the rest of the species, I use the food analogy: there are absolutely no similarities between pizza and apples and ice cream, and I appreciate every one of them. I don't wish they were more like each other — I celebrate how different they all are. People have big noses and small noses, perfect teeth and crooked teeth, balding heads and hairy arms and curvaceous thighs and flat chests and furrowed brows and flirty smiles, and there's something genuinely compelling in every feature if you look at what's there, not what's missing. To hell with anyone who tells you otherwise — you (yes you, dear reader) are genuinely beautiful, and I'm not just offering platitudes. You really are, so-called flaws and all.
(Wait, this business model isn't going to work if I keep giving this away.)
©2012 wpreagan
Why have dishes and silverware if you're not going to use them?
That was the inside joke at our house to justify a sink cluttered with dirty plates and bowls, coffee mugs stuffed with so much flatware they resembled metallic hedgehogs or some found-art installation. My wife and I both dislike washing dishes, so for years, we simply wouldn't do it until we had to. When one of us would inevitably be forced to stir coffee with a butter knife or contemplate eating cereal with a serving ladle, we would resign ourselves to the task and invest two or three hours into cleaning and returning every item to its respective shelf or drawer. It was a massive undertaking, but it only takes one serving of coffee from a Tupperware container to know that you've reached the end of your dishware tether.
While we were equally willing to build mock city skylines with piles of dishes of varying heights, I am better able to tolerate dismantling the towers — it satisfies my latent obsessive/compulsive tendencies, the dish rack becoming a blank canvas and filling every square inch an art form. An hour into excavating the porcelain midden we formerly used as our sink, the dish rack bowed under the weight of its contents, items propped and dangling with such precarious complexity that it called to mind the finale of a Cirque de Soleil show. At this point I would back away slowly and say to my wife in my best Nigel Tufnell, "Don't touch it. Don't even point at it."
When I was staying at my Mom's house this past summer, I noticed that she washed the dishes every night. Once the food-consumption portion of the evening was done (which for her meant "dinner", while in our house that means "post-prime-time chip raid") she would quickly and efficiently clean the kitchen before settling down to relax for the evening. As a result, every morning, the kitchen was spotless and inviting. Her favorite coffee mug was sitting next to the coffee maker, not buried under the rubble of a three-course meal. I know, it was a simple, deliberate routine that made this happen, yet every morning it seemed like magic.
Of course, applying this simple, deliberate routine to my own home was akin to telling a would-be dieter, "So you just eat healthier food and less of it." Yes, simple to describe — the challenge is in the execution. I have things I want to write, Words with Friends games to play, bad TV I need to watch then scoff at — there simply wasn't time for washing dishes every day. Anyone who would argue otherwise does not understand the depths of my laziness. (To help you put it in perspective, I watch reruns of Chopped. I know what dishes they're creating, I know who wins, and there is nothing to be gained from watching it. But it is so much easier to watch it than to get up and do something productive.)
By the beginning of Winter, an opportunity for changing my mindset finally arrived — my wife's birthday. I'm ashamed to admit this, but I'm not a great gift-giver. I fret over what to get her every year, wanting to give her something that's creative, thoughtful, useful, and not an item of clutter. Along with the creative gift (read: clutter) that my daughter and I made for her, I also made her a pledge: She would not have to wash dishes for an entire year. This might not be a fun gift to pull out of box, but if ever there was a gift that keeps on giving, this was it. Needless to say, she loved the idea of the gift, even if she was skeptical about delivery.
But I'm delivering. It required a complete lifestyle change, but knowing I have a few of my mom's genes in me, I knew it was possible. I abandoned my previous ignore-as-long-as-possible approach and made dish washing part of my daily ritual. The gift was intended to benefit my wife, but I've realized essential benefits for myself:
It hasn't been a seamless transition — my hands are getting dry and cracked, and I'm struggling to find a dish glove that affords the dexterity I prefer when washing dishes. But the bottom line is this: My wife is happier, and isn't that the ultimate goal of a birthday gift?
You may be expecting a feel-good-movie ending to this essay, a thoughtful summarization of how the value I've found in this finite, focused task has expanded to other parts of my life. Nope. My office desk still resembles a paper-only time capsule, my workshop looks the before picture on a power tool safety poster, and the basement continues to look like an amateur audition for Hoarders.
But c'mon, my favorite coffee mug is always clean. How much magic can one house accommodate?
©2012 wpreagan
I have gender issues. Not with being a man (I'm smart enough to I appreciate the good fortune my chromosomal composition has afforded me in America) but with the way our culture continues to define gender, and by reflex, the expectations of each gender. Specifically, what it is to be a "man".
For instance, I wear pink shirts. I like pink shirts. Not as much as blue or white shirts, but enough that I'm glad to have the option to add that color to the palette of my life. That shouldn't be worthy of note, any more than liking yellow shirts, yet at the office recently a woman said, "I like your shirt. It takes a confident man to wear a pink shirt."
Actually, it doesn't. If I could bottle self-doubt, I could make a fortune — though the product seems to be in plentiful supply, so I can't imagine who would buy it. What it takes to wear a pink shirt is fatigue with blue and white and plaid and whatever other shirts a man has in his closet. It's not just me — I work with other guys who wear pink shirts, and if you believe some people's prevailing wisdom, we're either a troupe of swaggering mavericks who boldly thumb our noses at conventional perceptions of manliness, or we're a bunch of dandies. In fact, I DO thumb my nose at the archaic yet common conventions of masculinity in our society — but it has nothing to do with a pink shirt. Because a pink shirt is just a shirt that happens to be pink. I'm not making a statement, I'm simply aware that with ivory-colored khakis and a brown suit jacket, a pink shirt looks quite nice.
