Fair and Balanced

Dear Shiddy,

I humbly submit to you the weeknight musings of a tired poet and a punchy house-husband:





It gives me an embarrassing amount of satisfaction.

I Need a Minute.

I saw this the other day, and I got more jazzed than I've been about anything in a while. In this case, it was more the condition of the clothing and coffins that interested me than the condition of the bodies, but: Jesus, why does this do it for me?

I've been fascinated by dead bodies since I was little. As a child, I was obsessed with the skeletons and plaster casts at Pompeii and Herculaneum. I kept a copy of National Geographic with an article about it. I slowly destroyed the binding by flipping through and considering all the pictures, especially the Ring Lady.

I am strangely invested in the past: I am (maybe) more interested in it than I am in the future. Perhaps this is my weakness. I'll spend some Saturday mornings clicking through this site, enlarging images so that I can see lettering on windows and appliances, facial expressions, stitching on clothes. For me, the past is irresistible when there's a record of it--a photograph, a sound recording, a skeleton or (better) a weirdly preserved body--even if that record's not entirely reliable. I did seriously try for a career making half of the money I make now just so that I could flip through dead people's diaries and letters all day. (For the record, I'm now glad that didn't work out.)

As for my own past, I remember too much of it and consider it about as much as I consider what I'm doing in real time. (This is probably not true in reality--that would be incredibly sad--but it least it feels this way sometimes.)

Speaking of which, real time has been fucking me tough lately. I want to find a secret pause button so that I can enlarge and peer at some stitching or lettering. I've noticed the general acceleration more keenly since returning to Austin, because this place feels like a city-sized personal time capsule from my twenties. What intervened (New York City) was a blur: two and a half years of a certain routine (work, subway, gym) after years of little routine (graduate school, social life, part-time work). My memory from April 2007 to December 2009 bleeds and clusters. It feels like it didn't actually happen. Maybe this is excellent.

Of Human Management

Dear Shiddy,

In the way that there are people who derive great pleasure from calculating numbers or measures or notes; people who can assess the strength of a beam or building, who predict the time between accidents, deaths, or weather... that is the way in which I enjoy considering people around me. At its most dumb, my latent anthropologist spends a lot of subliminal energy reacting to and examining how I interact with others, and they with others, ad infinitum. This lends itself to a fairly crippling yet pleasurable sense of nostalgia, which I think it's fair to say is a major component of my personality. (Aside: an older friend once insisted that no one really knows nostalgia until their late 30s. I beg to differ.)

So there really isn't much outside of relationships that interests me about the world. When I respond to music, I'm approaching it from its real or imagined backstory. Photographs: more about the framing than the content. Nature- the way we all move through its space. (I kind of hate that word, what the hell is nature, anyway?) And as my twenties feel further in the past, I find myself in roles where I'm constantly managing other humans. Mostly grownups. And I think I like it most of the time.

That sounds manipulative, here is more what I mean: in my current occupation my tasks revolve around some hybrid art of influencing, hosting, encouraging others to connect and share information. To give in to the more human. Sometimes this coaxing only takes the form of me being an example of empathy or earnestness or frankness. There's almost nothing dark or clever about it, though I often want to indulge that aspect.

It is a strength of mine: rallying a group around a purpose. I am persuading, tailoring my words or actions to another vocabulary, customizing a way of being with a particular individual. I like determining how to be with each other- or at least setting up a series of possible ways of being together, better ways than what has come before. It makes me feel powerful. I work to articulate a public facet of intimacy- the one in which we tell mere acquaintances what we want, and they tell us their desires in turn. And the private instances as well.

If all that I have just described is so valuable to me, if I am detailing these qualities as the essence of what I do or am; then I guess it makes sense that the past would be my most important reference point and study aid. Because past relationships, events, dialogues form an amalgam of technique and intuition that gets richer and more accurate with each experience and contact.

And when a person from my past or present makes a reciprocal gesture toward me- one imbued with a similar attentiveness, affection, consideration- it feels like the world is speaking back to me, assuring me that there is nothing else.

Fraught via Facebook

Dear Shiddy:

In the early nineties, high school was finished with me. I'd accepted the role of borderline nerd, cool enough for ski club, say, or a part in the spring musical. But too bookish to be invited to any real parties or be part of anyone's inner circle. I was awkward enough that there were many playback moments where my vocabulary solidly alienated me from boys. It was generally a bummer. I've spent lots of time reliving it, can you tell?

(Note: I'm sure hundreds of thousands of Gen-Xers have already written their versions of teen angst and embarrassment, so feel free to roll your eyes, be bored, etc.)

Throughout high school I'd had more guy friends than girl friends but that never equaled any physical action for me. Despite the raging hormones I was dramatically virginal and whiny about it. Perfectly Catholic.

At some point in the spring of our senior year, Jude asked me for a ride home from play practice. For years I'd been somewhat close to him - an AV/TV nerd who had managed to remain uncool, almost strikingly handsome, and above the fray at the same time. As I stopped in front of his driveway, engine idling, he pounced on me. I think that is the word I mean to use. He lunged over the console, took my face in his hands, and commenced making out with me. Hardcore. (It is so hard to contain my laughter as I type this). It was a good twenty minutes, and by that I mean, it was really, really good. Liberating, fun, random... It was probably the hottest moment of my adolescence. Well, I still remember it quite vividly, so it must've been seminal, right? (snigger)

The next day at school it was like it never happened. We still chatted in the hallways, acknowledged one another's existence during Chemistry lab, smiled, but that was it. There was no repeat performance, and I never saw him again after graduating.

Last week, while trolling Facebook, I noticed that kid (now obv a grown man), had friended me. So I took a look at his profile, browsing the pictures and becoming increasingly confused. Even anxious, because this guy looked nothing like the kid I knew some 15 years ago. This could not have been the kid that I knew back then, right? Yeah, people put on some poundage, they lose hair maybe, they hunch. But 15 years isn't a lifetime, or half of one. This guy didn't even seem to have the same jawline.

But there he was, standing around drinking a beer in a snapshot containing at least three other people from our class whom I could clearly recognize. What happened?! Surely my memory could not have fucked me so hard, right?

I was DEVASTATED. Frantically, I retrieved my yearbook from the basement. I tried to remap his old visage to the new one. It was total cognitive dissonance. Half-laughing/half-ranting, I told my husband the entire story-- and his only suggestion was that possibly this guy contracted moonface. That did little to cheer me.

There are questions here, Shiddy. Did I totally imagine the whole thing? Was the episode magnified by my nutso, melodramatic teen fantasies? Did this guy really get in my pants? Didn't I really want him to? Doesn't my brother still harass me about it (after overhearing me on the phone weeks after the event)?

Sigh. I regret ever getting an account on Facebook. It destroys what small succor nostalgia brings.