TBC or TBD

Prepare yourselves for a Carrie Bradshaw-esque post. 


 I didn't get cliched comments when I was younger about loving yourself, having respect for yourself, not putting up with unseemly behavior from love interests. I literally did not understand what it meant in relation to me. Nice guys seemed all too boring. The ones looking for a relationship seemed, well, not much of a challenge or a catch. They weren't always the best looking ones in the crop either. But now that I'm not as young as I used to be the term "all the good ones are taken" has frightfully taken on a new meaning. I'm sure all the good ones are not ever taken at any one time. But, I am sure the girls who snap them up like themselves. It occurs to me recently that women need a very serious booster shot containing self-love.


I am the quintessential chase-after-the-bad-boy kind of girl. While all girls love the chase, I seem to love it to a higher degree. This puts me at odds with the boys I chase after, since men also seek to pursue. At any rate, those guys who are not available for one reason or another intoxicated me. I was seduced by their nonchalant attitude and self absorption. They also tended to be pretty good between the sheets and quite handsome (vanity also came with the looks). 


Overtime I realized where this drive was coming from, it's really all too transparent. And I'd like to think that I've moved on from it. I was the unstoppable force crashing into the immovable object one too many times. Love stinks and so does the lack of common sense inherent in immaturity. I have to admit that as a natural story teller, I loved the drama. I loved going to my girlfriends and explaining the latest episode that may or may not have a TBC attached to it. Or, at least that's how I liked to think of it or tell it. Of course there was always a TBC and a TBD and that's the way I functioned best. That mystery, keeping something to the unknown made it safe, kept it playful and so on and so forth.


But, this is the thing...I've seen my former behavior mirrored by someone I'm close to and I cringe. Whatever the reasons, it's clear that antics such as sleeping with an ex in town for the weekend or starting a flirtatious friendship with a guy already in a relationship, who lives some distance away, are shallow ways to validate oneself. And what's worse, they're ways that are bound to fail. Why set yourself up for failure? Loneliness, something to talk about and maybe most importantly, this deep seeded fear that you can't do better. Or maybe at this time you don't even want to. I've found when my goals are off and I'm unsure of my future, so is my ability to do anyone any good in a relationship capacity.


I think complex women of some intellectual bearing might be fraught with similar insecurities, especially as they age. But, the fact of the matter is most women who settle down earlier are just simpler. And because most people are simple (not to mean that as an insult) in their wants from life, it makes sense that most people link up sooner. Am I getting off-topic? Perhaps.


So, this is my Carrie moment: Is it better to be single with no immediate prospects and have your sense of dignity and self respect or is it better to be fucking around in ways you shouldn't just to have SOMETHING? I can only say that I used to subscribe to the latter, but lately the former is growing on me.


We all make mistakes. We all do things later on we wish we hadn't. I don't mean to judge. But I do mean to point out that while you might be able to romanticize away your insecurities like I did, it all amounts to the same thing. We are the company we keep. We get out of life what we put into it. The level of respect we have for ourselves is the gauge others have to know how much respect to give us. And behaving in ways that say you don't mind a wishy-washy situation and you don't want the things you do you want is like wearing a sign that says "don't take me seriously. Don't respect me." It's a sign that's read all too clearly and stringently abided by, which isn't fair but is simply the truth. 

Crescendo

The second movement (Allegretto) of Beethoven's 7th symphony is my favorite. Not my favorite piece of music or my favorite piece of instrumental music. Not my favorite symphony or a product of my favorite composer. It's just my favorite. 

When I was little it was hard for me to get to sleep at night sometimes. If you've ever seen the movie "What About Bob?" and you remember the therapist's son Siggy, you might also recall that he wore black all the time and had a fear of death. Well, I did too for about a year during the age of 10 or 11. At one point in the film Sig and Bob are laying awake and Sig says something like "We're all going to die one day. You are going to die. I am going to die." It describes the fear perfectly. Because unlike monsters under the bed or bullies at school, you know that this realization can't be fixed and isn't ever going to go away. 

I used to sit awake at night, inevitably the thought of death would creep into my thoughts. It's not like I imagined how I would die or thought of myself in heaven or hell. In fact, I was pretty sure there was no such thing as one or the other. I just felt like you die and that's it. It was the void, the finality of death, the inevitability of it, that was so shocking to me. There was no boogey man fantasy attached to my fear. Just the knowledge itself was enough to make my heart skip a beat.

