i am a pretentious hack.

       i'm not dead!

Thursday, October 25, 2007

the password is "jerkwater"

so much to say, so little assistance or support from my home internet connection, which runs hot and cold like a neurologic abyssinian cat in heat. it works, it doesn't work, it starts to work and then changes its mind, it loves me, it loves me not, it spits on fidelity, pitou . . .

i am keeping notes and drawing up blueprints, cross my heart. i will tell you something useful and informative, because i do not fancy myself a belletrist, and i still intend to post my summary of ben greenman's appearance in brookline way, way, way back in some other lifetime of mine (or april; i sometimes get the two confused). but i have things to tend to in the office, and at home, well, you see how it is.

but i would like to take a moment to answer a very important question that somehow directed one knowledge-hungry reader to my den of pretentious hackery:

"what does it mean when a hamster pushes your hand away with their nose?"

excellent question. hamsters are very complex and mysterious creatures, and their tendency to express themselves via subtle, dancelike gesture makes them a favorite pet of rodentophiles, and not just those who are specifically cricetinae enthusiasts. i have had some hamsters, and none of them has ever done this to me. one of them often bit my hand, but nobody ever nudged it. a motion of this sort could mean many things, from "you are blocking my light" to "we have a bond that can only be described through the subtle, dancelike gestures of a hamster, which is dandy, as i am a hamster and can offer you just such an expression. in this movement, as i press my tiny nostril, through which oxygen and thus life enter my body, against your hand, which you use to stroke me and provide me with food and water and therefore sustain my life with, i am telling you that i recognize my debt to you, and i am grateful for your care, and the warmth and tenderness that i feel for you exceeds the bounds of my tiny, furry body and is spilling out into the pine shavings around me with every exhaled breath. as i press against you now, i am acknowledging, with no regrets about the fact, that my life is quite literally in your hands." not knowing your hamster, dear reader, and not having seen the pushing of the hand myself in its authentic context, it is difficult for me to offer a definitive interpretation of the action. if, though, the hamster was, as you say, pushing your hand away, then i would err on the side of caution and assume that the hamster kind of wanted you to get your hand out of its face. or their face, as the case may be. if you submit a video of the pushing next time, along with a brief write-up of the events leading up to the contact, i may be able to give you a more concrete explanation.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

oh, in that case . . .

everyone could deal with melting ice caps, right? coastal erosion, elevations in dangerous weather patterns, species extinction--no sweat. no sweat. but no one told us that a side effect of global warming might be increased humidity! finally, though, the hideous truth that no one dared speak has come out. all of those hot gusts circulating in those expansive storm fronts and causing all that ice to melt and flood our beachfronts and waterways might actually lead to there being more moisture in the air. well, fuck. that's a whole other pack of tomatoes. i guess we'd all better buy bigger, more powerful air conditioners.

according to nathan gillett of the university of east anglia, humidity is "an important contribution to heat stress in humans." i'm not a climatologist or an epidemiologist or anything, but i'm going to tentatively concur with this statement. it is certainly a source of stress to me, particularly when it leads to the first thing out of every other human's mouth being,"god, it's so humid!" it has been my experience that humidity tends to increase in tandem with heat, as does human stress, and i'm made slightly more confident in my assessment by the fact that "the finding isn't surprising to climate scientists."

i find the whole bit almost seussian: humans' refusal to actually live in the climate has been one of the primary factors contributing to strongly negative shifts in that climate, which have led to an even more staunch refusal to accept the climate, thus worsening the climate, and wheeeeeee! around and around we go, until we land here in this ridiculous place where this perfectly plain pattern is revealed to us as shocking news. and it is still being presented as if nothing were at stake but the cleanliness of our armpits:

although it might not be a lethal kind of thing, it's going to increase human discomfort.

poor us. couldn't i just cry us a river. i would sweat us one, if any building in the world ever set its thermostat above 50 degrees. it is still pretty warm here in new york; i haven't even noticed any leaves starting to turn. i guess i'll have to wait until it gets cooler outside, when the buildings turn their thermostats up to 75 and i have to take my coat and sweater off the instant i pass through the door in order to keep from fainting from heat stroke. tomorrow we sweat; today, we weep.