I was recently in a Facebook "conversation" (my euphemism for the exchange of opposing viewpoints that follow many posts) about women who ask their men to get tampons or hair dye at the store, and one female commenter stated that any man who would buy these things "doesn't have a man card." This strikes me as a juvenile approach to both menstrual cycles and grocery shopping. I have no problem buying tampons — I know the brand and box my wife prefers, and I don't feel a need to disguise the product in a larger pile of groceries. That doesn't make me less of a man, nor more of a man - it makes me a shopper. If tampons are on the list, it would be ridiculous for me to tell my wife she needs to make a special trip to the store after I've returned with all of the other groceries because I am honor-bound by my Y chromosome to avoid the feminine hygiene aisle.
It was that exchange that enlightened me to a flaw in my thinking: Historically, I have blamed the ongoing delineation of gender roles on men. I thought feminism was working to make women genuine equals, and it was vestiges of the old-boy network that perpetuated the narrow idea of "manly" behavior. This bias was based on my personal observation that many men remain very much hung up on being "manly" - choosing a manly drink at the bar (because what kind of pussy would order a drink with grenadine in it?) or driving a manly car (which explains why VW is trying to define their new Beetle as manly) or refusing to wear a pink shirt. I find these attitudes misguided, but they're common, and I've come to begrudgingly accept it. My error was in thinking that I was taking the women's side on this, because I've been noticing lately that women are just as likely to have a skewed gender perspective.
I remember my wife (before she was my wife) pointing out a "starter" toolkit at one of the big box stores, made for someone who wanted to have basic tools in their home: hammer, pliers, screwdrivers, saw, wire cutters, and an assortment of nails and screws. What made this set noteworthy? Every handle was pink, and they were all encased in a box labeled "Her Toolkit." (In a flowing font that looked like it had been lifted from the front of a cheerleading outfit.) My wife laughed because she owned a black-handled, non-gender-specific hammer, because she never perceived a hammer as an outlet to express her femininity - she simply wanted something that could drive a nail into the drywall. The idea of someone marketing a pink-handled hammer to her was absurd. Of course, she only felt that way because it was absurd.
Another example: a woman called my friend's hardware store and asked to talk with a deck specialist. They sent the call to the resident desk specialist, an experienced woman with a deep knowledge of materials, construction, and local zoning ordinances. The caller asked again to speak with a desk specialist. "That's me," the salesperson insisted, "how can I help?" In short order, it became clear that the caller didn't want to speak to the smartest desk specialist in the store - she wanted to speak to a male deck specialist. Because men really know that kind of stuff, you know? Satisfying the caller meant transferring the line to a less-qualified male employee. Fortunately, they had such a person on staff.
I know that I'm not exposing some seedy, secret underbelly of American culture. This is par-for-the-course even in the 21st century, and that's exactly why I'm speaking of it. These attitudes get reinforced every day, and too many people seem to shrug it off as "just the way things are." We can blame marketers who create ad campaigns like Dr. Pepper 10's inane "It's not for women" or beer ads that contribute catchphrases like "man card" to the cultural dialogue; we can blame Hollywood for perpetuating gender stereotypes under the guise of "that's what audiences respond to"; we can blame anyone and everyone, but there comes a time when we have to accept some responsibility ourselves. Yes, it's the way things are, but it's not the way things ought to be.
With all the negativity that life can throw at us - job insecurity, health scares, resource depletion, domestic violence, terrorism, poverty, natural disasters, insert your personal demons here - does it really matter what color shirt a man wears or who's buying the tampons? Gentlemen, if you like vodka on the rocks, by all means, drink up - but don't choke it down because your preferred Tequila Sunrise makes you "look" like a pansy; and ladies, recognize that a man who faithfully adheres to the testosterone playbook may only be showing his studiousness, not his strength. Rather than worrying about who's wearing the proverbial pants, how about we all put on whatever we want to wear and get to work addressing the things that really matter.
©2012 wpreagan
I lost my dad this summer, a fantastic man who gave me 44 years of guidance, wisdom, humor, and love. I can't do him justice in an essay, as none of us really could with our parents — his influence on me and my siblings is so broad, so subtle, so all encompassing that any attempt to define it leads to endless addendums and clarifications, each tangent getting no closer to a complete truth than the insufficient phrase it expands upon. There would be no me without him, literally and figuratively. For every good thing I am and I've done, he and my mom deserve the credit. I will miss him forever.
When he passed, I was blessed to have many people who expressed condolences, and I was reminded of a very peculiar aspect of human communication: despite thousands of years of evolution and enlightenment, humans are still struggling to build a language to respond to or assuage a deep loss. Perhaps it's a complex emotion that we are fortunate to not have enough practice at expressing; perhaps it's an instinctual sense that the language we use to corral and quantify our ideas is simply incapable of addressing the pain and sadness of losing someone we love.
Whatever the reason, it is always hard to know what to say. I love words, but they are simply not suitable for all occasions. The platitudes of sympathy cards, however well-intentioned, seem formulaic; the tried-and-true stock phrases we rely on have become the accepted cliches because we have collectively and silently resigned ourselves to being unable to express what our hearts are experiencing. There's certainly no wrong thing to say, because we know that whatever we say is simply a placeholder for something larger, something more inexplicable. I appreciated everyone who tried, right down to a friend who said simply, "I don't know what to say" and wrapped me in a bear hug.