And so, I found a CD in my mom's music collection of Beethoven. I figured classical music would help drown out the pesky thought of the end of my life. And it did. And I discovered Beethoven's 7th. If I had to describe the symphony in words, I would fail utterly. 

Never has any piece of music I've ever heard flowed like this. The beginning, barely audible, starts out in such a bittersweet way. Light, but dark, uptempo and yet somehow still foreboding. And then there is the addition of strings, following the same melody as the woodwinds and a crescendo that takes measures and measures to come full blown. It's as if it's saying, everything starts out okay, but it gets more serious. Just when you think the climax is coming up stage left, the strings have more to say. It's something quietly whispering in your ear. It's dancing, it's enticing you to come along and listen. The oboes follow, drawing the point out, supported by other woodwinds. And then a descent into something quite more punctuated happens. Just the horns now with a delicate stacatto of strings behind them. You're being fooled. The original melody mocks you in the background. And then it comes and BAM! Timpany! There's hope! From such small, humble beginnings the piece finds its own inspiration and achieves greatness.

This is the symphony of life. Because life is like that. Up and down, quiet and when you least expect it, extremely loud. But, it all flows together in a way that turns out to be seamless. Though, while we're living it, we perceive enormous crevasses. As I've gone through moves and broken hearts and ambitions that turned into nothings and forged new ambitions and been humbled over and over again, I go back to that second movement that ends on three perfect notes whispering,  "to be continued." 

The Ann Arbor Tribe

Have you heard of Kelly Cutrone? She's this chick who runs a successful PR agency in NYC. Been on some reality TV, comes off as a real tough talking bitch. She wrote a book about navigating through life as a woman. And I swear I cried at the end looking at the picture of her daughter, whom I assume she wrote the book for. 


It's actually a pretty sweet little read. Her life has been insane. She moved to NYC when she was like 12. Okay, maybe 17 or something. She talked about drug abuse and the "good life" filled with money and prestige and celebrities. And now she's middle aged, wears a sloppy black T-shirt and jeans to work every day and doesn't give a fuck. She's in the business, I think, because it's one she knows well and she likes being a business owner. It's not to preen and kiss celebrity ass and feel important because she hobnobs with people on the cover of rags like People and UsWeekly.


I'm digressing. In the book she talks about finding your "tribe." The assumption being that you aren't necessarily going to find it in your hometown, you shouldn't be afraid to look elsewhere and if you are in a foreign place a big focus should be finding a group of people you fit in with, who will be down for you no matter what. I like this idea. I advocate it wholeheartedly. And I think about moving back to Ann Arbor in conjunction with tribal camraderie. 


I think about my little cousin Beth, who lives in NYC in pursuit of a career in big magazine fashion editing, and her tribe. Her tribe is definitely in New York. She met a girl there right away who became an instant best friend, they had so much in common. And they're still best friends. Her new bestie introduced her to more girls like them and in working the PR fashion mag circuit, she met even more women like herself. She found her tribe all right. 


My other cousin, Crystal, came to New York a political radical, a little bit of a hippie. She joined an anarchist group and became a therapist for a non-profit organization that fights human trafficking. Through her extracurriculars and job, she found her tribe.


I moved there with no specific goal in mind but to finish college. I had no specific career goals, I had no idea who I was, I had no friends my age and the job I had was with people who were all older than I, resigned to the menial low paying tasks they signed up for. Whereas I saw the gig as merely a stepping stone. But, a stepping stone to where? I didn't know. I couldn't have gotten an internship that helped me find a degree-centered job because I was working full time anyway. I wasn't particularly qualified for anything, really. Slowly, but surely my resume morphed from "office experience" to "writing and editing" but still, I wasn't sure how to parley this into more work. There was a job placement agency a girl I knew used to get her job and I guess I could have hit them up, but by the time I quit Reuters and wanted to freelance full time, I'd been living in New York for five years and was so burned out. So, very, very burned out. 


Where the fuck was my tribe? It wasn't there. Plain and simple. I never met a group of people that were really like me. I'd met people I liked more than others and no one that I would say I openly disliked, but yet, no one that really fit me or vice versa.  There was always something I found strange and a little "off" about the people who crossed my path. And maybe I was being overly judgmental. Maybe I should have given more people a chance. Maybe.


