Tuesday, June 18, 2013

On Being A Little Broken

Marriage, for me, was an insular experience, a sort of you-and-me-versus-the-world that gradually turned into more of a you-versus-me-versus-the-world for reasons I want to say aren't terribly relevant to this essay but probably are.

Point is, I've never been one to cultivate a large number of friendships, and when I was married, that singular connection and a couple of satellites were all I wanted and needed.

Post-separation, I've done a lot of dating, and with the chances of meeting eligible, interesting, interested women while working at an office supplies store in the suburbs of Portland a touch on the low side, much of it has come from online dating sites.

By way of disclaimer, a part of this equation is obviously me. As a datee, I am interesting by virtue of being from another country, full of odd stories, and sometimes quite frighteningly able to walk the tightrope between my natural awkwardness and the charm I must have somehow absorbed from my dad to create something that is, apparently, quite attractive (or at least attractive enough to distract from the slightly fat ginger monster thing). At the same time, I'm very guilty of both wanting (nay, demanding) my own space while simultaneously allowing bouts of intense loneliness and boredom to drag and sometimes hold me in orbits I've no business being in.

I'm honest about that. To a fault. There's no shame in being a little broken. To paraphrase Doug Stanhope, the parts of you that don't work the way they should are about the only interesting thing about you dreary, bleak motherfuckers.

Online dating, by comparison, is all about dishonesty, both in the obvious sense of having to build a profile that makes you seem like somebody people might want to meet, interact with, fuck, and possibly even form some kind of longer-term bond with, and in a second sense far more interesting to me, that being the common reaction to the removal of the social norms that go along with dating somebody who continues to exist in your life pre and post.

Early in my online dating experience, I met somebody I really clicked with, both intellectually and physically. I liked her a lot, but as I was drawn into her life over a period of a month or so, I found I didn't much like her friends or the kinds of places she liked to go so socially. At the same time, she began to give the impression that the fact we weren't spending more than an evening or two a week and sometimes less in each other's company might be a bit of an issue.

So I stopped contacting her.

I wanted that last sentence to sound awful, because no matter how much you sugar-coat it (and you can bet your sweet ass I'm about to), it's pretty fucking terrible to stop talking to someone you've been intimate with just because. But I would be doing her a disservice if I said that she was desperately trying to contact me and I was ignoring her. There was an organic element to it. I was out of town, our communication fell off dramatically, and I allowed starting a new job, moving into a new apartment, and figuring out how to accommodate my son to gently nudge her out of my life. At one point, weeks on, we arranged to meet up. I genuinely wasn't able to make it, let her know in advance that this was the case, and we've had no contact since.

What I should have done was told her the truth, and if it means anything at all, I've made a point of doing exactly that in all my dating interactions since, because I like to think that I'm less a douchebag and more a person that makes mistakes, admits and learns from them, and hopefully becomes a little better at relating to others.

Of course, there are times when those are one and the same thing.

Prior to writing this, I had in my phone a list of women with an abbreviation of the dating site I use in place of their last name. I had not dated all of these women, but over the last seven months or so, these are the people with whom I've reached the point of exchanging numbers and real (I hope) names. I was able to delete all but two of these with pretty much zero risk that I'd get a text from an unrecognizable number at some point in the near future wondering what I'm doing Saturday night.

I don't want to dwell on how many, because the point isn't to boast or to be slightly horrified at becoming a serial dater in my limited free time, but it's odd to think that so many people have passed through my life in such a way as to leave almost no evidence of their presence, that so many potential friendships and relationships can be dismissed and forgotten through the simple act of removing a name from my list of contacts.

More interesting still the overwhelming evidence of my online dating experience, which is that most people - when you remove the mortifying possibility of seeing John at the water cooler Monday morning or explaining to mutual friends why you and Cindy aren't hanging out so much anymore - will cheerfully fuck with you by flaking on dates, standing you up, using you for sex, or just plain disappearing without explanation when they feel things aren't working out.

The long and short of it is that people are mostly dicks. Not all people and not all the time, but enough to make you question the integrity of that 95% match with the shared interest in the lesser-known works of DeLillo and that awesome picture with the baby sloth, and then you're back at square one, lost among strangers, seeking some connection even you don't fully understand.

You versus the world. posted at 11:11 PM ---------------------------------

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Pride

Years ago, on the eve of one of our quarterly meetings, one of my many managers sent out an email that was headed with a lengthy quote I recognized immediately. He'd edited it for brevity and for bad language, but it was the speech Al Pacino gives to his team towards the end of the movie Any Given Sunday.

I don't know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives. It all comes down to today, and either we heal as a team, or we're gonna crumble, inch by inch, play by play, until we're finished. We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell one inch at a time. Now, I can't do it for you, I'm too old. I look around, I see these young faces, and I think, I mean, I've made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I've pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who's ever loved me. And lately, I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that's...that's a part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life's this game of inches, and so is football. Because in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I'll tell you this, in any fight, it's the guy who's willing to die who's gonna win that inch. And I know, if I'm gonna have any life anymore it's because I'm still willing to fight and die for that inch. Because that's what living is, the six inches in front of your face.

Now, I can't make you do it. You've got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now, I think you're going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you're gonna do the same for him. That's a team, gentlemen, and either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football guys, that's all it is.

Now, what are you gonna do?

Heady stuff for a Starbucks manager meeting, I think you'll agree. But there's a reason it's been on my mind, and it has to do with finding some kind of value in what I do with the vast majority of my time. In many ways, I'm starting to feel like I'm looking at the rest of my life, and I suppose I'm trying to find some way to frame it that doesn't feel like I've somehow failed.

There's time, of course, to do many things, but those opportunities have been there for long enough that not taking them has gathered its own meaning, and that's led me to this line of thinking, this wondering what value the things I've done have when left to stand alone, without the ever-present belief that this is all prologue, prelude to defining acts yet to come.

The Pacino speech is absurd in context, as motivation for a group that - in my memory, at least - was largely unconcerned with the importance of coffee, or not on such an epic scale, anyway. But it did ring true in the sense that everything I've done in the fifteen years I've spent toiling away in retail and service on two different continents has been about teams, about taking them apart and putting them back together, about creating them from nothing or merely fine-tuning them. About winning.

I had reason to consider this in a conversation I had earlier this week, where I suddenly felt compelled, amidst the shrapnel of self-deprecation that usually flies when I talk about my day job, to defend  what I do, to point out the times when I've been a mentor to kids who otherwise had no guidance, the times I've given people who'd never won a thing in their lives pride in achieving something, in being number one, even if it was just in some contest for who could sell the most smoothies, the times I've stood up for people - and one or two of them might even read this - who might not have deserved it for the sake of a second chance.

I haven't cured any diseases or fought for any grand causes. Mostly, I've sold shit. And if I'm honest, I've never been all that great at it. But every time somebody says I'm the best manager they've ever had or that the place where they work hasn't been the same since I left, I feel pride. Pride that I made a difference, no matter how small it may have been. That may not be living and dying and the six inches in front of your face, but it's something. And sometimes that something's got to be enough to keep you going. posted at 11:15 PM ---------------------------------