Yet one recurring theme that gave me genuine solace was stories. My friend Scott recalled the era when our band practiced at my parent's business, a cavernous woodshop that could fully accommodate our four-piece band and the racket we created. When we practiced, dad would come over to check in on us now and then. I know he didn't like the volume, and he wouldn't stay for the actual practice, but he was great company as we set up, relating well with all of my band mates, sharing laughs, telling a joke, whatever. I suspect he would have preferred that I wasn't in a band, worried that we would emulate the career path of Motley Crue despite us behaving more like The Wonders from "That Thing You Do", but he kept that to himself — I was obviously passionate about songwriting, I was playing with three great friends (and great people), and he was there to support me.
If I had listed 1,000 memories of my dad, I wouldn't have listed the story Scott told. But when he brought it up, it felt like yesterday. The same was true for all of the stories that friends and family recounted — their stories were the ideal expressions of sympathy because they didn't mourn his death, they reminded me of his life. They told me that, while I have an intensely personal image of my dad, it wasn't an image I had simply conjured — so much of what I saw in him was visible to everyone, and that was never more clear than when I heard these simple little stories of moments that had no particular significance yet lasted through decades of life. The moments may have been insignificant, but the characters were essential.
I reflect back on a life with my dad and realize that memory is like an iceberg - we might think we can recall a lot, but there are so many more memories resting comfortably in the recesses of our minds. I wonder how many more there are in there, but I don't wrack my brain trying to find them, because they rush out suddenly with the simplest provocation: when I think about where to get coffee and hear my dad advising, "keep your money local"; when someone notes with incredulity the amount of sugar I put in my coffee and I hear him chiding, "you don't drink coffee, you drink dessert"; when a photograph captures me channeling him through a particular expression or gesture. There is so much of him in me and my family, and while I would have groaned to hear that when I was 18, I celebrate it at 45.
I have a lifetime of memories filed away, yet I cherish the stories I hear from others. In the scrapbook in my brain, my mental snapshots are all taken from the same angle; these other stories give my father more dimensions and allow me to see things I might have missed from my vantage point. That's something Hallmark can't offer, and it reminds me that when I have to try to express the inexpressible when someone else suffers a loss, I'm not going to try to wordsmith the right thing to say — I'm just going to say, "I remember one time..."
©2011 wpreagan
As a prologue to this story, let me quickly recount a music listening experience from my college days, when a friend said he loved how the harmonica in REM's "Pretty Persuasion" was strangely out of key. Harmonica? I had heard that song at least 40 times and had no recollection of a harmonica. He popped on the album (kids, your parents can translate) and as the third verse started, he pointed at the speakers. Sure enough, buried deep in the mix, there was a hard-blowing harmonica, clearly not the right key but close enough to make the friction interesting. 40-plus listens and I had never heard it, and from that day on, it was impossible to miss. How had it eluded me for so long?
Flash forward a couple of decades to the necktie-wearing version of me standing at a downtown Portland Max stop, waiting for the Yellow Line to whisk me home. I was in the midst of a serious fascination with The Roots, the Philly-based hip-hop/funk/awesome ensemble, and one of my favorite funky songs began flowing through the thin white wires of my iPod. I stood close to the platform edge so the world could shuffle behind me while an involuntary sway took hold of my middle-aged body.
About 15 seconds into the groove, I began hearing a violin line that I had never heard in the song before. Hearing unusual instruments is not unusual in a band with a full-time tuba player, but this was one of my favorite songs---how had I not heard this before? It wasn't pushed up to the front of the mix, but it was clear enough that I was astonished that I was hearing it for the first time.
As I focused my ears, I could feel my jaw dropping. The violinist was totally adventurous, pushing against the textures and rhythm of the song, veering toward chaos and suddenly resolving into achingly gorgeous melodies. He bowed right over Black Thought's rhymes, seemed only loosely tethered to Questo's beats, and played with an enthusiastic abandon that made the song completely new. I stood on the train platform, entranced and ecstatic. It was truly one of the best listening experiences of my life.
Then the song came to an end, and the violin didn't. In the pause between songs on my player, I realized that the violinist was standing behind me, playing an entirely different song that was coincidentally in the same key. What I had been hearing was pure chance, a cosmic fluke that could never be repeated intentionally, a private headphone moment juxtaposed against a public sountrack. It was like a DJ's mash-up, and god was the DJ, squeezing disparate elements into the same sonic space.
On the train home, I contemplated the odds of what had happened: eight minutes on the platform that happened to overlap with the violinist's performance; 25 hours of music on my iPod, all in various keys, dozens of songs in the violinist's repertoire, all in various keys, and within that eight minute window, we were in tune. If the train had been early, if I'd gotten off work late, if the violinist's tips had been enough to call it a day before I arrived, the unlikely duet would have never materialized.
I wish the violinist could have heard what I heard. I wish I could have recorded it. But it wasn't meant for that - if I could listen to it again and again, I would be more critical, mentally mapping the missed notes, lamenting the sections that weren't as seamless as I recalled. This gorgeous collision of sympathetic melodies was meant for that moment, a cosmic spark that flared and faded in a matter of minutes, burning itself into my memory and disappearing forever.
©2011 wpreagan
All the cool kids wore Levi's jeans.
I was in eighth grade, at my second Junior High School in two years following my family's relocation to Maine. I was the new kid, and like most new kids — and like so many eighth graders — I wanted nothing more than to assimilate, to disappear into the crowd, to not feel like I was being assessed and summarized by a class full of kids who had known each other since they were sticking rulers into paste pots in kindergarten. And that assimilation wasn't going to happen in rust-colored corduroys. Even if they were Levi's cords. Levi's blue jeans were the invisibility cloak my 12 year old soul dreamed of.