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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

what will i do with all these leftover pretzels?

i know that for a select few, the new yorker festival just goes on and on and on . . . they have their seminars and dinner parties and galas and elegantly lit corner booths, and the conversations and debates spin out endlessly into the twinkling, mirthful night. but there is nothing select about me, and my expendable income for the month of october is more or less used up, and so my party is all over. i'm so sad that i don't live in an era of public conversational salons and roundtable fêtes; even in college i could feel the loss, but i wasn't in despair. there was still one coffee shop that people sat around and discussed ideas in, there was an art gallery down the street that hosted biweekly potluck suppers open to anyone in the neighborhood, and i could always corner someone at a party and pick a fight about the estate tax or the bohr model or whether there is such a thing as a nonmisogynistic french film (i still can't decide). now everything happens in chat rooms or comment threads or text messages, you can't get anyone to engage in three dimensions, and it's dreadful. the internet will be the death of artistic movements, i'm sure of it. something happens when you put people with a common interest or goal together in a room that just can't occur when they aren't face to face. a spontaneous and immediate reaction to an idea or statement will always lead to a more rewarding discourse. there are more coffee shops all the time, and they're always full of people, but those people are all sitting at their own tables, talking on their cell phones or clacking away at their laptops, and it's a completely dead atmosphere. for me, anyway. i guess the people in the coffee shops feel o.k. about it. but my heart will always long for the communal, intellectual atmosphere of the belle époque, and i know that all of those folks were fairly select, too, but at least they were trying. if i had more than twelve square feet to host them in, i might try to start up some gatherings of my own. well, if i had more than twelve square feet and a chair, and maybe some kind of table, even if it weren't round, you know, an end table or something, or a tray table, and more than one glass. *sigh* someday.

anyway.

the closer to the word-nerd party, featuring ira glass as the ringmaster and susan orlean, chuck klosterman, and malcolm gladwell as themselves, was not officially a new yorker event, though there were, obviously, a high number of references to the magazine and its practices and contents. not to disparage the festival, but i think last night's talk was better than any of the other literary events i attended this past weekend, because it was so lightly mediated and loosely themed, and because ira mostly wanted the writers to talk to each other. the event was both promotion for ira's new book, the new kings of nonfiction (which actually contains a lot of not-new nonfiction that apparently had been piling up on glass's desk long enough for him to feel compelled to do something with it), and a benefit for 826nyc, the local branch of 826, a national nonprofit organization that offers free after-school programs and tutoring in creative writing for school kids from kindergarten on up. i love that 826 exists. i love that dave eggers, john scieszka, and sarah vowell are heavy presences on its board and keep it a little wacky. i love that a young, broadly lauded writer with a good amount of clout chose to start up a wacky nonprofit to help kids instead of buy a $7 million brownstone so each of his own kids could have a private floor (man, foer, you really turned out to be one glaring disappointment after another). and i love susan orlean and fidgety lefties who bite their nails and scrape the labels off of their water bottles and pick at the untucked tails of their shirts (aww, my secret boyfriend fiddles with inanimate objects, too! we're so perfect for each other). until tonight i just kind of felt all right about ira, but now i love him too, and i don't think i'd ever heard of or read anything by chuck klosterman until a few days ago (sorry, dude, but i stopped flipping through spin when i was about 16), but what the hell—i love you too, man! i love your sweeping hand gestures that have probably proven dangerous to passersby, i love that you babble and flail like a vertiginous speed freak, i love that you love what you do. structured, mediated, q&a-type discussions are great for what they're worth, and sometimes they're the only way you can get things done. but ira just threw a handful of smart, eccentric spazzos together and let them gab about why they love writing about smart, eccentric spazzos, and it was brilliant. and i learned some things, too:


