"Speak English"

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat.

Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan -- a creature that became more than was hoped for."

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leavning the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.

I have read that prologue more times than I can count, more times than I can remember, and it always makes me cry.

When people tell immigrants to "speak English, like real Americans" -- or any variation of that same small and ugly sentiment -- what I hear in their words is the fear of the ignorant. I hear a deep and defensive ignorance, a fear of admitting that ignorance, a fear that would crush newcomers more worldly and knowledgeable into the same cramped little horizons so that no one might stand taller or see more than they do.

I hear people who know very little and recognize, somewhere deep, that they know very little, and who are afraid to let others know more. Who have only one language, and fear the not understanding that comes with confronting the limits of one's own knowledge, and whose answer is not to try to learn more, but to take that learning away from others.

I feel this because they took that language and that learning away from me. I should have grown up bilingual. I should have grown up speaking Korean as easily as I do English, learning words and rhythm with the ease that comes only from hearing those words and feeling those rhythms while you're too young to understand anything but the sound.

But I didn't, because my mother, like so many immigrants, came here and was told that anything other than perfect American English was less than. Less than worthy. Less than really, truly American.

So she didn't teach it to me. Didn't risk a daughter who might have some kind of an accent, however slight, and come out sounding different to match looking different (which was hard enough, at times, because of course the same ignorance that prioritizes "talking American" also prioritizes "looking American" and defines that with the same crippled and crippling racism). And so I lost a knowledge that should have been my birthright before I was old enough to comprehend. I lost stories and histories that can't be told in another language without losing their essence, because ideas take on the shape of words and forcing them into other forms must, always, alter their meaning.

And my mother remains self-conscious, some forty years after coming to this country, that her own English is not perfect American English. Which is the other side of the cruelty, of course: that it imposes the shame of inadequacy on people who have done far more to accommodate themselves to a strange and alien culture than the people mouthing this idiocy can ever understand.

Nobody wants to struggle with language. Nobody wants to be limited in understanding the world they occupy. When I was ten years old my parents put me in a German school in Germany. I didn't speak German. I didn't speak much at all, actually, for the three years I was in that school, because while my classmates were unfailingly kind and encouraging, and Germany at that time period and in that social class had nothing like the grotesque chauvinism of "speak English," it is still unpleasant to be a bumbling foreigner who mangles syntax and enunciation and can't understand the simplest things. It is embarrassing. Breaking through that barrier requires a courage that few people possess, and that I certainly didn't have at that age. I likely wouldn't have it now.

But of course that's the point. The point of telling people to "speak English" is not, actually, to encourage them to speak English. It's to tell them "shut up, you aren't wanted here." It's to say "you don't belong, leave, go away." It is to denigrate their efforts as never good enough, their accents as badges of shameful difference, their children as somehow un-American if they know too much.

And it's to say "I have only this one language (barely), and I'm conscious of the deficiency (barely), and I do not wish to be reminded that someone else -- someone of a different color -- might know more. I do not wish to be made self-conscious of my ignorance. So I will take away the knowledge that you have, make you embarrassed about passing it down to your descendants, and do my utmost to ensure that your future generations remain as stupid as mine."

That is what that is. It is the perpetuation of ignorance because of inadequacy. It is the use of shame as a cudgel to separate others from their heritage and knowledge.

It is stupidity wielded as an imperative, and it deserves scorn.

Stories of Your Life and Others

(with apologies to Ted Chiang)

One of the things I've been wrestling with since last year's election is the problem of empathy, and of understanding, and of how to bridge the gap between lives.

I don't mean political views, although I think that exposure to other perspectives and personalities tends to get you there anyway. I mean lives.

There's been a lot of talk about how people live in self-segregated silos now, and don't talk to people on other sides of the political divide(s); there's talk about how exposure to diversity tends to reduce fear and divisiveness because people come to understand that We're All Human; there's plenty of earnest soul-searching about what each of us might do in answer to these challenges.

