The Problem With Doing Things The Best Way Possible

The older couple next to me does their ritual. One man unfolds the plastic wrap around a single sandwich and puts each half on separate plates. The other guy uncorks a bottle of wine and fills 2 plastic cups to exactly the same height. They sit in low-back chairs with their bare feet on the blanket in front of them, shoes neatly to the side with socks tucked in little balls.

I get the sense they’ve done this before.

That’s part of the joy and pain of getting older. With time, you learn how to do lots of little things the best way possible and so you do them that way again and again… but that can create stagnancy and keep you from growing. And It will start to wear on you, like a weight sitting on your chest that won’t go away.

You know that feeling…

To get lessen the weight and break up the burden try changing a tiny little detail in your day, even if it means being less efficient or less accurate. Step off the blanket and get your feet dirty. Go with mustard instead of mayo. Take a different way home.

Every once in a while, shoot for what’s new, instead of what’s best.

I Got It On Video

Video is not enough anymore. Objectivity is gone. There is only storytelling, and the storytellers rarely work with what’s in front of them. They care more about what’s inside them.

We do whatever is necessary to keep our own beliefs intact.

Two people can watch the same video and pick different villains. It doesn’t matter who is holding the weapon and who is falling down. There is always something to interpret. The slightest shift of an elbow, the corner of the mouth, the twist of a head.

And if nothing in the video will suffice, then something outside the video will certainly do the trick, even something no one else has seen, something that happened weeks before, or something that should have happened right after but didn’t.

And when we can’t find a story line to underscore our own truth-beliefs, well, then we just throw out the video.

There’s no winning this game with evidence. It’s not the videos that are going to change our minds. (We’ll always side with the same actor.)

It’s knowing the heart of someone who could have played the other role.

The Woman Who Let Me In

I’m in standstill traffic driving on a 4-lane road (2 lanes on each side) heading into Santa Cruz for the Fourth of July.

I need to make a right in about a hundred feet but I’m in the left lane. The minute I put on my blinker the driver to my right lurches forward to close the gap between her car and the one in front of her. No eye contact. It’s a clear message.

What’s unfortunate for her is that we’re not moving so I’m still on her left and still in her life, even after the lurch. I smile. I’m not aggressive, I’m not angry. I’m asking.

I know she sees me out of the corner of her eye but I wave a little anyway to insinuate that I think she doesn’t see me yet. This is important. It gives her a way out, the space to change her mind and form a different relationship with me, without anyone else knowing what could have been.

She looks over. At this moment, my face is crucial. Am I pissed? Incredulous? Entitled? Or really just asking… one frustrated driver to another seeking to manufacturer some goodwill before we go in different directions.

Green light.

The traffic lets up a bit. The cars in front move a half a length and her car remains still. She looks resigned at first, like she lost something, but then I give her the universal thank-you hand gesture along with some eye contact and a smile. She raises her hand off the wheel, just a few fingers, and smiles herself.

Just like that, she becomes a good Samaritan.

We all like to be good. Sometimes it just takes a second for us to get there.

The Helping Bug

To give you an idea as to how much I think about helping people find their way…

As I was reading a self-help book written in the nineties, I found myself putting aside my own growth to counsel the previous owner of the book who had carefully underlined significant passages and written their questions into the margins.

My heart sank a little as I flipped over the final page and found no epiphanies penned into the yellowing paper. No exclamation marks. No double underlines. Just more questions.

My Red Nikes

I have a pair of red Nikes that make me happy whenever I wear them. They’re classics, They’re perfect, but it’s not their appearance that makes me so happy. Not the comfort either, and they’re damn comfortable.

I was visiting my brother in LA, just me this time, without the family…

Not too far into the trip, my brother suggests we take some ecstasy and go clubbing. I instinctively push back but he keeps going on about it and before we know it, we’re shopping for dancing shoes. (I was wearing flip flops and you can’t dance in flip flops.)

So there we are, in a thrift store and I see these red Nikes. I can tell they’re my size just by looking at them. I know they’ll fit perfectly. I know they’re already mine.

Ecstasy shoes. Forever and ever.

I dance down the shoe aisle and up to the register. I tell the cashier these are my dancing shoes and that we’re going to go clubbing. On E.

I leave the store, flip flops slung on my index fingers, jacket off and around my waist, I feel like the sun is shining for me, like anything is possible. My red Nikes on my feet feel impossibly light, almost mystical, and like Dorothy, I wonder if I move them in the right way, well, maybe, just maybe they’ll make me fly.