  • susan orlean and chuck klosterman both think the word "sequelae" is pronounced "suhkweelia." i don't have a problem with this the way i do with "nucular." i had a conversation with my uncle once about which is worse, someone mispronouncing a word but placing it in an appropriate context, or someone speaking a word beautifully but using it inaccurately. we decided that misusage is a greater sin, because someone who knows what a word means but not how it sounds is someone who reads and retains knowledge and wants to enhance his or her working vocabulary, but someone who has heard a word and repeated it without taking the time to find out exactly what it means is basically a blowhard. and "suhkweelia" isn't an unpleasant-sounding word. "nucular," however, is an abomination, especially now that the incorrectness of the pronunciation has been a topic of public discussion for a while. i'll never fold on that.
  • malcolm's working on a book about, um, something . . . cultural identity? something unbusinessy, i think, anyway, and it doesn't sound as if anyone will be able to use it to sell more chairs or records or crappy movies,* so that's nice. of course, i could be mistaken; all he really told us was that there's one chapter that he interviewed his mother and aunt for, and i have chosen to grab up that nebulous ball and run all the way to juneau with it. i'm open to most any subject matter, really, as long as little, brown prints it in the same font as the first two. the typeface and leading are so refined, and yet also so approachable and calming. very thoughtfully laid out, those books. so there's no birthday article for me this year, but i can totally live with that.
  • it's entirely true that most people think of men first when they're asked to name people they admire for intellectual or artistic reasons. my cousin asked me the other day for some music recommendations, and i had listed about twenty artists when he stopped me and said, "it's weird that you don't listen to any girls." but i do listen to girls, and am wild about plenty of them. i just didn't remember them until i was prompted to do so. and then i was very disappointed in myself, because no one should ever forget mirah or ani difranco or mary timony or chan marshall. but i had. it's true for writers and visual artists, too, i think of faulkner and ibsen, chuck close and françois truffaut, but when i sit down and concentrate, all kinds of amazing chicks pop into the foreground. it's really strange, that women don't leap out, or really even lodge. i have to dredge them up, even the ones who've kind of changed my life. but i thought maybe it was me, and now i think it's everyone. isn't that troubling. i mean, i'm not a feminist, exactly, and i don't always get along so well with girls, but there are plenty i'd rather remember than forget. and now i'm worried that i won't.

susan touched on the difficulty of being a woman and a reporter, as opposed to a novelist or columnist or food writer, something that didn't require travel and weeks of immersion in a subject's life, and i thought, why should it be harder for a woman to travel than it is for a man? but it isn't necessarily; it's just harder for a woman with a home and family, and it's harder for that woman than it might be for a man with a home and family. it's easy to write it off as the result of women's desire to stay closer to home when they have a family, and to then write off such a desire as something inherently female, but what you're implying when you say a thing like that is that men don't love or miss their children as much as women do, and i doubt that. but in the end it's a personal choice, and all of my tiny x chromosomes aren't enough to enable me to muster up much sympathy for women who choose to have a child and then miss their lives. it's their choice, isn't it? you can decide that the other parent should give up a life instead, or you can decide that you will both carry on as usual and hire a third party to raise your child, but someone will have to sacrifice something on one or the other front. it's impossible for me to believe that women who are working at jobs they enjoy and then decide to have a child don't have a rough idea, one way or another, of what's going to happen once the child arrives. you want one thing most, right? and you pick it. it isn't gender-based, it's person-based. susan's still a writer, and an excellent writer, she just writes less. and maybe that's difficult for her, but she has the career she wanted and is positioned pretty highly within her admittedly male-dominated field. (no one was rude enough to ask ira why only two female writers were included in the current anthology, but i'm sure he was feeling the heat for a minute or two.) am i an awful woman? am i a heartless woman? maybe i'm an ignorant woman. it seems that people of both genders whine a lot about how they can't have it all, but nobody has it all. my sympathies are with the people who don't have enough, or who aren't free to make a lot of choices about their own lives, and i think that susan is not that kind of person. i mean, i'm not that kind of person, even without a chair or a table, so what is she complaining about? i like you, lady, but suck it up.

in the same vein, as much as i hate having to jab malcolm in the kidney with my pointy stick, he occasionally drives me to it, and it really irks me when he mocks the wealthy. i mean, the man ain't broke. he's not digging through the couch cushions for enough change to buy a box of spaghetti at trade fair. he isn't on the wrong side of any tracks. rally for the underclass, sure, but don't sling mud at the rich. again, i think that most people have more than they need, but maybe someone with way, way more than he needs will actually be more willing to hand some of it off in a charitable manner, because that handoff is so unlikely to impact his quality of life. someone in the middle class might decide that he shouldn't have to help anyone else, because he still has a lot less than the people with the most. but if what ultimately matters about wealth is how it's allocated, i'm going to side with the obscenely wealthy people who are donating a fifth of their income to social programs and charities before i'm going to side with the people making $30,000 or $40,000 a year who glare at homeless people and toss the jimmy fund can over their shoulder when it's passed around the movie theater. the residents of southampton may or may not ever have done much of anything at all in terms of supporting worthy causes. i have no idea, and i don't think malcolm does, either. what i'm sure of is that i'd rather align myself with the people who are doing something, even if it's only for the tax deduction, than side by default with the people in my tax bracket, because they certainly aren't always the same people. some people make their assets a central part of their character, but i don't think there's any call to do it for them. the rennert saga was moronic, and more than worthy of extensive pointing and laughing, but i want to laugh, you know, at the case, and not the individuals. maybe there isn't a way to do that. i'm kind of struggling, lately, with efforts to prevent my hatred of certain aspects of people from emerging as hatred of those people, period, and i don't know yet how effectively it can be accomplished. i'm looking for the gray areas. and i know that malcolm is also primarily mocking the acts and not the individuals, but sometimes it's just so hard to visualize a firm line. don't worry, though, i'm not going to stop hating people. god, can you imagine? what a boring, wasted life that would be.