I think part of the answer must come in the form of each of us considering, and offering, some openness about our selves.

Who are you? Why are you? What are the things you wonder about in your idle moments? What are your little curiosities and whims? Hopes, fears? What are the textures and rhythms of your days, the things you see, the things you smell, the voices that you hear? What are the memories you carry each morning, the ones you wish you could bury, the ones you wish you could hold closer? The friends you wish you knew better, the passing strangers who pique your interest?

What are the stories of your life? The ones you'd tell about yourself, and the ones that others might tell in your passing?

I ask these questions because I'm curious. If you are reading this -- a stranger on the internet, a member of my own immediate family -- then I am genuinely curious what the answers are for you.

Who are you? Why are you? What is a story of your life? Not the story, because there's never only one. But a story.

Pick one out. Tell it. A small one, if you like, as brief as a haiku. Or a great one about an earthquake that shook your foundations. Whatever you like, whenever you like, as opaquely or transparently as you like.

But tell it honestly, or as close to honestly as any of us ever really can. Allow for uncertainty, for imperfection, for humanity and mistake. Avoid platitudes and easy endings and the just-add-water formulaic sentiments that come packaged in words that aren't your own. Tell your story. Open a window into a world that is deeply familiar to you, but unlikely to be known to others.

Because that's the value of the exercise. If we want to know each other better (and I think that we do, some of us), then we have to be willing to reveal something of our selves to the world. We have to share those stories for others to hear.

And they have to be real, not airbrushed clean of flaw. Which can be scary: you open yourself to the judgment of the world, and also to its indifference. You expose yourself for what you are: a person, an imperfect creature fumbling through an imperfect life. You confront the limitations of your skills as a writer and a thinker (or at least I do, constantly).

But it's the only way to learn, and the only way to help others learn what your life is like. Perhaps the only way to answer questions that you might not have considered in such bare terms.

These things are worth knowing. For yourself, for the world, and for those close to you. I don't think it's any accident that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his son; I think that's a useful way to sharpen your focus as to what matters and what you wish to say. I wish my own parents would write letters of their lives to me. Perhaps someday they will.

I can hope. And I can encourage you, as I would encourage them, to write such letters of your own life. Put them on the internet for all the world to learn, and put them aside for your children or parents or unknown strangers to read someday in the future, quietly, when they look back on these days and want to know who you were.

What were the stories of your life? Who were you? Why?

Wine Reviews

In this occasional feature I am going to post my on-and-off wine reviews.

I don't drink wine. I don't know the first thing about wine. The topic of Wine has always loomed before me as a dense and impenetrable thicket of fancy jargon and improbable descriptions and forbidding price tags. Nothing about it seemed the least bit inviting, and so I stuck with cocktails, which (to me) taste better, feel more approachable, and will get you drunk much faster with way fewer calories.

But for the manuscript that I'm currently supposed to be working on (this being the as-yet-nonexistent romance project), I'm going to finally have to get over myself and learn a little bit about wine, if only enough to write characters who also don't know very much but have occasionally tasted a glass or two.

So here are some of the things I've tried, and what I thought each time.


Chateau de Montfort Demi-Sec Vouvray (2015): a "young, bright, green-gold" lightly sweet white wine from the Loire Valley, made with chenin blanc grapes.

Tastes like a springtime full of promise in someone else's life. This person probably owns a bonnet and a basket full of flowers. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney animals sing in her footsteps. She is definitely blonde.


Warre's Warrior Finest Reserve Port (2015): a "classic, elegant, ruby-red" port*.

I don't actually like George Orwell's 1984 very much; in my opinion Orwell is a great essayist but not a great novelist, and that book in particular is, IMO, overrated as hell. The one part of 1984 I *do* like is when Winston finally gets his first taste of wine and, based on having read descriptions in books, he thinks it's going to be sweet and luscious "like blackberry jam" and in fact it is HORRIBLE and he can't believe the disappointment.

That is also how I feel about wine.

