Besties

"What's a best friend?" someone asked me a couple of days ago when I was talking about them, and although this question at first seems breath-takingly stupid, if you give it a second it reveals itself as actually breath-takingly troublesome.

I mean, what is a best friend, really? I can't say a best friend is the person who knows you best, because sometimes you

know someone is or will be your best friend when they know you hardly at all. I can't say a best friend is the friend you've known the longest, because by that logic your best friend would simply default be the person who's known you longest, and that's obviously not correct. I can't say a best friend is someone to whom you'd tell things you wouldn't tell anyone else, but because in one way or another that description fits all my friends. Your best friend doesn't even have to live close to you: for a long time now, I've had Situational Best Friends (SBF) and a Best Friend; the SBF is my best friend where I am, but my Best Friend is my long-term BF.

So what would I say a best friend is? I would say a best friend is someone to whom you can tell your news and your troubles knowing not just that they won't judge, and not just that they will consider those news and troubles thoughtfully and objectively, but also knowing that they will not try to do anything with them. This is why it's so hard to explain what a best friend is - because it's so hard to explain what that last phrase means. Of course a best friend will say if they're concerned for you, and will tell you things you don't want to hear sometimes if they think you're thinking or behaving foolishly, but it seems to me that a best friend must also give a sense that they're in it with you, whatever "it" is: if you're happy, your best friend is at least a bit happy, too; if you're sad, your best friend listens and respects your sadness (although not forever). A best friend is someone you tell your stuff to not just because you need a receptacle for secrets or a well for troubles, but because you know they want to hear just because they're interested, and that they're interested just because they're your friend. Which I guess is just a complex way of saying that a best friend is the person who listens to you most carefully.

Although not just that, of course. Best friends know you best, and so know how you'll react in a given situation, or how best to help you in such a situation. Best friends make the right noises at your confidences. And maybe most of all your best friend is your best friend because, for whatever reason, you just like seeing them a little better than you like seeing anybody else. This is also, I think, why they're the receptacle of your secrets: you tell your secrets to your best friend because you want to, because you want to become entwined with them that way.

See? Best friend is hard to explain.

All of this comes up not because of but linked to the fact that my closest friends here tell each other everything. I mean, they tell each other stuff I would never dream of telling anyone. As a result, they know each other very well, but not in a way that gives any sense that that knowing is special or unique: this is just the kind of stuff you know if you know a person well, is the suggestion. And because we behave as we see modelled, I've now done this with a few of those people. And you know what? It's quite nice. It does feel like I'm just doing what you do when you know a person well, and perhaps because there's no sense of such tellings as a big deal, or of the revelations as shocking, it simultaneously brings you closer to the people and relaxes you. Oh, you think, this isn't such a big deal after all. And now I am known. Both very pleasant sensations.

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Snowly

We have had a huge amount of snow here - at least 6 inches - and the result is that WhereIlive looks (a) beautiful, and (b) quite like home. I LOVE snow. Have I said this before? I'm sure I have, but it bears repeating. I mean, I really love snow.

In honour of the snow I'm going to tell a story I would never tell to a crowd of strangers, but which I can tell on the internet because I can pretend no one's listening. Two years ago, I went to London over New Year to be with Mr. Fallen. I flew from Otherhome, and on New Year's Eve day in Otherhome it was perhaps fifty degrees F, with not a cloud in the sunny blue sky. I was so excited to be going. You know that excitement where you wish you could physically push time forward, and wish there was some way to make all intervening events happen faster so you could arrive at your conclusion as quickly as possible? That's how I felt.