Now to put this into perspective, my parents gave me everything I needed. I always had a few new outfits at the start of the school year, I was able to play little league baseball and hockey and soccer (with hand-me-down gear, but that meant it was already broken in for me), there was always delicious food on the table at dinner time. But my folks had four kids, so we couldn't have everything, and Lee and Wrangler were more affordable jeans. My mother was incredulous when I expressed my disdain for Wrangler - wasn't Wrangler a brand name? Weren't they better than the ill-fitting denims available at Zayre and Kings? I'm sure I seemed like an ungrateful little cretin when I lamented that, no matter what they were, what they weren't was Levi's.
"Bill," my mom assured, "anyone who judges you by your pants isn't a friend worth having." Thanks mom. Straight out of the Parenting 101 handbook. Mom was an adult - how could she understand what it felt like to be the new kid? I was exhausted by feeling alien and out of place, and all she could do was utter meaningless lies like "no one is paying any attention to your pants." Of course they are — I AM, so why wouldn't they? I resigned myself to a lifetime of lunches at the misfits table, eating brown-paper-bag sandwiches while the cool kids ate school-lunch pizza in their cool jeans and planned their fabulous futures.
That was my reality until the day my mom came home and flopped a stiff pair of denim pants onto the bed - LEVI'S! I was ecstatic, quickly slipping into the rigid fabric, buttoning them up and feeling like a changed man. I couldn't wait to go to school the next day, imagining the nods of approval from boys who barely acknowledged me the previous day, hoping one of the blooming eighth grade girls would notice all the wonderful qualities about me that had been hidden by my corduroys.
The next day, I proudly donned my new jeans, strutted to school with newfound enthusiasm, and was delighted when the guy at the locker next to mine remarked, "Hey, new jeans." It was just as I had imagined, and it was happening as quickly as I had hoped. I replied with forced nonchalance and overt brand-dropping, "Yeah, I just got these Levi's yesterday."
"Are they red tag or orange tag?"
I quaked at the question, unsure what it meant but concerned for the possibilities. "Turn around," he said, taking a peek at the small brand tag sewn into the stitching of the back pocket. "Yeah, orange tag. I prefer the red tag." And as I walked to class, I quickly learned that all the cool kids preferred red tags. The tiny tabs on everyone's pants suddenly shined like tiny LED christmas lights, and less than 10 minutes into the school day, I felt foolish for trying so hard to fit in and for failing so completely, the inflexible fabric scraping the flesh of my legs as the orange tag scraped my psyche.
I don't know how much I actually learned that day, but I look back on it as a milestone, my first glimpse behind the facade of "cool": even if you buy a ticket, the ushers at the door can call it out as a fake. It also showed me that those ushers are assholes, guarding the gates to a club I no longer wanted to join. My mother was right: If the test of my worth is based on a 1/4" tag on my back pocket, I had no desire to pass that test. My Lee jeans never felt so comfortable.
I'm sometimes reminded of this when I attend music shows in Portland or stroll on North Mississippi, seeing the meticulous effort some people put into their exterior identities. The self-concious haircuts, the skinny black pants, and vintage t-shirts and white-plastic sunglasses seem to serve as beacon calls to others of the species, a preliminary filter to sift out anyone who supports chain restaurants or network television. I'm probably wrong — I prefer to imagine they're all thoughtful folks who judge their fellow citizens by the content of their character, not the cut of their coat — but to me, it all looks like red tag Levi's, and I outgrew those many decades ago.
My daughter is eight, and I know there's nothing I can do to save her from learning this lesson on her own. At this moment, she has no awareness of clothing brands, and judges every outfit on color and comfort - the only true measure of a good wardrobe. I hope that remains her focus, but I know that once she hits junior high, her concern with the tag is going to come, another of those heinous rites of passage that occur as we try to figure out how to live in our own skin. She's probably going to want her generation's version of Levi's, and if my current budget is any indication, I'm going to have to buy her something else and assure her, "anyone who judges you by your pants isn't a friend worth having." She's going to look at me and think, "Sheesh, dad, you have no idea what it's like to be a kid."
Of course I don't. What could an adult possibly know about that?
©2011 wpreagan
I was passing time on the bus by peeking over the shoulder of the woman in front of me and reading the headlines of her People magazine. Personally, I would never buy People magazine — and I say that with so much righteous intellectual superiority that my you'd think I didn't own a television — but in truth, it's always my first choice when I'm at the doctor's office. It's the cotton candy of magazines: no nutrition, no substance, but so much pointless deliciousness.
What immediately startled me during my visual eavesdropping session was the awful appearance of the stars featured on a particular two-page spread. Each one seemed happy enough, but almost catatonic, as if they were all auditioning for a starring role in The Stepford Wives and the casting agent was facing some difficult choices. I jockeyed for position in hope of finding an explanation, my face close enough to smell the other rider's hair, and saw that the article was comparing which celebrity women faired best at wax museums.
Halle Berry was featured, looking far more ordinary than she ever looks in film or photographs. Actually, her breasts looked fabulous, it was only her face that failed to match reality. (It's clear where the artist spent the most time on their work.) Lindsey Lohan looked spacey and stupefied — surprisingly lifelike in that regard, though her paraffin doppelganger sported a pre-tabloid innocence that looked oddly anachronistic. I shifted to see the other women featured, but my move coincided with the bus hitting a pothole and caused my chin to gently bump her shoulder, so I spent the rest of the ride glued to the back of my seat in order to make it perfectly clear that, no, I did want to nuzzle her neck (anymore), and no, security did not need to be called. But those glossy photos of those glassy-eyed celebrity duplicates continued to haunt me.