Anyway, had Winston tried Warre's Warrior port instead of whatever he actually did drink, he probably would have been a lot less disappointed, because this here is a candy-coated powerhouse slammer of a wine. It is sweet and luscious and also it will bionic elbow smash your face straight into the ground after a few cups.

I'm a fan.

(* -- fn: apparently Warre's is the oldest mark of port in the world, having been in business since 1670. I did not know this when I bought it, since I blind buy all my picks for this project; my selection process was more or less "well it's not $5 but it's also not $150, cool, let's go with it.")


Antoine Moueix La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes (2013): a "yellow-gold dessert wine with notes of apricot and honey." 70% semillon, 30% sauvignon.

Have you ever dug around in the very back of your pantry and found a can of tomatoes that expired three years ago, but you're desperate and hungry RIGHT NOW and you figure canned goods are okay for basically forever, so you go ahead and pop the can and use it to make something anyway? And it has that really weird acid-y metallic aftertaste that makes you realize, too late, that you just made a terrible life decision?

I think of that as Zombie Apocalypse Aftertaste, in honor of all the zombie videogames where people are forever scrounging precious precious 20-year-old cans of tomato sauce and beans. All their food probably tastes that way. They probably think it's awesome.

La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes tastes that way too. It's fine until you get to the aftertaste and then it's all "woah wiat waht."

I dunno if this was a bum bottle or a bum year or a bum brand (could be any of those things, this bottle was $15 but other years of La Fleur go for > $40), but it was Not Good.

Appropriate for toasting your survival in the zombie apocalypse, otherwise I'd say give it a pass.


Bersano Brachetto d'Acqui (non-vintage, like it explicitly says NON-VINTAGE on the listing because they want to be real clear that this is a wine that doesn't get a number): a "sweet, frothy, sparkling wine inflected with strawberries and rosewater."

Straddles the line between red and rose. In the glass it's red, but spiritually it's cotton-candy pink, so I'm gonna call it a rose and y'all can correct me if that's wrong. (It is not wrong.)

This is a really fun wine, which is not at all the same thing as saying it's a *good* wine, because it is not. It's a powderpuff pink wine in a powderpuff pink cashmere sweater and powderpuff pink marabou heels, and if you tried to subject her to a serious analysis she would demand you stop this car RIGHT NOW, I'M GETTING OUT, because clearly you'd be making fun of her in the most mean-spirited way.

There is nothing serious about this wine. It's lightweight and low-alcohol and fizzy and pretty perfect for a summer night out grilling, because if you don't want to roast marshmallows with the kids then you can have a glass of this stuff instead and it'll be pretty much the same thing.

I think I'm going to write a wide-eyed naive minor character into this manuscript solely so that I can have her mistake a Brachetto sparkly for Champagne. Seems like a reasonable mistake to make at 17, whether you're having your first drink in 1933 or 2017. This is what Champagne *should* be, at least when you're 17.


Barao de Vilar Porto (2011): a "hugely dense wine with immense ripe black fruit and dusty tannins."

I was pretty excited for this one because it was a moderately expensive port (at $70, the second-priciest wine I've bought for this project) and got a rating of 96/100 from Wine Enthusiast magazine, which means it's "top rated" so I was all like "sweet, this one's gonna be AWESOME" and I put it aside to crack open after my Third Circuit argument.

you can see where this is headed

This was my biggest disappointment thus far. It is worse than the Zombie Apocalypse bottom-shelf Sauternes, which I actually bought with the full and deliberate knowledge that it was going to be a bottom-shelf dud. This one I expected to be good, and it probably [i]is[/i] good (I dunno, I'll ask some of my friends who actually know things for second opinions), but it is not good to me personally.

Let me rewind here: So way back when, a long long time ago, I used to be in the Conservative Party in college (yeah yeah I know). This was partly because I thought it would be an interesting sociological experiment (WHO EVEN ARE THESE PEOPLE) and partly because I had the hots for this one guy who I'm pretty sure was slightly afraid of me, which of course only made me vastly more into him.