We all got on the little RJ that was going to fly us from Otherhome to Chicago (where I would get the plane to London), and shortly after we taxied onto the runway the flight attendant informed us that we would be delayed because it had started to snow in Chicago. Okay, whatever. We sat there for twenty minutes, and then he came over the P.A. and informed us that we would be further delayed because the snow had caused Chicago to space more widely its incoming and outgoing flights. We sat there and sat there for perhaps an hour, and I stared out the window at the afternoon sun shining out of the crystal blue sky, thinking to myself, There can't be that much snow in Chicago if it looks like this here. And at the end of the hour the flight attendant's voice came again, telling us that we were going to delay still further because...CHICAGO HAD CLOSED THE AIRPORT DUE TO SNOW!!

And I wanted to stand up and scream, "I am going to London to get laid, and this plane will get to Chicago so I can catch my connection IF I HAVE TO FLY IT MYSELF."

But I didn't, and we sat on the tarmac for twenty minutes longer, after which we were cleared for take-off, and I thought, See? How much snow could there have been? Typical American overcaution. And when we got to Chicago there was a full-scale blizzard. (although we still departed reasonably on time. Someone on that flight told me that international flights, unlike domestic ones, are very rarely delayed, and even then not for very long.)

So what moral might we draw from this? Well, one possible moral is however much I love snow, I love sex with someone I'm attached to even more - a good moral, I think you'll agree. Another possible moral is that you shouldn't hold the announcements of your airplane personnel in dismissive contempt - and I will say that this experience taught me that moral, because I never have done so again. Or you could just take this as a random story that I find funny, which is how I take it.

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Revisioning

I was going to write this post about some news I got about Irishboyfriend earlier this week, and I still will, but first I want to write a tiny bit about what I've been doing, and what it's made me think, yesterday and today.

So I've been revising my book again since Tuesday, as I mentioned in my last post. Yesterday I finished cutting and pasting chapter 2, then typed it up and went to bed. Today I read chapter 1, revised it a little, then printed it out. I don't know why this took a whole day, because I scarcely did anything to it, but it did.

When I got told I needed to do more revisions to the book, I was told that I needed to integrate the philosophers' ideas more thoroughly with what Byron was doing. I was in

despair, because I had no idea how to do that: I just didn't. So I wrote to a very wise friend of mine, older than I and very successful in my area, and asked him to read parts of the book and make some suggestions. Which he did, with great care. I've tried to take the questions he suggested for the parts of the book that he did read and apply them to all my revisions, most notably, "Can you find a way of making the philosophy do more to expand the notion of instability?" With chapter 2 I could juuuuust about do that, but with chapter 1 it's a real struggle. I have no idea how to do that.

Anyway, when I printed out chapter 1 today and was walking home, I thought to myself of how I was going to go back to my room and sort out how to do this on my own. This is never what I would do, but I thought of sitting down on my bed with my manuscript bits, reading them, and trying to figure out where and what to fix. And then I thought, not in a resentful way but just in a factual one, that this is why people come in twos. If I had a partner I would still have to do all this work on my own, but I would know that in the background there there was someone who would give me a pat, or who would be waiting to go out to the pub with me when it was done. Not someone to help, but someone to be there if I needed help and they could give it. I thought the same when I gave my big dinner party a few weeks ago: I didn't really want someone to help me do stuff, but I wanted someone to watch out of the corner of their eye to see that I still didn't want someone to help me - or to notice that I did.

Anyway, to the real post! Earlier this week I discovered that Irishboyfriend's wife is going to have a baby! You will perhaps wonder if I was jealous, and I wondered that myself. I certainly did feel some sort of jealousy at the news, but without very much analysis I noticed that this jealousy was of the fact that Irishboyfriend had a wife (which is to say, I felt a particular manifestation of a general jealousy), not of the fact that she was having a baby. In fact, I had a chance to test this hypothesis later, because two nights ago my cousin wrote to tell me that his wife was having a baby! And I was pleased! (well, as pleased as I can be, as I believe that my cousin and his wife will someday get divorced [and not some day in the very far distant future], and I'm sorry that a kid will have to go through having its parents get divorced. But maybe not...I mean, if I had to peg one of my cousins certainly to get divorced, it would be this guy's sister, 'cause her husband for sure is gay and has already cheated on her [with a woman, though]. So maybe my cousin and his wife will not be the ones for the chop...) I like babies, although I've never particularly wanted one myself, and I'm pleased other women keep producing ones for whom I can buy cute clothes and charming books.