chuck, um, didn't say anything that i feel strongly about or moved to comment on. he seemed smart and funny, and fun, and a bit manic. mostly he seemed just plain happy, with his life and what he's able to do with it, and that's such a lovely thing. but, it's just, i mean, he didn't want to write about the strokes, but he did, and i don't want to read about the strokes, and i won't. and i can only keep up with one magazine at a time, and he writes for about nineteen, so i don't know how often we'll cross paths. alas and alack, but there are only so many hours in the day.

i guess i'm assuming everyone knows about ira glass, but for anyone who doesn't, here. love him or hate him, but don't hate him in my house.

so, yeah, the end of this party. but all is not lost: reviews are forthcoming on other festival events, i swear. you'd never know it to scroll through iaaph these days, but i do care about things that are not malcolm gladwell. not many, but enough to shut the hell up about him every so often, and i'm going to. honest. tomorrow. i think i'd like to talk about mark danielewski for a while, too, if anyone wants to stop by, and the new mcsweeney's collection of very, very short stories is filling my heart with love and blood and other assorted substances of varying densities. i know there isn't much room in this place; go ahead and climb on the bed if you want, and i'll perch up here on the counter, and if everyone brings a glass i'll make sure there's enough to drink. it won't be the start of a revolution, but i think we'll all get on just fine.





* update, 10/10/08, 1:21 PM: i was, um, really, really wrong about this. the eternal optimist meets with eternal slaps in the face, i guess. this book is more about the creative process than the process of marketing creations, though, i think, and its projected release date is awfully close to my birthday in 2008; he's trying.

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Sunday, October 07, 2007

i know you're on the edge of your seat . . .

fact: adam gopnik is even more self-conscious and eager to both please everyone and not let on that he cares about pleasing anyone in person than he is in print. i hadn't known it could happen, but there it is.

fact: malcolm gladwell does an adorably awkward and fidgety-teenagerish thing with his right foot when he's forced to stand still while speaking. he's also left-handed. i am incredibly happy about both of these things.

fact*: despite the official call, based on a highly unscientific (and uncounted) show of hands and made by the heavily and unabashedly biased mediator, simon schama, who is a professor at columbia, gladwell made a far better argument, in that he more fully and roundly supported his point: ivy league schools make judgments and awards based on criteria other than academic merit, and this is unacceptable for academic institutions of any standing, but particularly for those of such legendary standing as harvard, yale, and princeton. the problem, i think, was that his well-made point didn't fully support his position, which was that the campuses of harvard, yale, and princeton should be levelled and the land sold for condominium development. i'm not without bias myself, as we all know, but i don't agree with that at all. if the aim is to promote social equality within the confines of the grounds, maybe it would be better to turn the space into a kind of public orchard, to be maintained by the pinko zealots effecting the takeover, using the amassed funds in the schools' current accounts. anyone could come in and pick fruit from the trees and then lounge around on the grass thinking brilliant thoughts for free. all of these schools have large bodies of water nearby for their crew teams, so irrigation wouldn't be too much trouble. we could keep some of the older buildings intact and turn them into hostels and mulch sheds. i guess we could grow other things, maybe tubers and legumes, but i do think the plants should be more utilitarian than decorative. but it would have to be something like that, an open-access venture. if you want to do away with the schools because they bar entry to intelligent and motivated but poorly connected individuals from the lower classes, it makes no sense to turn them into high-end housing that those individuals also couldn't get into. of course malcolm was joking about all of that, but still, hon, make a joke that's in keeping with the theme.