So anyway I was the only non-white person in the Conservative Party and they had all these amazingly hilarious meetings and club rituals that are exactly what you're probably imagining they are (if you're imagining a bunch of dopey 19-year-olds hanging out in Mory's Temple Bar wearing velvet-trimmed smoking jackets and slippers while puffing on cigars and drinking bizarre concoctions out of a double-handled silver chalice then yep, bingo, you've nailed it).

And there was this one dude who was the absolute living embodiment of the Unfortunate Facial Hair Libertarian and he looooved to drink port and bloviate on his political beliefs and hit on girls (whom he clearly expected to be impressed by the first two things), and he was not good at any of those things, and also even as a dopey 19-year-old it was evident to me that libertarians were possibly the most willfully clueless political alignment you could be.

I was not a big fan of that dude. I was also not a big fan of the port he liked to ask girls to sample.

Unfortunately for the version of me that exists some fifteen years later, it turns out that guy had terrible taste in politics but pretty good taste in port (both of which I will attribute to his parents, because he had nothing developed of his own), and Barao de Vilar Porto (2011) is a straight sensory flashback to me trying to fend off a 19-year-old legacy admission with bad facial hair in the sample room of a Connecticut cigar bar.

PASS.

Melania, Nude Modeling, and Misogyny

Yesterday I put up a Facebook post that said this:

I deeply dislike the line of criticism that argues that Melania isn't "classy" because she took some nudie pics as a model.

The Birth of Venus is a nudie pic. The Venus de Milo is a nudie sculpture. Marilyn Monroe was the first-ever Playboy centerfold. Those are all pretty classy things! (Also, I will fight you if you want to argue about Marilyn.)

There are other criticisms one can make of Melania (although, frankly, I'm not a huge fan of those, either), but the nude modeling one particularly annoys me because hey guys, we're supposed to be the enlightened feminist body-positive side out here, and that there is some straight-up misogynist prudery.

Defining "classy" as something that exists in opposition to art or photography or (gasp!) the female body is, in my opinion, not great. I'm not surprised when the right does it; that's what they do. I am, however, pretty disappointed whenever I see it from the crew that's supposed to be about smashing the patriarchy. Because that right there? That is holding patriarchy up high.

Not too surprisingly, it turned out to be a pretty hot-button topic that got a bunch of comments and some spirited discussion. DJT and the people around him are a topic about which lots of people feel strongly; the tangled knot of sex/nudity/decency is another topic about which lots of people feel strongly. For the most part, I felt the discussion was thoughtful, insightful, and as measured as any quasi-political discussion can reasonably be these days, although a few times I had to clarify that my intention was not to defend Melania as a person (my purpose with this discussion was and is to use her as an interesting and challenging prism through which to approach, question, and examine these ideas, not to defend her life choices or hold her up as a figure of admiration), and as with any fast-paced conversation on the internet, a few of the finer points probably got lost in the avalanche all around.

But, again, for the most part I thought it was a good and useful discussion, especially given that the original post was semi-flippant and not too obviously a springboard for a serious examination of these issues. I think that the intersections between modesty and frankness, "decency" and how its varied interpretations intersect with feminism, celebration vs. exploitation of female sexuality, etc., are not discussed often or candidly enough for many people to have clearly separated out why they feel as they do, what they think the salient differences really are between art and porn, moral and immoral, "classy" and degraded/-ing, and so on. Almost everyone has strong feelings about at least some of the issues tangled up in that ball, but few people have really taken the time to figure out why.

And since DJT and his coterie are very public figures, we're all familiar with them and all have at least a basic idea of where the conversation might begin. Accordingly, the current First Lady provides (in my opinion) a valuable opportunity to discuss some of these ideas.

Anyway, things trucked along for a while and then one particular comment thread took a turn that just happened to hit on a lot of the reasons that I made the original post in the first place (namely, my belief that stigmatizing women's sexuality has a lot of negative ripple effects for a lot of people [mostly, although not exclusively, women] throughout society, and that for this reason it is advisable for us all to consider carefully what we wish to criticize in this sphere and why).