BueNO. I did not find out about Irishboyfriend's (well, I guess I should call him FormerIrishboyfriend's) baby via an e-mail or a letter, but rather via a facebook update, which told me he'd reactivated his running blog, and when I went to his blog he had written that he was reactivating it because his wife would be having a baby about the time of next year's Boston Marathon, so he thought he'd write the blog about his training and her pregnancy in tandem. He felt that this gave the blog nice narrative tension: "Will I be able to make the marathon, or will the baby decide to show up on the very day of the Marathon?" (I paraphrase).

Uh-huh. Well, I'm not making any remarks about that narrative tension, or the question, or what it might reveal about FormerIrishboyfriend. Instead, I thought I would honour him and indicate what a successful father I think he'll be by telling The Soup Story. The Soup Story is one of my most famous stories about FormerIrishboyfriend; it is perhaps equalled only by The Kettle Story, but I think The Soup Story is more appropriate here.

Many years ago, when I was still involved with FormerIrishboyfriend, I got sick. Now, for me "sick" has a specific meaning. It's not like, a cold, or the sniffles: "sick" means I am confined to bed, genuinely too ill to work or otherwise to function without great effort (I don't often get sick). So there I was on my bed of pain, and ThenIrishboyfriend came to check on me. "Can I get you anything?" he asked. "Well," I said. "What I'd really like is a bowl of soup. Could you make me a bowl of soup?" "Okay," he said. Then he teased, "But I only do this once." And he made me a lovely bowl of cream of mushroom soup.

The next day I was still sick, and still in bed, and he came over to check on me again. "Do you need anything?" he asked. "Well," I said, "I'd love it if you'd make another bowl of soup." And he said, "I told you I only do that once." And he did not make me a bowl of soup.

The worst thing about this story is that I stayed with him for at least another year after that, and in the end he broke up with me.

He's said he's had a lot of therapy since we broke up.

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Working on Working

This seems to be the week of random single memories, because two days ago I had one about my father, and tonight, while I was doing my ballet barre in the kitchen (perfect location, it turns out: warm, big, quiet), I had another. I was holding onto the countertop and moved my hand forward so it touched the edge of stove, which, to my disgust, was lightly coated in grease. And this made me remember weekend mornings with Irishboyfriend - not every weekend, but a fair number - when I used to make him a breakfast that included very thin potato slices, fried. In this memory, which was all the days smooshed into one, it was sunny, and I was in my favourite flat in Massachusetts, and he was in the bedroom reading while I cooked the potato slices, wearing a long white nightgown I used to have but since have lost. It was the grease on the stove that reminded me, of course, because the grease in which I fried the potatoes went everywhere, but what a nice memory to spring from grease: bright but n

ot hot, alone cooking for someone I loved in the next room, my feet bare on the boards and my long white cotton nightie circling around me.

Anyhoo (BUEno), that's just by the by. I've been working today, and knock wood it's been going pretty well. Of course, that may be because a good deal of the work has been cutting up my chapter and repasting it so the narrative runs differently. And when I say, "cutting up" I mean, cutting up," and when I say, "repasting," I mean "with Scotch tape." For some reason, this is the only way I can successfully reshape a piece of writing of any length; I suspect it's because it's the only way I can see it all before me and get a sense of its rhythm. Anyway, now half my desk is covered with little strips of paper containing a sentence or two sentences and the other half is covered with sheets of notebook paper alternatively taped to partial typewritten sheets and covered with a paragraph of handwriting followed by a partial typewritten sheet. As I said, it's been going well - I just feel bad about killing so many trees.