It's clear that wax museums have a solid base of supporters, but I am not one of them. I just don't understand the allure — the creepy figures they house may bear a general resemblance to a Hollywood celebrity or historical figure, but their lifeless gazes and frozen postures make the museum experience seem like an open-casket wake for 300 irrelevant personalities.
There are a few I can understand: What is it like to stand next to 7'6" basketball star Yao Ming? It's rare we encounter anyone approaching seven feet in our daily life, and I am unable to imagine the scale and proportions of his size by making a mark on the wall at 90". Maybe jockey Willie Shoemaker as well, though he was 4' 11", and I see people that tall when I drop my daughter at school every morning.
But what is the excitement of seeing a wickless-candle version of Matthew Mcconaughey? A wax casting of Princess Di? A plasticized Michelle Obama? Boy George, Adolph Hitler, Franz Kafka and Gandhi all standing rigidly at the world's most boring cocktail party? I don't get it.
Looking at wax museum sites online, I found one that boasts of a life-size facsimile of Glee's caustic cheering coach Jane Lynch — if ever there was a celebrity who you would want to be vocal, Jane is it, because without her wit, she's a middle-aged Old Navy display hawking affordable red sweat suits; another brags of their lifelike Julia Roberts, though the awkward expression and shimmering creepiness of her molded face makes her look like the dream date for BK's King.
It seems like a strange commentary on our culture that our celebrity obsessions are so deep that ogling claymation replicas of Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Lopez is deemed an afternoon well spent. Yet countless online photos confirm the popularity of the pastime, fans posing with mannequins dressed as their favorite movie characters, the lifeless eyes of James Bond or Jack Sparrow or Al Gore staring slightly away from the camera as if they themselves don't want to be in the picture.
I'm not passing judgment* on people who spend $35.50 for a day of silent socializing with a warehouse full of Hollywood has-beens. I simply don't get it. A few hours spent at the Smithsonian Museum is an opportunity to see or experience something tangible — observing the scale of Linburgh's plane and the Apollo 11 space capsule, examining the skeletal frame of a triceratops or the confines of a Chicago "L" transit car. Is there a similar historical value to seeing the waxy version of W.C. Fields or the original cast of television's Star Trek?
Personally, if I'm ever going to have my picture taken with the likes of Snooki or Speaker of the House John Boehner, I don't want it to look like I'm standing next to a scientifically preserved version of those people, because...wait, maybe those aren't the best examples.
* Of course I am.
©2011 wpreagan
Talking about marriage is like talking about religion — it means different things to different people. Even to people in the same marriage. You've got your Orthodox Married who believe that everything after "I do" is a compromise of one's personal self for the good of the institution; you've got your Reformed Married who are willing to compromise but have recognized that two televisions in separate rooms is a matrimonial blessing; there's your Born-Again Married, who keep a Deepak Chopra book in the drawer of the night stand because marriage is too complicated to get through without an owner's manual; you've got your IRS Married who tie the knot for financial reasons, though with the US tax system, getting married to save money is like swimming in the Willamette river to save laundry money. None of these are necessarily better than the other, because there is no right or wrong marriage — you get from it what you invest in it, and it's yours. For all the discussion of the "meaning" of marriage on a public and political level, the people who define each marriage on a personal level are the two people who say, "I do."
But marriage is more tangible than religion. Marriage is like family, except you volunteer for it, which means that when you get to challenges, you have to accept some of the responsibility for the circumstances. With the family you grew up with, you can blame them for everything — all those weird little foibles and flaws ingrained in our personalities? Most of us trace them back to the family dinner table. Of course, all the weird little strengths and specialties we proudly claim as our own can be tracked to the same roots. We marry a person because we love them, and their family is included in the dowry, the bonus and baggage DNA entwined in their psyche. But your spouse understands that. Even embraces that. Otherwise, why would they agree to attend big family gatherings, the type preceded by a roster of warnings about this one's politics and that one's biases and so many other one's peccadilloes. Few things prepare a person for life with another as well as watching the family dynamic when it comes to seemingly simple events — for example, taking group photos. You can learn a tremendous amount about a person and their family in the brief (or often excruciatingly long) duration between "Okay, let's get a picture" and the actual click of the shutter.
But the family gathering isn't the most reliable crash-course in life another person. A more stringent test is the long drive. And I'm not talking about a couple of hours across the state line, I'm talking about a driiiiiiiive — a map-unfolding- cross-border-multi-day mobile living excursion. The depth of one's affection cannot be accurately measured in living rooms or restaurants or even at family reunions because these places allow too much breathing room, too many escape routes, too many buffers, either intentional or accidental. The confines of a car, endless hours of humming tires, enduring a CD you wish you never lied about liking, bare and unwashed feet on the dashboard, splitting a bag of pretzels and a Mountain Dew and calling it dinner…again. A long drive is a concentrated imitation of life: adventure, anticipation, anxiety, excitement, fatigue, monotony, redundancy - but best of all, intimacy. Not honeymoon-style intimacy, but the deep backstory that gets shared between mile markers 71 and 134, tales that simply don't come to the surface amid the bustle and distraction of life. Memories jarred loose by radio songs or roadside diners, dusty tales that lack the practiced fluidity of our standard storytelling repertoires. The irregular flashes of oncoming headlights are like camera flashes, snapshots of tired eyes and relaxed smiles or the quiet repose of an exhausted head pillowed by a folded sweatshirt against the car window. These snapshots endure in our memory, reminding you of the reason you were excited about this journey. Even as the journey takes you past creepy roadside rest areas and countless mediocre chain restaurants, as weary eyes try to focus on the task at hand, these snapshots remind us that life is good, and even better with a copilot you can count on.