I'm indebted to this commenter, because when I saw this comment I wanted to go "YES! THAT'S IT! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS TRYING TO PUSH BACK AGAINST HERE." But I didn't, because it was around 4 am at that point and I was pretty brain-blasted after a long day at work and I had to take the dogs out. So, instead, I filed it away to write a blog post about later, and now here we are.

Here's the comment that struck me so hard (lightly edited to remove the first and last sentence and insert some paragraph breaks, otherwise reproduced as originally posted):

You can't have it both ways. You can't drive down the street without seeing young girls in shorts up the crack of their ass, boobs hanging out and 4 lbs of makeup. You have music calling them bitches and whores. Magazines that pray upon their opinions about their appearance. We have young girls getting pregnant that are 12 years old and others giving blow jobs. Our society sexualize women from the day they enter the world. 

Most of us would prefer to be valued for character, our heart, our mind. We rant and rave because we are paid less, our ideas and intellect aren't valued. We don't want to be just sex objects. We don't want that to be what young girls learn or how they see themselves. On the other hand you have women like Melania who help teach those young girls exactly what is important. If you are sexy enough, pretty enough, crafty enough, and know how to use your body then men will want you. And if men want you they will take care of you. You can try but you can't separate Melania from that message. 

We all know how this works. We've all had the doe-eyed, big boobed nitwit at the office. Melania isn't some free spirit forward thinking feminist. She's got the oldest game in the book. Sex sells and as long as there is testosterone it always will.

What strikes me most immediately here is how strongly and (in my reading, although I might well be mistaken) unconsciously the argument grants the continued and unchallenged existence of male supremacy in this world, and therefore proceeds to the conclusion that the "correct" course for women is, presumably (and, again, in my reading) to desexualize themselves. I want to argue against that, but I also want to take a moment to pick apart what I think are the essential underpinnings of this worldview.

The "young girls" who put themselves on display are described in terms that portray them as both victims (prematurely sexualized, manipulated into adopting roles and postures they don't fully understand and whose consequences they cannot appreciate) and sirens (painted and underdressed "with boobs hanging out"). The possibility that they might simply be experimenting with and play-acting at adult roles (as preteens and adolescents are wont to do, and as is necessary for eventual adulthood), as innocently and safely as a girl trying out her mother's high heels and lipstick in her own bedroom, doesn't seem to exist in this scenario. Instead, the outcome that's contemplated is that 12-year-olds will get pregnant and give blowjobs. Wear revealing clothing --> turn into a slut, get knocked up.

Curiously, men are absent and yet ever-present in this scenario. Music calls these girls "bitches and whores." Magazines prey on their insecurities. Our society sexualizes girls from inappropriately young ages. But the fact that (predatory) men do have to be involved somewhere for pregnancies and blowjobs is never called out. The focus is not on them, but on the girls for inappropriately expressing their sexuality. Implicitly, the girls are condemned for not doing enough to protect themselves, or for playing with fire and getting burned, but the fact that the "fire" in this scenario has its own moral agency is not contemplated or questioned. It just is, an elemental and eternal fact of the universe, a natural hazard against which girls have to be prepared to defend themselves (by reining in their own displays and presenting an appropriate demureness, but not by challenging the men around them).

The next two paragraphs exhibit similar assumptions. If women present themselves as sexy, that is the reason they're paid less, their ideas are devalued, their worth reduced to sexual appeal. The danger is other women -- and, specifically, other women's sexuality -- not the men evaluating them. The possibility that (predatory) men might not be the arbiters of a woman's worth, or might choose to evaluate their employees fairly -- maybe your boss is a woman! maybe he's a guy who's just a decent person! -- is not entertained. The world is presented as a zero-sum game in which scheming beauties (who are simultaneously empty-headed, "big-boobed nitwits") win by manipulating men at the expense of the plainer but more skilled.