gopnik's primary counterargument was the same one i would have made: if you do away with those three schools, three more will move up to take their place as the most recognizable brands in american higher education. people love status, they love being affiliated with things that convey status, they love bearing brand labels that tell onlookers that their lives are better than the average life. applicants to schools like harvard and yale and princeton know that they're buying into a brand. there aren't any illusions about it; most people understand that they can get the same, if not a better, education at another, less well-known institution. but the names of those institutions don't open as many doors. people think something about you when they see that you're wearing a designer label, and they think something about you when they hear that you graduated from yale. but they think it at the level of the brand, not the faculty or curriculum, and you know when you don the label that you are only attempting to project at the level of the brand. schools like harvard, yale, and princeton—and internationally coveted fashion lines like versace and prada—will exist as long as human beings are human beings. we don't always have the time to tell someone we've just met about all the ways in which we are better than him or her; sometimes we need something small that we can flash quickly, like a handbag or an alma mater, in order to get the job done and be on our way.

and gladwell's rebuttal was the same as mine would have been: the desire for such instant and ultimately meaningless recognition is asinine, and we shouldn't allow or encourage or enable universities to accommodate it. we should enact changes that make the name on the tag irrelevant to the assessment of the product, and those changes have to happen at every level. published school rankings should reflect more meaningful measures, such as what becomes of students once they're enrolled and how many of them go on to do things that strengthen society, and people reviewing or applying to colleges should demand more information on how the school serves its active students, instead of how the name of the school serves its graduates. naturally, right? and yet so not the way things tend to be done.

just to be up front, i'll tell you that i applied and was accepted to an ivy league school (not one of the three mentioned above) but decided not to attend it because i was offended by its graduation requirements. specifically, i would have had to pass a swim test in order to receive my degree. this was a common requirement at a number of schools until around 1980, when most places began to realize how goofy and unnecessary it was. the current holdouts include cornell, columbia, notre dame, dartmouth, and swarthmore. i can swim just fine, but it bothered me, and continues to bother me, that whether or not i graduated could hinge on something that was 100 percent nonacademic. i think the requirement's aquatic nature got under my skin, too. there's something about water and the gilded upper crust in my mind—the newport oceanfront mansions, sculling, gatsby's pool, i don't know. i kept thinking of those 1980s movies where the rich preppy in his tennis whites finishes waxing his yacht in preparation for the regatta and then goes over and kicks sand on the poor townie schlub who really, really, really needs the prize money but will never win (or so everyone assumes) because he can't already afford a killer boat. but a school that doesn't accept students purely on the strength of their academic merits can't be expected to graduate them that way. i went to a private non-ivy college, spent two miserable years there, and then transferred to the state college down the street. the main building of that college had once been a public high school and still had lockers on its ground floor. there were never more than thirty students in a class, the professors were supportive and always accessible, i was able to pay my entire tuition in cash, and i learned approximately eighty-three times more in a semester than i had at my first school. when it comes to basic undergraduate education, failure should be an impossibility for a student who wants and is trying to succeed. if the school provides access to the proper resources, it is impossible. at my state school, there was a very high degree of support for students in terms of assistance outside of the classroom, arrangements made for students who had to hold jobs, flexible scheduling, etc. at the private institution, where i was paying fifteen times the tuition, those things were not really available. of the twenty or so people i became friendly with during my freshman orientation, all incredibly bright and driven kids who'd been near the tops of their high school classes, only about half graduated on time, and some never graduated at all. do i think this means all state schools are boffo? absolutely not. nor do i think all private or top-tier institutions are full of crap. what i think is that you can find outstanding colleges, and lousy ones, at every level of the current ranking system, and i can't help but think that that must mean the current ranking system is pretty full of crap. so i agreed with malcolm before he said anything. what, are you shocked? like that never happens.

i agreed with gopnik, though, too, to a tiny degree, in that it makes less sense to get rid of elite institutions than it does to attempt to reform their operations or enlighten the public so that they can, i guess, demand reformed operations. but he didn't offer any suggestions as to how we might do that. he didn't offer any suggestions at all, really. what he did was call malcolm the pol pot of parchment (at least three times); compare the grouping of harvard, yale, and princeton to the factitious but catchy "axis of evil" triad; insist that the ivy league provides tremendous opportunity without referencing anything even resembling a fact in support of that statement (and even then he was talking about opportunity for its students, or maybe just its graduates, when the problem is that it is denying opportunities to deserving applicants based on snooty, capricious whims); and closed with the warning that a vote for malcolm gladwell's america is a vote for george bush's america, but a vote for gopnik's america is a ballot cast in obama-esque optimism. a gimmicky and failed (and sort of rovian) presentation, i thought, which was too bad, because if he'd tried he could maybe have gone somewhere with the original idea. or maybe that was the best he could do, i don't know. on the quasi-upside, i have decided that his smugness is affected rather than intrinsic. i'm having some trouble figuring out why anyone would choose to project smugness. it could be a defensive posture (new york in the 1980s was a rather fierce place), or perhaps it's the result of parisian influence. i really can't say, never having lived in either place, and especially never having been a short canadian man in either place. i do not like him more, exactly, but i am infuriated by him less. and that's the best i can do. there was no ass-rolling, anyway. sorry to disappoint, kids, i know some of you were keeping your fingers crossed for an old-school rumble, but he was so sweaty and ill at ease up there under those bright lights (which only he had to speak under, weirdly; when malcolm was talking the hall was dimmed. does anyone know what that was about? it was so odd) with his shirt collar open, trying to look so smooth, grasping at liberal straws, that even i would have felt too mean to end it all by letting his sizable audience watch him get beat up by a girl. he and i both know the truth, and that's enough for me.