Most importantly, marriage isn't the same thing as love. Love is like an idea for a movie, unlimited in scope and ambition; marriage is that same movie when it's exposed to budget constraints, impromptu script changes, bad lighting and confusing, unexpected jump cuts. As you make your movie, don't focus on how the dailies aren't matching your imagination; instead, look closely at the reels and try to make it the best film you can. That movie you have in your head is just one version of the story, limited by your imagination. The one you make every day is a collaboration, and it has every potential to exceed anything you could have imagined by yourself. Share the writing, share the editing, and most of all, make sure both of your names get equally billing in the credits.
©2010 wpreagan
This piece was originally written to be read by several readers at a friend's wedding. I have modified it to commemorate my 11th anniversary with my wife. I am grateful every day to have her in my life, and look forward to every moment of the proverbial car ride ahead. (Though I'm probably going to ask to skip a few tracks on that one CD.)
At this moment, I am humming Buddy Holly's "Everyday." You know the one: "Everyday, it's a-gettin' closer, goin' faster than a roller coaster..." and so on. Buddy's charming paean to the promise of impending love is a sweet little ditty, but frankly, after more than an hour of it, I want to carve it out of my cranium with the thin plastic knife that I got with my bagel at the same time I got this freakin' song stuck in my head.
The café in my office building is notorious for such subliminal gifting. I stop in to order a latté or some peanut butter toast, flip through one of the newspaper sections left on the tables while waiting for the item is toasted/steamed/whatever, grab my purchase and jump on the elevator. It seems innocuous enough, until there in the empty silence of the elevator car the thought crime is revealed — suddenly I'm whistling the opening synth riff from "The Final Countdown" or realizing with great alarm that I have been reassembling the lyrics to "Hotel California" in my head. It's enough to sour the taste of whatever treat I have in my hands.
The bizarre array of music that sneaks from their speakers and into my brain on successive visits makes it clear that the various employees take turns choosing the playlist, and I'm willing to bet, often choosing a station for ironic effect. I've worked in such environments, where it's fun to pick stations that will playfully annoy particular coworkers or set a strange mood for the work day. The trouble for the customers is that we don't have Madonna to cleanse our audio palette after Bad Company has muddied up our short-term memory — we exit while the latter is still playing, and the offending chorus follows us around like an inescapable pest, nipping annoyingly at our thoughts every time we have an idle mental moment.
It's not just that café, of course. Ambient music plays almost everywhere we go, which explains why we can be sitting somewhere quiet and some long-forgotten melody will suddenly be front and center in our mind. I usually leave my bank with some passé radio hit by Alanis Morissette or Crowded House burrowing into my psyche, and leaving Target empty-handed rarely means I'll leave empty-headed. Worst of all, it's the catchiest songs that cling tightest, sonic burdocks that can't even be loosed by a headphone session with the iPod: I once pumped a blissful medley of irresistible Guided By Voices songs into my ears in order to flush a freeloading 80's hit, and ten minutes after turning off the device, I was once again banging my head on the table to shake loose the cloyingly effervescent da-da-da-dum-dum intro of A-ha's "Take On Me."
I know there's someone reading who is thinking, "Wow, I haven't thought about Alanis in a while. I'd love to hear 'Ironic' again." And therein lies the problem with these unavoidable soundtracks that fill our air and our ears — everyone likes different things, so a business has no idea how their so-called mood music is impacting their customers' moods: one might find Peter Cetera to be the ideal background music for filling out a deposit slip, while the next might close their account simply to avoid the risk of ever having to withdraw money to the strains of Jewel.
It's not really about Alanis (who, I confess, is one of my guilty pleasures) or Jewel (whose voice is impressive even when her songs are not.) It's about the reckless use of these voices in public settings. Companies constantly remind me about the convenience of online banking and online bill paying and online shopping, but it isn't the convenience that attracts me: it's the fact that all of these transactions can occur without the fear of some schlocky Heart ballad pirating the mental radio in my brain. Am I ready to skip the in-person retail experience completely? I don't know. But everyday, it's a-gettin' closer...
©2010 wpreagan
"It's like being inside a model train set." That's how my father described the few acres of college town that surrounded his business. The century-old paddle and oar factory sat next to train tracks that, ¼ mile north, carried freight cars across a picturesque trestle bridge that spanned the jagged rocks that made up the bed of the Stillwater River. To the south, the train rails passed a old New England homes adorned with painted porch chairs and bright potted flowers before crossing several roads in quick succession, each intersection, each featuring the flashing lights and ringing bells of classic black-and-white "X-ing" warnings. When a train passed, it was easy to imagine it had all been laid out by some fussy hobbyist, intent on making an improbably accurate scale version of an idyllic Maine town.
I worked at the factory for 10 years, and never tired of walking out to the trestle for my lunch breaks. The primal force of the river as a whole was a satisfying sound, but just as an orchestra sounds like a cohesive unit until we begin picking out the individual melodies of each different instrument, there were rich layers of sound that could be picked out from the river's white noise: The low-end rumble of the major flows, the hollow midrange as it met the resistance of the rocks, the high end "shhhhhh" that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't a mystical experience or a metaphor for life — it was simply a roaring, awesome soundtrack for eating a turkey sandwich and escaping from the smell of varnish and sawn wood.
When college was in session, I often saw students crossing the trestle, an easy shortcut from the rental houses across the river to the charming couple of blocks called downtown. In the summertime, I usually had the whole trestle to myself. One sunny late July day, I took my chicken salad and a soda and set out for the bridge, turning the corner behind the factory store to see what seemed like a scene from a movie: a beautiful woman I had never seen, gleefully tromping through the tall grass and picking weeds.