(As a footnote, this also sets up a no-win scenario for pretty women. If a woman happens to be "doe-eyed" and "big-boobed" but is also serious and skilled, where does she fall? Does she, like Emma Watson, become an illustration of the proposition that "our culture cannot handle a woman who is both sexual AND serious"?)

In my reading, then, that comment exhibits a deeply misogynistic worldview. Which is not to say that it's entirely inaccurate in its observations. Girls do get sexually exploited at disturbingly young ages, and there are workplaces that still run on a Helen Gurley Brown-esque, early-'60s model of overt sexual favoritism. Not many (and certainly not any with a half-competent HR department), but they exist.

But, by and large, we recognize these things as unacceptable, and we recognize that the crux of the problem does not lie with the women. I was sexually assaulted on a public bus when I was 10; it wasn't because I was made up or dressed alluringly (I was an extremely plain child, I'd even say "grubby"), but because a random middle-aged dude on a public bus was a pervert. There are workplaces that place more emphasis on women's appearances than their job skills, but generally we recognize that the problem isn't with the short-skirted secretary but her boss.

And -- this is where we circle back to my original post and original point -- I think the best curative to these toxic scenarios is not to condemn the women or tell them to repress their sexuality, but to help them explore and understand themselves without stigma or shame, and also to place condemnation where it accurately belongs: not on a 12-year-old girl experimenting with makeup and clothes, but on the man who thinks it's acceptable to put his penis down her throat. Not on women who were born with big breasts or like to wear false eyelashes, but on the people (men and women) who think that appearance gives them license to devalue those women's ideas and intellect.

My belief is that openness and frankness and tearing away the shame is both kinder and more effective social policy. Broadly speaking, it empowers women, keeps them safer, and breaks some of the levers that are used to hold them down.

Girls are going to experiment. It's part of growing up. The best thing we can do for them is not yank away the lipstick (if you don't get your beginner makeup mistakes out of the way when you're 12, you might wind up making them when you're 22, which -- take it from me -- is way worse), but to give them a space to explore and experiment safely, with clear and calm parental guidance that gives them the freedom to learn without abandoning them to fall too far. We would do better, too, to arm them with the knowledge (about contraception, about STDs, about the emotional and mental health aspects of sexuality) that they need to safeguard themselves. Ignorance never keeps anyone safe; it only makes them easier prey.

And girls are going to make mistakes, as we all make mistakes, because that too is part of life and how we learn. I think destigmatizing those mistakes goes a long way toward neutralizing their corrosive impact, though. So much of the shame and moral panic about women's sexuality is used to coercive effect: the high-school girl who gets blackmailed with her nudie pics; the one-time porn starlet who feels locked into a job she no longer wants because, having been made "dirty," she feels like she can't do anything else; the stereotypical but too-frequently-real rape victim who blames herself because she wonders if wearing a short dress and getting a little too drunk meant she was asking for it.

It's all part and parcel of the same thing. It is all shame and stigma used to strip women of agency, cow them into compliance, and reinforce the patriarchy.

And I will yell about it all day every day forever, if need be.

Pride and Process

Something I've been kind of poking on-and-off at is what it means to live a meaningful life, and how one defines that, and how one gets there. I'm going to poke clumsily at some aspects of that question in this blog, and yes, I'm aware that it's clumsy, and no, this isn't meant to be universal. It's just me talking through some things that have worked for me and that may or may not work for anyone else.

Today, pride and purpose and process, beginning with two observations:

(1) One of the things that happens when people learn that you are "a writer" (meaning, for present purposes, someone who's had one or more books traditionally published) is that lots of them will confide that they also wish to be "a writer" and ask how you achieve that. And the standard answer (which is, again, simultaneously facile, true, and misleading) is that "if you write, you are a writer."

