There’s an interesting event being held the weekend after next at Serendipity Cafe in Magnolia.  It’s called “Seattle Stories” and you can read all about it here.  It’s a storytelling session “for adults, by adults.”  I’m guessing they don’t mean adult as in “racy”, but adult as in “not aimed at a seven-year-old.”  I briefly considered going to the audition, but then wondered what story I would choose to talk about.

I took a too-quick journey backwards through my life and considered most of the possible safe-for-public-consumption events of my thirty-eight years.  There have been some good stories embedded in there; some that are so unique or unusual that I’m sure an audience would appreciate the novelty; some that are so emotional that they even today choke me up a bit; a bit of heroism here, a bit of cowardice there.  Some loves, some laughs, some fun.

Leaving aside for the moment whether or not I’d like to stand up in front of an audience of strangers and tell a true story from my life, it got me to reflecting on the concept of selfhood and to what extent we see ourselves as a collection of stories.  This is timely for me, because I was just recently describing to a friend how a story from years ago still plays out in my head as a defining characteristic of my life today – but it is just a story; it’s not me, it isn’t even about me, really, it was just an event, a serendipitous confluence of fate and circumstance that I still carry around in my back pocket.  But should I?  Am I my stories?

No way.  Stories are backward-looking.  And to the extent that a story gives you meaningful information about yourself, you’ve already internalized it and can make use of it for future decision-making.

So I’m sitting here what stories about myself are still relevant.  Are any of them?  Maybe they all nothing but fine china in the cabinet, nice to look at but ultimately impractical, things that have abstract value to myself and perhaps a few others.

And then I think no, that’s not quite right – stories are more than that, better than that.  It’s somewhere in between.  Stories don’t define me, but they are the glue that helps me connect to others with whom I want to maintain relationships.  I guess the key lesson is that I am more than the sum of my stories, and when a story loses its relevance, it’s OK.

Me at Serendipity Cafe, March 8, 2010.

This morning I received the most recent “What’s Happening In Seattle This Week?” newsletter from Seattle Spin.  Their editors typically choose a topic for an abridged summary of what’s out there, and this week it was “self help books.”  They boiled all the essentials down to three themes: Get Over It, Knock It Off, and Make A Plan.  Call it sound-bite psychology.

Here’s the blurb for “Knock It Off”:

I have some recent direct experience with this. About six weeks ago I came to the conclusion that there were some habits I wanted to stop, and merely willing myself to stop them was proving fruitless.  So I put together a little template and put green dots when I did the thing I wanted to do, and a red dot (well, orange – Bartell’s didn’t have red) each time I screwed up.

Here’s my progress after almost four weeks:

(These things are things I mostly do at work, hence the blank spots on the weekends.)

You can see that I hit orange every now and then, but it’s amazing that the first day was almost all orange and then IMMEDIATELY started to go green.  By weeks three and four I felt really great about my progress and in fact as of this writing I’ve stopped tracking my daily progress on those sets of habits.

My conclusion: Three things about this type of system work well.  First is the visibility: this was 18 inches from my nose Monday through Friday.  Second was the tactile process: putting the little dots on the paper gave me a sense of accomplishment that I wouldn’t have gotten by clicking a checkbox in a website or on my iPhone.  Third: you can code the things you want to track so that you can have the sheets out in public (in your cubicle, for example) – nobody needs to know exactly what “NVD” means, for example.

I’m not normally a Type A super-organized person – in fact I laugh just writing those words, I’m so far on the opposite end of the spectrum – but this Type A tactic worked really well for me.  Hope it can work for someone out there on the innertubes.

Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s premier lit-crit bunny ranch, is presenting an evening of readings at the UW in a few weeks.  The theme: Laws of Attraction. Phillip Lopate, Marya Sea Kaminski (which is such a great name, I’m half convinced it’s chosen, not birthed), and Emily Warn will be reading from new works in front of an audience at Kane Hall.

Event details:

When: Friday, March 19th, 7:30 – 9:30 PM
Where: UW, Kane Hall, Room 120
How: Buy tickets at brownpapertickets.com.  Prices range from $15 to $25.