I'm never been much for horticulture, so I'm sure they were officially known as flowers, but when something grows everywhere, uninvited and untended, we tend to call them weeds. All along the unkempt paths along the train tracks, tiny wild flowers grew and bloomed and died without anyone taking notice, yet this college-aged woman was plucking them with the enthusiasm of a six-year old. As our paths converged, I marveled at her smile, her long blondish hair, her deep suntan, and risked making a fool of myself by momentarily pretending to know something about flowers: "Making a bouquet?"
She smiled wider with a nod, reaching down to add another spindly yellow stem to the couple of dozen sprigs in her hand, and gushed, "These are so wonderful!"
I looked at the collection: a couple of pale purple buds about as big as your smallest thumbnail, a few of the miniature daisies that grew throughout the neighborhood, and a random scattering of other miniature flowers that would grow and whither along the tracks until the railroad company did their annual mow. A less impressive bouquet could not be assembled unless it featured clumps of overgrown grass, but I was far too impressed with her face to tell her that, so instead, I said, "Great colors. Though pretty common flowers."
"You're so lucky", she replied, looking at them one by one as she continued, "I'm here visiting my aunt. I'm from Hawaii, and all of our flowers are big and bold. I love them, but they're almost ostentatious. We don't have anything like these," and she pointed to the purple buds, just like the patch I had scythed the day before to allow air to flow around our stacked ash lumber. Recalling a few small orange flowers on the backside of the wood pile, far enough from the stack that they were spared from the blade, I walked behind the pile, picked them from the long grass, and offered them for her collection. More delight, more smiles, a quick thank you, and her eyes went back to the ground.
In the movie version of the moment, the act of adding the orange to her bouquet would have allowed our eyes to meet, and the scene would jump-cut to the two of us sitting on the rail sharing a chicken salad sandwich, the roar of the river requiring us to lean in with unexpectedly comfortable intimacy. Sadly, it wasn't a movie. Instead, it was clear she had barely noticed me, my being too big and bold to hold her attention. She moved south through the model train set, and I went out to the trestle to eat my lunch and imagine how the rest of the movie might have gone.
Years later, a friend described her reasons for quitting a landscaping job: She loved working with plants and digging in the dirt, but one day saw her boss ruthlessly tearing up a cluster of flowers. She asked why. "Because they're weeds." She explained that they weren't, naming the flowers that now lay in a dead pile, and he replied, "It's a flower if it grows where I want it to grow. If not, it's a weed."
I suspect we all do that a lot in our lives — deeming something worthy or expendable based on its value to us, not its intrinsic value. I often think about that woman from Hawaii when I'm out walking with my daughter, seven-years old and yet to "learn" how to separate the world into flowers and weeds. I'm glad, because it's amazing how many lovely weeds she is able to find.
©2010 wpreagan
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, commonly known as OCD — especially by people who have OCD and don't have time for so many syllables because there are sock drawers to organize — is the bastard child of logic (the nurturing mother) and insanity (the demanding father.)
This disorder (as clinicians call it — people with OCD call it "hyper-efficiency") is easily misunderstood by people who think that putting the crayons into their cardboard box in correct spectral order is a waste of time. Of course, some adherents to OCD also think that putting the crayons into their cardboard box in correct spectral order is a waste of time, as the satisfaction of even the most attentively ordered rainbow is offset by the frustration of finding a proper home for burnt umber and timber wolf. (I have a functional form of the condition, so my solution for the 64 pack is to populate one of the eight rows of eight with all of the misfits, including black and white; it's unsatisfying, but at least it corrals the dissatisfaction into a single tier.)
If you say to a person with OCD, "I know it seems pointless, but in the spoons slot of the silverware drawer, I stack the three types of spoons in groups so they don't mix," these folks won't roll their eyes or stare in disbelief. Instead, they'll usually respond with some variation of, "As opposed to what, haphazardly tossing them into some willy-nilly collision of flatware? Stacking is the logical thing to do. Duh." Others may even contribute advice: "I used a glue gun and some 1/8" clear plastic strips to subdivide the fork section between dinner and dessert forks. Not only is each type isolated, the plastic wall keeps both piles neatly stacked."
I use this example for a reason, which I will get to in a moment.
To be clear, I have never been diagnosed with OCD. Nor have I ever asked anyone to explore such a diagnosis, because I am not afflicted with any of the symptoms that make OCD an obstacle for my life. (One look at my home office demonstrates that I am not fetishistic about order or cleanliness, as the shelves around my desk look like the aftermath of an explosion at a paper recycling depot.) For some, OCD is genuinely debilitating, and it's not a joking matter. For me, it's more like an idiosyncratic anomaly, a quirk on performance-enhancing drugs.
So back to the spoons. Over the years, our silverware drawer has evolved by necessity only. When we moved into our house a decade ago, we gave ourselves a housewarming gift of a great set of silverware, tossing all of the mismatched pieces we had acquired through hand-me-down generosity or Goodwill necessity. The new set was gorgeous, felt great, and was worth every penny.
In the ten years since, the collection has suffered the standard homeowner attrition, pieces of the collection whisked into the same black hole that consumes single socks and Tupperware lids. Each time the count of a particular utensil type drops below a usable number — that number defined by the inconvenient frequency with which we must wash the remaining items — we purchase a small set to supplement the collection.