(2) One of the things that college admissions people supposedly look for is a student who demonstrates sustained passion for one or two endeavors, rather than superficial engagement in a bunch of scattershot activities. For a long time I really didn't understand what that was all about. Now I do, and I wish I could go back and tell my seventeen-year-old self the cheat code to that particular minigame, which confounded me for the longest time.

Anyway, the reason I bring up those two points is this: they're both founded on the fact that, paradoxically, you get much better results and will be much happier in life if you focus on the process rather than the outcome. On doing, rather than on having done.

Staking your sense of self-worth on whether or not you can get a book published is a pretty common pitfall. I mean, I get it; when my first book was out on submission, I really really really wanted somebody to buy it. But, for me, it was never like not getting published was going to destroy my identity as a person. The point wasn't to be A Published Author. The point was to try and write a story that I could have some (perverse, masochistic) fun writing. The point was the process, not the outcome. Write, and you will be a writer. Facile, but true.

Similarly, what I eventually realized (much too late to do me any good, but hey) those college admissions officers were looking for was the same thing: a person driven by the joy of doing rather than the perceived status of "having done"; someone who was engaged by the process of discovering and practicing and the pleasure of doing a thing for its own sake.

Sometimes this means you get really good at a thing. Sometimes it doesn't. In either case, that isn't the point. Gerald Mazorati has written movingly about the pleasures of

improving at a demanding skill or set of skills — a craft, a discipline. I have in mind something that will take years to get proficient at, something that there is a correct way of doing, handed down for generations or even ages, and for which there is no way for you to create shortcuts with your cleverness or charm. Playing the cello, maybe. Or cabinetry. Or, in my case, tennis, serious tennis.

Mazorati took up tennis in his mid-50s. He knew going in that he was never going to be great at the sport, and he found that knowledge freeing:

Here’s a blessing of late-middle age (and there are few): You will not be inhibited from improving by the perceptions of others. No one is paying attention to you! Haven’t you noticed? And unlike a pro athlete or master-level practitioner, you will not be committing to anything — be it swimming or judo or open-sea sailing — that you have either any serious talent for or the body to get great at. You are not young, and learning and improving at a sport or activity will not make you feel young in any physical way. In fact, you will feel more consciously and intensely to be of a certain age, which I happen to think is a benefit.

[...]

Which brings us to the beauty of a disciplined effort at improvement and, I think, the only guaranteed benefit of finding something, as I found in tennis, to learn and commit to: You seize time and you make it yours. You counter the narrative of diminishment and loss with one of progress and bettering. You spend hours removed from the past (there is so much of it now) and, in a sense, the present (and all its attendant responsibilities and aches), and immerse yourself in the as yet. In this new pursuit of yours, practice is your practice: It comes to determine the way you eat and sleep and shape your days. It is not your life, but one of the lives that make up your life, and the only one for which looking ahead, at least for a little while longer, is something done without wistfulness or a flinch.

Process, not outcome.

There are several excellent benefits to approaching life in this way. One, as Mazorati noted, is that "you counter the narrative of diminishment and loss with one of progress and bettering" -- true not only in the context of aging, but whenever one might be tempted to take the measure of one's own life and find it wanting. It might not be great today; it can, at least in this specific context (and really, that's enough to sustain hope) be better tomorrow. Another, also as he noted, is that it affords a certain discipline and structure that can be invaluable to those feeling directionless. You are on a journey, and that pulls you forward; you must master certain skills along the way, and that gives you purpose.

It teaches you resilience. You learn that failure stings mightily, but that it's survivable. A failure is something that happens, but it is not who you are.

And you learn that there's a deep satisfaction in attaining the small triumphs and moments of beauty that are earned along the way. It is satisfying to work at something and come out of it with a delicious pie or a cleverly knitted hat or an improbable, beautiful shot in a tennis game. It's satisfying in a way that only comes out of repeated failures and struggles. It isn't really the pride of a perfect performance I'm talking about here -- no pie I ever bake is going to be as perfect as one of Magpie Bakery or the Hungry Pigeon's; pros are pros for good reason -- but of seeing your own personal improvement and understanding, for yourself, what it took to get there.