Tonight at dinner I had a most interesting and wide-ranging conversation with S.A., on subjects both mentionable and none of your business, thank you very much. One of the mentionable subjects, however, was my hypothesis of this morning (while I was making my first cup of tea in the kitchen) that men raised by single mothers are better than other men. In this hypothesis, men raised by single mothers are better than other men; it seems to me, from my experience, that they tend to be more open to discussions of emotions, more interested in talking aimlessly about the world (this is a vastly important skill, I think), and less rigid about gender expectations. Also, they seem to be more relaxed and open generally. Also, also, they like to dance - an attribute very rare among men. Exhibits in favour of this hypothesis include:

My FTT - okay, rather conservative in the gender expectations department, but surprisingly open (given that) to discussions about emotion and psychology, and deeply deeply (deeply) interested in clothes.

Now, I recognise that this hypothesis has a number of pieces of evidence against it:

Exhibit A: Dr. Heier. Well, his parents were married until he was around 18, so maybe he doesn't count. But he was certainly vastly closer to his mother than his father, and he was not in any way relaxed (although neither was his mother), and he certainly had stern gender expectations - if a film possessed the merest hint of male homosexuality, you could feel him practically go rigid with discomfort.

Exhibit B: The many men I know who are relaxed and open, and chatters, despite being raised by both parents. Okay, that kind of throws a spanner in the works.

So perhaps I'm going to have to work on this hypothesis (which is why it's a hypothesis, not a theory). If I work empirically, however, I could draw the conclusion that men raised by strong mothers are, subjectively (me being the subject), better than other men. This is because: first of all, in my experience men with strong mothers are not afraid of, and often know how to deal with, strong women (yes, strong women have to be wrangled, just as do strong men. That doesn't mean you shut them down, but it does mean that there are ways to be strong and tempered, and ways to be strong and dictatorial. A man who has had a strong mother can avoid the risk of a strong woman becoming the latter). Second, men with strong mothers seem to have learned, somehow, to engage in conversation - that is, to listen and engage with other people - rather more pleasantly and effectively than other men. And they tend to be fairly comfortable in the realm of emotion, or at least of discussion that is not rigidly goal-centred. They also tend to help out more around the house. Also, they tend to notice what you're wearing (hey, it matters to this subject).

Although this post really isn't going anywhere, I'll end with some supposition as random as the rest of the thinking. My supposition is that all these benefits come into being because of the increased communication exposure gained by growing up with a woman. Women talk more than men, and by and large they like to converse more than men. Now, the fact that women openly enjoy this and to some degree expect the same from the people they live with means that the men who grow up with strong women are to a degree forced to join in. But I actually don't think force comes into it. I think we largely do and are comfortable doing what we see modelled: we think this is what all people do. Men who grow up with someone who chats randomly, who helps out as a matter of course (something women also tend to do more than men), who is open and comfortable about discussing emotion, and who pays attention to her own appearance and that of others, will simply do the same - they think it's what people do.

Or so I believe tonight.

At some point I'm going to blog about feminism. But I think everyone involved, reader and writer, will have to gird their loins for that one.

And tomorrow I get my hair cut and blown dry straight, in anticipation of a formal dinner for O.'s birthday tomorrow night! Reader, I love getting my hair straightened. I know we should love ourselves the way we are, and I do. It's just that...I really love myself the way I am with straight hair. So I am looking forward to tomorrow. And Wednesday I have a date! And I am interested to see if my loved straight hair will make any difference to my date!

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It's Not a Fling, You Know

Mmmm, I'm so tired, and I should go to bed, because I'm still under the weather, but I HAD to write.

There's this guy at tango; let's call him The Flying Scotsman. He's very well known in the WhereIlive tango community (eye roll), in that everybody hates him. This is first of all because, as a friend of mine put it, he's an asshole. This is a word I very much dislike and actively try not to say, so the fact that I used it will give you some idea of how apposite it is: there is really no other word to describe him. In addition to that, however, he is a terrible dancer - he does, in fact, dance like a train. And the worst bit of it is, he's a teacher.