So reading about this event got me to thinking about attraction, desire, want, love, lust, and their opposite numbers in the emotional pantheon: distaste, rejection, hate, and whatever that one-word description is for the situation where an anticipated physical consummation suddenly stops dead in its tracks – say, when your parents unexpectedly return home early and walk in on you and your girlfriend spooned up on the couch.  They’re carrying a bucket of KFC and a couple movies from Blockbuster and you know that nothing is going to happen THAT night.

What attracts you?  Head?  Heart?  Body?   All of the above?  What do you find unattractive?  It’s a complex subject, worthy of many many many readings, and in fact I might suppose that the bulk of human artistic output has been concerned with two topics: attraction (love) and war (hate).

It’s intensely personal.  The words I might use to describe attraction may be (and probably are) completely different than the words someone else uses.  But there are themes, commonalities, refrains, choruses.  It thus becomes universal.  We don’t all drive the same car, but we do drive the same roads.  It’s also less of a conscious topic than a sub- or unconscious one, and I would bet that most people would be hard-pressed to define, right now, exactly and completely what they find attractive or unattractive.  Everyone could make a start, of course: “I like a girl who…” or “I don’t like a guy that…”.  But there are deep waters below each of us, frantic with unseen life, that we rarely glimpse, let alone go actively seek out to explore.

Which brings me to one statement I can make with certainty: those who do that hard and often uncomfortable exploration are attractive.  To me. To take what is given, by birth or by upbringing or by societal convention, and then ask “what else?” or “what if?” or “what next?”.  To not accept what is given, but to use it a jumping-off point for a real journey of self-discovery.

There are other elements at play.  One thing that I find fascinating about attraction is this notion of attraction-as-mirror – that we explore ourselves, what we like and don’t like, by viewing ourselves through the eyes of others.  There’s a sort of recursive voyeurism at play.  I see you seeing me, and in doing so, I see you more closely, which you pick up on and see me through a new set of lenses, and so on.

I may make a point of going to this event, if only to put my thinking about attraction up against a new set of claims, and see what sticks, what evolves, what disappears.

You?

Sitting at Voxx coffee, which is one my favorite few coffee shops in Seattle,  and recognizing oh-so-well the blind aimless blundering that made up the bulk of my life in 2008-2009.  Remember Scooby-Doo?  One of the kids’ tricks was to throw something – a blanket, a bucket, a barrel – over the head of the bad guy, and he’d go running around stumbling into posts and walls while the kids made their hasty escape.

I feel like that guy.  In retrospect! Right at the moment my head is less enveloped in fog and I can see forward and backward with a clarity I didn’t have at the time.  I suppose that’s human nature, to be hyper-focused on the critical moment and lose some perspective, only to recognize later the narrow tunnel through which one journeyed.

I now walk with my head up, looking forward, and finding lots of interesting life out there to observe and interact with.  Professionally, personally, and in that gray area between the two that I predict will make up more and more of our collective shared space in the years to come.  Work friends who are actually friends, and friend friends who you occasionally get together and work with.  Partners with whom you do business with, either explicitly in the old-school LLC “let’s go into business together” model, or, more likely, with whom you have an implicit, but no less important, relationship, all parties sharing the same goal of supporting and encouraging each other in separate domains.  The sounding boards.  The devil’s advocates.  The constructive criticizers.

Reciprocal muses. Your Zelda to my F. Scott. My Beatrice to your Dante.

Think of this as two possibilities: on the one hand, a tandem bicycle – both riders pedaling the same machine in the same direction at the same pace – vs. two separate bicycles; yes, both going in the same direction at the same speed, but with an acknowledged – I will say necessary – distance between them. 

It’s this distance that fascinates me right now.  Too much – too far — and the other fades into the background noise, part of the cacophony of everyday life; the half-known and the partially-recognized and the almost-important; too close, however, and that slight gap, into which the arc of electricity, the firing of the synapses, the place into which the mysterious alchemy of true collaboration (at all levels) takes place, gets squashed and squeezed and cramped.  It’s like placing a candle snuffer over an incipient flame.

Distance is a funny and confounding thing, though.  I think most of us are hardwired to clutch, to grab, to possess, to hold – not to “see the other whole against the wide sky”, to pull a quote from Rilke – but to see narrowly right through the other’s pupils, as it were.  Some people are conditioned by family or circumstance to feel lonely, dispossessed, and despairing when distance separates them from their desires.  And there’s a certain (illusory?) comfort in falling in to the other, collapsing the gap, willingly giving up individual purpose in pursuit of a more immediately comforting embrace.