it was all pretty light, as it should have been, because in the end there's just nothing to it. if we all agree that there are excellent schools that are more willing to accept funny-looking students with no legacies or trust funds than the ivy league schools are, then we could probably agree that those students should attend those schools instead of harvard, yale, or princeton, since they'll probably have a better time somewhere else, anyway. it's an undeniable irritation that someone who went to harvard can simply say "i went to harvard" and be greeted with more and better job or postgraduate offers, despite his high-C average, than a student who maintained an A average at the university of virginia. but the things that need to happen in order to change that can either be brought about now, with schools operating as they already do, or not at all. we have to change our priorities. razing a few lecture halls won't help with that. refusing to pay top dollar and beyond for a designer logo might help that. but that isn't really the american way.




* fact: i really do say "fact" in this way when i'm speaking out loud. it's one of my less endearing conversational traits, right after my unfortunate air-quotes affliction, but you're here for the real me, right? and that's what you're getting.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

the language of the industry

today they threw a surprise party for my department's vp, who was recently inducted into the publishing hall of fame. i didn't know there was a publishing hall of fame, but there is, and my boss's boss's boss has been recognized by it. and i'm happy for him, i am. he's a good guy. he thought enough of me to escort me down to human resources after my return interview for my current job, he came by my office on my first day to welcome me. he wants to explore options for making the company carbon neutral, he's promised to save me a spot on the committee. a good guy who does good things—not always the type of guy who receives a lot of notice, sadly enough, and i wasn't at all put out at the thought of applauding him as he entered a room.

the forty or so minutes of standing around uncertainly after he had entered and the applause had died down weren't so great. picture me in my standard social-gathering position: back to the wall, hands in my lap fiddling with some inanimate object (in this case my keys), gaze fixed upon a point in the unknowable distance, acknowledging no one. and i'm listening. i'm listening to the entire room, waiting for any line of conversation to resonate in my ear, to speak to me. the odds of that happening aren't always great even at a normal party, where people generally know each other and have made a firm choice to be together, when they're in it for more than the free cake and root beer. but office parties, man, they're interesting-idea vacuums. they're communication voids. the guy who wrote the neverending story, with its nightmarish threat of the Nothing, the emptiness that replaces all beauty and creativity in the universe after people forget how to dream? i bet he'd gotten stuck at a lot of office parties.

"hi, i'm me. you're you, right? what division are you in? oh, i'm in a different division. how long have you worked here? really? that's a very interesting length of time. i've worked here for a different length of time, and that person over there, she's worked here for a whole other length of time. she also used to have long hair. gee, it sure is nice to be away from my desk. this windowless space is such a refreshing change of pace from the one i'm usually in."

"i'm working on a project. it's a very big project. i'm incredibly busy. i'm so busy that i shouldn't even be standing here right now eating this cake and drinking this root beer and telling you how busy i am, because it's taking up so much of my time, and i don't have any time to spare, because my very big and important project keeps me so very busy. oh, you're busy too? yes, everyone's so terribly busy. but not like i am."

"i like this bar. do you like this bar? what about that bar? i never go to that bar. i used to go to one bar, but now i go to another bar. except for sometimes when i go to a different bar."

"hey, let's all talk about that woman over there. she's a bitch, isn't she? i hate her. just look at her. look at her standing there all bitchy in those clothes, wearing those shoes like a bitch who wears shoes. now she's looking at us, what a bitch, let's smile and wave like we've been trying to get her attention and ask her about her division and her very important project."