Now, every tango dancer has of course had lessons from someone, somehow. But the thing about most tango dancers, at least in WhereIlive, is that you can't really tell with whom they've had lessons: they may develop their own style (subject for another post), or they may have no idiosyncracies and simply dance well (or badly), but they don't bear the clear marks of one teacher or another. Unless they've had lessons with The Flying Scotsman.

Twice in two months now I've danced with young men at a milonga - the second time was tonight - and I have instantly identified them as having had classes with TFS (which is to say I guessed, and when I casually enquired where they'd had lessons, they confirmed my guess). They both have a distinctive style: it would be most accurate to say that they are mannered without being skilled. First of all, TFS teaches that the main means of guidance is the hand. This is not true in tango, and it's difficult to convey how both unpleasant and potentially downright damaging it is to have someone pushing you with considerable force here and there in the small of your back. That's bad, but to add insult to injury (literally) he teaches them to cross their ankles and do a "one foot flat, one foot posed on toe" position as the final or resting position of each step. I'm sure the theory behind this is that it looks suave, but in fact it just looks posey and pretentious. Also, when I danced with these men it rapidly became clear that they have no real experience. They're just beginners, but they've been taught all these advanced flourishes. And as a result they're just not much good: you'd have to take them right back to the beginning to fix them.

I cannot conceive of what woman would ever find it enjoyable to dance with these men. I understand that TFS does some quite interesting stuff in his lessons: he talks a lot about posture, and weight and body placement. So I'm willing to believe that there are things to be learned from him, and I'm willing to believe that a woman might find it enjoyable to learn from him, at least when it comes to those things. But to dance with someone who dances like that seems to me not just unpleasant but, even in the short run, painful: the damage to your back muscles would perhaps be small, but it would certainly be noticeable.

I did consider telling tonight's young man what he was doing wrong, but then I thought about how long it would take, and how bad it would make him feel. So I just requested that he be a little lighter in guiding me (by my back).

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Scriptora Judaica

Writing, reader, is a strange exercise. It is my job. There is no way around that: whether I am a fiction writer, or an academic writer, or a teacher, at least 50% of my job involves picking up a pen or putting my hands on the keyboard and writing. And yet, unless I am commenting on a student paper, writing is always in some degree terrifying. Now, it is true that on a small number of occasions I am filled with the Muse (although, because there was no prose when the Muses were invented, my Muse would have to be Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry - that's her over there), and then the words come pouring forth, but even though at that moment there is no fear, there is fear on either side of that moment, because there's always the possibility that that won't happen again. I have had long periods of writer's block (LONG periods of writer's block), so I am familiar with that feeling.

I've never been afraid of the blank page, but I suppose that page is really a metaphor, a metaphor for the commencement. Only I've never really been afraid of the commencement of a piece of writing, either - in fact, I'm very good at opening paragraphs. What I'm afraid of is the long thickness ahead, the places where, after the good beginning, it all goes wrong and doesn't work, or can't be made to say what I want it to say, or to have the import I want it to have. "Terror" really does describe the feeling I have in this regard when I pick up the pencil (which is how I start most academic things I write, at least).

But sometimes, reader, after I pick up the pencil...it all goes right. This is not to say that the words pour forth, that I write for hours and hours until I've finished some golden production, but rather that as I get into the writing of that first paragraph I get a feeling that it's all going to be fiiiiiiiiiiiine. It feels that drawn out and smooth. That doesn't mean there won't be difficulties along the way, or that I won't at some points feel hopeless and as if I can't scratch through to what I want, but there's a moment's knowing that it's all going to be okay; it's going to work out after all. And that moment, with its combination of joy, relief, and a curious reminder of my own power, almost cannot be beat.