We now have three types of spoons: four from the original set, six acquired for a comically low price at Ikea, and four found in the close-out bin at Marshalls. Each is a different size and shape, so when they're randomly placed into the silverware drawers spoon slot, it's an ill-fitting mess. To solve this, I stacked them in like piles after taking them from the dish drainer — the spoons better suited for ice cream, the others for stirring coffee, and the third for meals (though I use those for ice cream, too.) Rather than having to rifle through a disheveled array of utensils every time I wanted a cup of yogurt, the sorted piles saved time and accelerated yogurt enjoyment.
But I was concerned that this preference for order would mutate into a demand for order (I'm even obsessive about my compulsions), so I decided to let go of this one — to let spoons be spoons, freely intermingling within their designated silverware slot. One small step for me, one too-small-to-be-noticed-step for anyone else who opens that drawer. It hardly qualified as a milestone, but I congratulated myself as I closed the silverware drawer. I had tamed the OCD beast.
Until the next morning, when I opened the drawer to get a coffee stirrer and witnessed the utter mayhem that lay before me, the haphazard tangle of spoons looking like it had been picked through by a swarm of indiscriminate yard-sale shoppers. I tried to extricate a stirring spoon from beneath the pick-up-sticks array of flatware, but the pile kept rearranging itself with a frustrating clatter. What had once been a simple matter of sliding out the drawer to make a simple selection had become an annoying game of three-spoon monte, and I was the sucker.
So much for minor victories. I immediately took the time to sort all three types of spoons and stack them neatly within their designated slot. It would have been nice to not care, to take any old spoon for any old task, but the inefficiency was unbearable. I hated giving in to the beast, but what choice did I have? It was the logical thing to do. Duh.
©2010 wpreagan
Every few years, a new study points to American children's dismal math capabilities compared to students around the globe. These mediocre showings usually trigger a string of efforts to improve math education in public schools, to bolster interest in mathematics, and to find the reason that American youth fail to compete in this educational category.
As a parent, I know the reason. The cause is evident, even obvious, nearly every time I hear a parent speaking to their kids. Even talking to my own daughter, I sometimes catch myself unintentionally sabotaging her academic future. The root of the problem is Parent Math.
Parent Math is a calculation system that relies on the language of traditional math, but discards the requisite rules that tether abstract concepts to real-world results. While academic math pursues an objective truth, Parent Math is a means to an end, utilizing a flexible set of rules that are unencumbered by consistency. In academic math, two plus two equals four; in Parent Math, two plus two might equal four, depending on whether the desired sum is four; if the desired sum is three, then two plus two can equal three. It's not math at all, frankly, but because it shares the same language as math, it sneaks into the brains of our children and irrevocably dooms their math SAT scores.
Here are a few common examples of Parent Math at work, and how it renders number-based phrases meaningless to a young mind:
Five Minutes: This all-purpose phrase can be used as either an ultimatum or a promise, with equally inefficient results. The way parents use it, a "minute" is like a "donut" - there are a thousand varieties that all fall under the same descriptor, yet there are few similarities between a glazed chocolate cake donut and a yeast-type maple bar.
As an ultimatum, it is issued anywhere from two to twenty minutes before actual departure time, making the conceptual value of five frustratingly fluid. For instance, if my daughter is playing with friends at the playground and the cacophony of screaming children has frazzled me like the participant in some graduate-level college psychology experiment, then "we're leaving in five minutes" means that she has 90 seconds of swing and slide time left; if my wife retrieves our daughter from a play date at the home of another interesting mom, "we're leaving in five minutes" allows the children enough time for several costume changes, a quick board game, and a languid goodbye.
As a promise, the words "give me five minutes" literally translates to, "I will come inspect your block tower or answer your question about leggings when I complete this entree/project/email/thought." The phrase has no regard for the accuracy of the words "five" and "minute" because the goal is simply to prolong the duration the parent has to focus on their own life. Sullying the meaning of "five" is unfortunate collateral damage.
Two cookies: You might think that the concreteness of cookies would make them less suspect mathematically, but in some homes, "You can have two cookies" is the serve that starts a long volley of negotiations and compromises. I've seen conniving kids argue with the craft of a seasoned attorney, citing precedent ("At the apple orchard you said I could have two apples and I ate three") and extenuating circumstances ("the first cookie was twice the size of the second, so really, two smalls and a large are equivalent to two cookies") until the fatigued parent will acquiesces, thereby damning the number "two" to an eternity of representing two, sometimes three, and occasionally more.
100 times: It's amazing how many things have been said or done 100 times. For instance, at various points in recent history, someone in our home has announced that we've watched iCarly 100 times, we've read Ferryboat Ride 100 times, and we've eaten cheese quesadillas 100 times. (Most of those were sighed by exasperated parents; the last one came from Sage as part of her petition for Pizza - as the house quesadilla chef, I struggled to shrug it off.) The problem is, my daughter goes through life as if she were an umpire with that little balls/strikes/outs clicker hidden in her hand, noting the frequency and duration of nearly everything, and we haven't experienced any of these things exactly 100 times: Quesadillas for dinner? 25 tops in my culinary memory. Ferryboat Ride? Closer to 75 times in Sage's life. iCarly? It's been on at least 600 times in our house this month. (I swear it's true.) The collective effect of these inaccuracies is the complete bastarization of "100" as a descriptor.
Is there anything that can be done? It's hard to say. Mathematical inaccuracies remain an essential child management tool, providing a foundation of so-called facts to support a desired agenda. Changing that mindset in order to improve our children's math comprehension is a noble goal, yet at the end of an exhausting day, the path of least resistance is an alluring route, and that path usually circumvents any noble goals.
I should know, I've taken it a hundred times.
©2010 wpreagan
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