"hi! i'm unnervingly eager to speak to you with tremendous enthusiasm about something of absolutely no consequence! i'm going to stand very close to you while i do it to impress upon you how deeply sincere i am about my desire to share this utterly irrelevent fragment of nondata with you! i dare you to refrain from recoiling when i grab your arm and lean toward your face so fast and so far that you are momentarily convinced that i'm going to break your nose with my skull! ha, you flinched! we have such a bond now, even though we've never spoken before, i feel like i could tell you anything! i'm in this division, i'm working on a very important project with that woman over there, who's such a bitch that i never tell her when i'm going to this bar that i like!"

and so on and so forth, etc., ad infinitum, or until everyone realizes that if they don't leave within the next thirty seconds or so they may be asked to help clean up. someone always approaches me at these gatherings to offer me cake and a vast "what's your name, little girl?" smile, and to tell me that i look so sad. and i'm sure that i do. but it isn't because no one is speaking to me, and it certainly isn't because i don't have cake.

all social animals establish working relationships of varying degrees of camaraderie and intimacy. some relationships are purely functional and require no friendship or pretense of friendship in order to satisfy the needs of all involved parties. others seem to require an inordinate quantity of pretense in order to be functional. human animals are overwhelmingly in favor of pretense when it comes to any relationship that's likely to last for more than forty-five seconds. in unfamiliar group settings, we default to bland approximations of cordiality; in more familiar groups, we default to conspiratorial cattiness. apparently, there is something in our coding that tells us this is comforting. i find it maddening. i am sitting with my back to the wall and pressing the teeth of my apartment key into the pad of my thumb because i am so afraid that if i stand or look up or draw any kind of attention to myself one of those default, pretense-heavy conversations will pounce on me and suck me into its gray, chilling vortex, and i don't want cake, i don't want cake! did you hear that bush vetoed the proposed expansion of children's health-care coverage? do you know where myanmar is? yes, i know that you've been very busy with your large, important project, but sometimes i take a break from building books and try to read one. have you read one? any one at all? can we talk about that? *sigh* no, actually, i kind of like her shoes.

by the time i dragged myself back upstairs i was exhausted and tense and incapable of focusing. i spent another hour, hour and a half, trying and failing to get back into a working rhythm, and then i gave up. the day was shot. i needed a walk, a long, hard walk, and while i was lacing up my sneakers so i could tear down the street and away from the office, the cleaning lady came in to empty the trash. i like the cleaning lady. she's older, in her early sixties, maybe, small and wrinkled but straight-backed and nimble. she always says hello when she walks into the room, softly but making sure that i hear her, so she doesn't startle me. she always smiles. and then she hushes about, emptying bins and straightening blinds and checking on plants, so quiet, like a mother cleaning around her sleeping child. one day i saw her in the kitchenette fishing photocopies out of the trash barrel and tossing them into the recycling barrel next to it. she looked up at me, half-smiled, shook her head. "people always make this mistake," she said, her accent slavic and heavy. she has one gold tooth, her upper right canine or first premolar. she wears her curly brown hair down, it falls over large gold hoop earrings. i half-smiled back. "i know," i said.

today when she came in she smiled as always, reached for the trash. i was happy to see her. the last few times i'd been in the office that late there'd been someone else, a younger girl, sullen and abrupt. she didn't care about the paper. i told the cleaning lady i was glad she was back, the other girl hadn't been friendly. i asked if she'd been on vacation. no, she said, her brother had died.

i looked at her for a few seconds. her english isn't strong, i think maybe she thought i hadn't understood. "an accident," she said, "in his car. for nine days i had to go, for my family. everyone is very sad, and i went for them, very far. but only nine days, and now i am here."

i know what i am supposed to say when someone tells me that he is running on empty because of a Very Important Project. i know what i am supposed to do when someone tells me that her commute was a nightmare and she's had the Worst Morning Ever. i'm supposed to draw my eyebrows together and up and tilt my head to the side, tsk my condolences, say it'll all be better soon. that's the line. i have to recite it so the performance can continue, so the relationship will function. there isn't a line for "my brother died." there's just the fall-back ad lib, "i'm sorry."