Meanwhile, it is the second night of Hanukkah. Now, I'll be the first to admit I'm not much of a Jew-y Jew, but for some reason Hannukah brings out the Jew in me. Perhaps because I light the menorah in the dark, and the quiet, and recite a prayer while I do it, and therefore am somehow in a meditative state, performing this action is the only time in my life that I feel a member of a community. In the real world I don't much care for communities, either - my childhood showed me that groups are pretty much always out to get you (although I was thinking at brunch this morning how very much I like looking across the table, and down to my left and my right, and seeing that everyone seated there is a friend of mine) - but on Hannukah I draw great satisfaction from the realisation that all over the world other Jews are, or have been, or will be, doing exactly what I'm doing at that moment: that I am a Jew, a member of the Jewish community - a survivor, a brick in an old wall, a member of an indestructible certainty. Yes, I'm proud of that, and restful in it.

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Missed

"You have to let him miss you." I should have included this in the ealier list of wise utterances. My friend Jennifer said it to me years ago, when I was going to cancel a trip to New York (to see Arcadia, so you can imagine how blinded by love and worry I was) to stay with Irishboyfriend. After the bra thing, I think it's the piece of advice that resonates most strongly in my life, not just with reference to me and men but with reference to me and other people, and with reference to women and men generally. I think of it often, almost always when I'm about to do too much for someone (of either gender) or to be precipitate in some way (usually with a man): I hear Jennifer saying this in my head, and I haul myself back.

I possess a general desire to have situations resolved immediately: if I send an e-mail, I want the response in an instant (and, conversely, I find it very hard to leave an e-mail unanswered in my own inbox); I very seldom leave phone messages because I have no idea when the person will call back, and I can't stand waiting for them to do so. I remember almost twenty years ago when my Anglo-Saxon professor was explaining to us how mysterious and worrisome life and the world seemed to the Anglo-Saxons, and he said, "But even today the world is a mystery in many ways. When we drop a letter in the mailbox, we have no idea whether or not it will get where it's going." I felt a chill go down my spine, because that had always been one of my greatest concerns (which is why I feel a good deal of sympathy in that scene in When Harry Met Sally where she puts a letter in the box, closes the little door, checks to see it's gone down, puts another letter in the box, closes the door, checks...with each letter separately). Anyway, the point is that it's therefore all of a piece that if a man doesn't get in touch with me promptly I get tense. Or used to, before I figured out how not to do this (which is: go off and force myself to focus on something else until I get sucked into that, instead).

But this is not just me. I have a friend now who's just embarked on a new relationship, and she has worked herself into a wire-tight knot because the man occasionally won't text as often as he did, or because the wording of his e-mails (which she parses like a philologist in search of a lost root) seems less-than-ideally sweet. And I just think, and try to say, "Calm down!" I say wise things like, "Remember, you're checking him out, too: he doesn't have all the power," and, "Usually what we think is behaviour based on feelings about us has very little do with us," or even just, "He's stressed!", but I see so much of the me I used to be - and could very well be again if I don't keep my head if I ever have another relationship - that I worry and wonder.

This tension over contact and its significance seems to be limited to women. At least, I've never encountered a man who worried over it as many women I know do. I wonder why this is? First of all, are there men who worry in this way? (or, do all men worry in this way, but they don't share it with women? Hmm...) Well, presumably yes, since there are men who do everything - or rather, since there's some man out there doing each thing there's some woman out there doing. So, then, I wonder why this worry seems to predominate in women. No doubt it's because generations of women have sat by the phone waiting (as Dustin Hoffman nearly says inTootsie), and have passed the belief that one waits and worries while one waits on to their daughters. And no doubt it's also because women tend to be more anxious than men (there's a question in its own right: why?). And of course women are encouraged to be openly vastly more insecure than men. But why is it, I wonder, that women tend to feel you should be there - whichever of those two words you choose to put the stress on - and be there consistently and immediately, or else love is going, and men don't tend to think so? I wonder what difference has been trained in there, or is biologically inherent? And I wonder how I'd go about researching it...

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