Well, the night doesn’t go as planned. Yeah, we found the shoes but we never did track down the ecstasy. Not too surprising, really.

Whatever. We call up our cousins and they come over and we laugh all night long over Moscow Mules. Big belly laughs. Wide smiles that make our faces hurt. We all laugh the same way too: loudly. It’s a family thing. It only takes one of our laughs to get all four of us going. And that makes for a good night, better than party lights and dubstep. Better than whatever’s in those baggies.

And every time I get up to go to the bathroom or refill my drink, before I take a right down the hall, I crane my neck the other way to see my red Nikes, down at the other end of the couch, by the door, peering back at me, docile and playful, like two little kittens waiting to be alone with their owner again.

Don’t worry, guys. I see you.

My magic sneaks that came into my life, lifted me up, and wiped away everything familiar just long enough to make everything familiar even more fantastic.

White Allies

It’s a beautiful thing to support someone suffering oppression, to be a self-less ally who steps into their own discomfort for the greater good…

But watch yourself, white people. Condemning other white people is the easy way out. Vilification is a selfish act, not a selfless one.

The hardest way, and our only hope, is not to place a thick chalky line between the so-called good ones and the bad ones, but to dip into your molten wellspring of empathy, just below the crust of self-righteousness and offer cupped hands flowing over as you tell your own story about what’s swirling around inside you.

And then to listen hard for something more than an echo.

Kidsized Thoughts

I got to be small for 5 hours between San Francisco and D.C…

Sitting in a plane by the bathroom allows you to experience the world as a child sees it.

There is a continuous line of towering adults standing just inches from you, not paying attention to you, talking above you in some other language as you stare at their belt lines and midsections. You’re close enough to see the threading in their pants, the few lines in their corduroys that have worn down more than the others. You can see the outline of their keys in their pockets, but you’re not in the conversation.

Despite your proximity, you’re not the priority.

You can stare at them freely; you almost have to because they’re so close. They’re in the space of your breath and your thoughts.

They’re so tall.

Occasionally, one will bend down to speak to you and it will be intimidating. It’s simply the logistics of your respective positioning but you can’t help but feel like the student, the abiding child, with your neck craned, smiling up at them while their hands clutch the top of your headrest.

They’re probably not even reveling in their height. They’re not thinking of how tall they appear, at least not as much as you’re thinking about how small you feel.

You might have something to say; you might even know a little more than them, but all of those things seem to fall away simply because you’re looking up and they’re looking down, a heavy symbolism that has no place in determining the hierarchy of things, but often does.

Beyonce, Belinda, & Me

A curious thing about me.

I’m a straight man and I love to sing female fight songs – ideally, anything of the “I Will Survive” variety. Songs like Madonna’s “Do You Know What it Feels Like for a Girl”, Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable,” Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” anything by the Indigo Girls or Pink. Most of Taylor Swift. I love that shit.

And I don’t just sing it. I own it. I belt it out. As if I know…

The first cassette I bought was Belinda Carlisle’s “Lost In Your Eyes”. It was either that or Erik B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend”, a close second.

But Belinda won out. I sang it all summer.

I’m not going to overanalyze this. It is what it is.

I like the soul of a woman, showing itself like a lightning bolt in contrast to everything and nothing, a sure-fire signal that the thunder is coming.

Stress Dreams

I had a stress dream about being surrounded by skunks, hundreds of them closing in on my feet. I kept thinking, I should jump away, I should jump away, but I can’t jump away because then they’ll attack. So I just stood there, immobile and stressed, until I woke up.

Then I did what most of us do with our dreams. I laid in bed and analyzed the shit out of them. Maybe I’m stressed about not doing something at work or maybe I feel paralyzed about something, or perhaps I forgot something important and so I shouldn’t make any rash decisions…

I had a hundred ideas and I’m sure I could have come up with a hundred more. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t any of that.

I just had to pee.

The stress dreams were a symptom of body stress, not mind stress.

So now, in the morning, instead of analyzing my bad dreams, I go to the bathroom and empty them out.

Finding Hope

I talk to a lot of people who have good reasons to give up, reasons I can’t (and don’t) challenge. Often they’re right. Things are dark, the doors have closed, and the hands have slipped into their sleeves. It’s hard to see, let alone walk.

But there is always a way out.

The key to starting up again is not to pretend the darkness isn’t there, nor to feel the walls for a switch.

The key is to search for that tiny light inside you and fan the flames.