"i'm sorry," i said. she smiled. "he is seventy, was not young man." "but still," i said, "he was your brother." "yes," she said. "yes. my brother." she looked down at the floor, and then i did, too, because i didn't know what else to do. normal social involvement doesn't prepare you for these moments. they require special training, intensive courses and fieldwork, rigorous self-discipline. "i'm so sorry," i said, and stood up to leave.

as i was picking up my backpack she turned and reached toward me, took the hem of my cardigan between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. "i like your sweater," she said. "i like the pattern. so pretty. very nice." it was a white crocheted sweater with tatting in a vaguely leafy pattern, acrylic fabric, something i'd picked up from a thrift shop years ago. not fancy, but one of my favorites. i thanked her. she ran her thumb over the raised stitching, across the wide weave along the bottom edge. "my sister makes fun of it," i told her. "she says it's an old-lady sweater. but i love it."

the cleaning lady looked up, her eyes bright. "my sister, she make things, like this, everything. no one teaches her, but she's so smart, her mind, she can look at it and see this stitch and that stitch, and then she just does for herself, dit, dit, dit." she dropped the hem and made sharp sewing motions in the air. "not now, it's too hard for her eyes, they've gone bad. but when she was young, a girl, anything, she could do. she lived with my brother who died, and now she is so sad, she cries, and i cry for her, i try to help, but is just too bad." and she did cry for her, right there in my dim office, in her powder blue uniform dress with its wide white collar and her worn white reebok sneakers and her gold hoop earrings. just for a second she cried, and then she drew it back in. "i'm sorry," she said. "is so hard to be not with them at this time."

some relationships don't function, exactly, in and of themselves. instead they support functions, those of the parties immediately involved and other external goings-on, the way the subterranean foundation of the cn tower supports its sky pod, its spire. i hugged her, suddenly and tightly, let her hug me, and out of her poured a rapid broken story of her family, its entire history. i caught pieces, just pieces, even though i struggled for the whole, wanted so much to receive this small, wracked woman's every utterance, to hollow out a space in myself for her words and carry them like a new and eminently vital organ.

her brother had died in the car accident with his friend, who was not his brother but was, and her brother was not her brother but was, they had different mothers, his mother died when he was twelve and he had come into her family, two families but still one, different blood but still family. her father had died when she was not very old and her brother, the new not but still brother, had mourned privately and briefly and then become a man, become a father, took care of the children so the children could be children, and they were so close, all of them, so close [and she banged her fists together in front of her face to show me, like this, there was no space between]. her mother had lived a long time, her aunt too, but now they are gone and she misses them, so much she misses them, but she has family still, even though they are far away. she has to live here, she can't be with them, and it's so hard, it's very hard, but for everybody it is this way. her sister, now, she is alone, and she is so sad for her, everybody is too sad, but for everyone it is this way.

again she told me that her brother had been seventy years old. "but he was like forty-year-old man, so young in his soul, he took no medicine, was healthy and had life, but was accident, you know? sudden. is hard. my english is not good, but you understand me. he was old man, but in his heart, in my heart, in my head was my young brother, and i didn't think the time. seventy, but still."

i thought of my grandmother, at seventy-five, clapping her hands and squealing like a child when she spotted a cardinal on her front-porch railing. i thought of how no one had been more shocked by her death than my grandfather, who had seen her every day and watched her weaken over her last few months and still expected to go first, had been counting on it. "but still," i said, "your heart breaks. no one thinks it's the time. how can it ever be time?"

she hugged me again, apologized. "maybe i talk too much," she said, "but i need to get the words out of my chest. thank you. thank you. i'm sorry, i'm sorry, but thank you."

"don't be sorry," i said. "please don't ever be sorry. i wanted the words."

she held my hands between hers and smiled, wept, smiled. "i pray that your family and who you love is healthy and strong. i pray. do you have family here?"

i told her no, that my family is far away, and here in the city i am alone. she sighed. "is too sad. is too hard. but is this way for everyone." and i thought, is it? is it? do we talk about nothing and laugh at unfunny nothing and enforce the familiar laws of cocktail-party prattle and beige, unprovocative, impersonal nothing because beneath all of that everyone actually is too sad? even to speak of it, too sad? i think most people would tell you that's rubbish, but maybe this woman knows something we don't. and maybe all of the important words are being held back by people who don't think they have a right to speak them. i didn't know this woman's name, she didn't know mine. some working relationships aren't "relationships." sometimes those are the only relationships that work.

on the street, on the train, in the atm vestibule, the same conversations, nothing, nothing, nothing. and i'm staring at the floor, i'm staring at the ceiling, i'm staring at the walls and out the window and i'm listening. i'm listening for the sound of a person who wants to say something that resonates, i'm listening for someone who's trying to speak. you can hold my hand, maybe we'll say everything wrong but we'll understand, refreshments will not be served but you can wear any shoes you like. don't tell me what you do, i won't tell you what i do, and when it's over i'll thank you. and i'll be sorry. and i'll thank you.