But, this is the thing. I was so spoiled in my upbringing. I'm not talking about I had a lot of toys and money and vacations to Hawaii. I'm talking I had insanely intelligent friends. People who are now, for the most part, doctors, attorneys, life/spiritual coaches and holders of MBAs and PhDs.  That's a tough act to follow, even for New York. 


Because, this is the other thing: In New York there is a population of 8 million people. And trying to find a tribe that compares to what you're used to in terms of intellect mixed with that Midwest "aww shucks" vibe is damn near impossible. Clearly, there are tons of artists and highly educated people in New York. But, it's almost not even worth it if you're going to be a pretentious prick about it. I grew up in the shadow of one of the country's most loved and highly respected universities. I grew up being taught to love knowledge for knowledge's sake. I grew up to revere being erudite, even more than holding any specific degree. 


And there's only one place I've ever been to whose tribe consists of the same kind of people; it happens to be my hometown.


I'm thinking that Cutrone could add some kind of note that if your tribe happens to be where you grew up, then it's quite all right to stay put, once you figure that out.

My "Work"

Today I'm gearing up to do some "work." I use quotation marks because, as a Midwestern girl, it's not work in the way I was raised to believe work is. Work was sitting in a cubicle, or an office, and doing something mundane and meaningless to you. In fact, if this was the kind of work you ended up doing, then you were doing all right for yourself. You were better than the people who had to work in food service or the people who had to work outside or on a car lot. You were classier, you had a college degree. You had bought yourself a lifetime of relative solitude, a desk and a chair, access to a printer, a desktop computer, and four partial walls made of God knows what covered in gray speckled fabric. 

I'm far from the first person to bemoan and belabor the point that work in most offices is hardly satisfying. And the meager pay as a cog in some company's wheel really isn't worth the real cost of wasting years of your life gossiping at the water cooler, drinking decent coffee you pay for or office coffee that sucks. In fact, office work you don't like or aren't in charge of is not any better than working on a car lot or in a restaurant or anywhere else.  You're still just someone else's bitch.


So, after a decade of office experience, I quit to "work" as a writer. And I've had my ups and downs in the last six months with it. Trying to find a balance between consistently working and total burn out. Trying to find some sanity in a job that I don't speak to anyone all day long in, but via email and if I'm lucky gchat. And trying to be honest with myself if this is really the right gig for me. 


Because, let's face it, just because you're good at something doesn't mean you should do it. And you may have a passion for something in general, but that doesn't mean you've always chosen the right version. You may be in the second or third iteration before you find the most satisfying way to express it. 


This current version I've thrown myself into is fashion and beauty writing. Freelance style. And so far today I have to write an introduction for a woman I'm helping write an eBook for. I'm in negotiations with an old work friend from New York who wants me to become partner and manage his fashion site. And I'm in the beginning stages of launching my own lifestyle site with two girlfriends. And then there's the easy, quasi reliable work that I've been doing for years. Short, instructional, articles for Tyra Banks website on everything from how to dress to how to wash your face. Some days I love it and I'm on fire and sharing the info I know is always fun. But, as a full time job, I couldn't/can't do it. Not indefinitely. Not for someone else. I'd go crazy with the same format all the time. 


Not to mention, I feel as though I've built up an online portfolio quite enough. I'm ready to go print. All I have to do is learn how to pitch to print magazines. But, learning and applying to new gigs, changing that iteration takes time. And when I'm writing my "pay-the-bills" stuff all day long, where is the time to do what I need to move forward? It's not there.


So, on Tuesday, I have an unofficial meeting with the manager at a restaurant downtown. A swanky wine bar/restaurant. I was looking for bartending work because I thought it'd be fun and have the added bonus of meeting people, except I have no experience bartending. So, this fine young man is going to put me on table service to start (if he likes me) and then I could potentially move into tending bar. And I'm doing it for two reasons: something to do that helps me to be around people rather than myself all day long and a way to make an income and buy myself time to change up the iteration into something I find more sustainable. That is managing my own site(s) and writing for myself, instead of everyone else. 


The funny thing is I always thought that the "creative" person's lifestyle of bartending or waiting tables was kind of sad, kind of lame. Unstable. How ironic that after working in an office for 10 years at the age of 28, I decided that I was done forever sitting in a gray cubicle. I realized that a mid-life crisis is probably more about going insane from the monotony of an office job, with no forseeable way out, than it is about trying to recapture lost youth or getting bored with your wife and kids.


So, it's Saturday, and I'm going to go and try to do some "work" right now. Wish me luck. The grind can be tough.