Is it possible to develop and carry a new paradigm around in one’s head?  To recognize that some distance – however slight, and in whatever dose is comfortable – is not only valuable, but required? To leave space for the relationship to flower, the collaboration to germinate, the partnership to bear fruit?

I think so.  I hope so.  My curiosity on the matter is waxing strongly.  My personal vectors are all reorienting themselves along the lines of this hypothesis.

Bedhead and a rueful smile at Zoka, early on the morning of February 27, 2010.

My head is bobbing along in the clouds, as if I am ballooning over Marseilles or parasailing in Jamaica Bay or dodging king cormorants as I swoop and glide through Tierra del Fuego.  The ocean beckons, green and white and unpredictable; messy exuberant watery contours pulling me close.

I soar up – I drop down.  My shadow flickers on the water and I drop my hand to feel the cold, wet spray misting off the whitecaps.  Abruptly, I dive, submerging myself, quickly losing the sunlight.  My head’s on a swivel – I’m aware of other things, also diving – for fish?  Are they other predators?  They burst down between the waves, awkward in the water, looking for something, then just as quickly turn and balloon up to the surface, some successful, some not.  They fly away.

Strong muscular pulls take me quickly forward.  I hold my breath.  I pass rock outcroppings and steep cliffs; bottles and timber and pirate-ships dot the landscape.  Large mouthy eels poke their heads out of the cannon-holes in the wrecks, silent observers to my quest.

My catch is down here somewhere.  I’m convinced of it. The other shadow-shapes have not yet found it. My eyes widen and pupils dilate to adjust to the darkness. The longer I am down, the more visibility there is.  I see the full expanse of underwater flora and fauna explode around me – coral and kelp and massive red tangles of dulse; crabs and anemones and schools of silver mackerel.  I’m close; I can feel it.  I’m warm with anticipation.

“Hotel Yorba” just finished blowing out my eardrums and I’m awfully psyched and thought I’d pop my head up out of the laptop and review my last couple days.  I’m sitting at Victrola, coding a bit against Twilio’s uber-awesome API, doing a small amount of people-watching and a fair bit of reflecting on the weekend just about to pass.  It was (typical for me lately) a study in contrasts; black-and-white paint spattered on the canvas, but patterns are starting to emerge, themes and riffs and reoccurring choruses and moments of sunshine and the reappearance of cloudbanks that I know I’ve seen before.  My analytic brain tries too hard to pattern-match, to put things into boxes with labels and yet my creative brain, the one I’ve begun to understand and love in ways I never knew before – even though I’ve always considered myself to be the creative sort — likes to sort of hang out and observe and watch things unfold and draw loose associations and connections that arise abruptly and surprisingly from my subconscious.

This morning I ran twelve miles.

That sort of deserves its own paragraph because I seriously don’t think I’ve ran that far since college.  Earlier this month I signed up for this crazy relay in July called the Ragnar relay and I met a couple of my relay teammates for the first time this morning at Greenlake and we ran.  Twelve miles.  I’m proud and tired and happy and realize that what I thought are my limitations are not my real limitations.  That’s powerful.  Chris and Leslie, the two people I ran with this morning, were supportive and encouraging and I had a really great time.  Did I mention it was twelve miles?

A couple great meetups this weekend, reaffirming my sense that I feed off of, and am made happy by, time spent conversing with smart, engaging and passionate people.

The weather in Seattle this weekend was A-fucking-MAZING.  That was the macro story; the thing on everyone’s lips.  It’s February but feels like we’re deep into springtime.  I didn’t get out as much as I would have liked, but what time I was able to get out and enjoy the weather was spectacular and memorable.

I hope you had a great weekend as well.

I wonder how many of the following items apply to you?  What would be on your own list?

TEN THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY
(no particular order)

1. Stimulating conversation
2. A good book
3. Fog
4. My babies’ sleeping faces
5. Playing soccer
6. Affection & intimacy
7. Challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone
8. Anticipation
9. This song
10. The sound of rain

Me at Greenlake Zoka, February 20th, 2010.