Focusing on process takes you down unexpected, interesting, and occasionally rewarding roads. Sometimes you do get good at a thing, and sometimes that opens up new opportunities. Even if you don't, the pursuit of process often introduces you to whole new worlds of teachers and fellow students, of unimagined expertise in the most arcane subjects, of new perspectives on the world and previously unseen connections between facts and ideas. You find a community bound together by enthusiasms, and that's worth a lot in this atomized world.

The outcomes become secondary, almost unimportant. They're markers of where you've been, but they aren't the endpoints of the journey. And the opinions of others, outside of your coaches and knowledgeable colleagues (which are valued for information and not for judgment), are of no consequence at all.

A funny thing happens once you get to a place you've been headed for a long time: you crest the hill, you reach the landmark, and... you find that the trail keeps going on the other side. If you're focused on process, this is an excellent development: there's more to do! Farther to go! But if you're focused on outcome, it can be crushing: there is not and will never be an end. Not really. There's always another mark, a little higher and harder, just a tiny bit out of reach.

And that's the paradox of pride and process. If you're focused on the journey, on learning and bettering yourself as its own pleasure rather than to reach some external objective, you're more likely to reach your goals. You are, in short, more likely to do something worth being proud of.

But you also become less dependent on that. You realize that the external markers are just that, external and arbitrary and ultimately unimportant. You become a person who can be proud of achievements, but who doesn't need to be.

It's like a koan in a kung-fu movie: to achieve pride, you must forsake pride.

But it's true, or at least it was for me.

Asking Your Partner to Do Boudoir

So let's say you're a guy who's been reading about boudoir pics (perhaps at THIS VERY BLOG), you find the idea intriguing, and you start to think that it might be nice to have some similar pictures of your special lady friend.

Today we're going to talk about how you might suggest that in a supportive and nonpressuring way. (Yes, that's right, it's another Unsolicited Relationship Advice post! Come for the racy pics and DJT rants, stay for the unsolicited relationship advice.)

I'm going to start with two baseline assumptions: (1) you already have a good relationship, and your lines of communication are open and clear; and (2) you have a good guess that she'd be receptive to the idea, or at least wouldn't be adamantly opposed to it.

If neither of those things is true, then this probably isn't the best time to go pushing for a boudoir shoot. As I've talked about before, boudoir pics frequently represent a significant gift of trust (not to mention a significant financial outlay, at least if you're using a good and established photographer), and if your relationship isn't currently as secure as it could be, then it may not be reasonable to ask for something that big. Meanwhile, if you happen to know that the lady would definitely not be open to the idea -- maybe she's extremely modest, or uncomfortable with her body at the moment, or this just plain isn't her style -- then, again, this might not be the time.

Boudoir isn't for everyone. It doesn't have to be for everyone. And with this as in all things: her body, her choice. Respect your partner's wishes, and don't push for something she truly does not want to do.

But assuming that she's curious and potentially into the idea, you shouldn't have to do a hard sell. What you might have to do is offer gentle encouragement, which I'd suggest structuring as follows:

1. Tell her why you want pictures of her.

This might be a hard one, because a lot of guys are unaccustomed to expressing their desires frankly and with sensitivity. The culture of Our Dumb Society hands you a whole lot of vocabulary about objectifying women at an emotional distance, but doesn't provide much help when it comes to earnestly and honestly telling your partner "you turn me on, and this is why."

To some extent, you're going to have to chart your own path here, and it's natural to feel self-conscious and awkward about that. It's totally normal to have flashbacks to the time you bared your heart to Mindy in ninth grade and got it stomped into paste and resolved to never ever do that again. Confessing your desires and being vulnerable -- even a little bit, even with a degree of self-protective irony -- is hard. It is!

But it's also really, really important. If you want her to do this for you, then you have to do this for her. You have to offer a little bit of vulnerability in turn and tell her, openly and with specificity, that the idea of having pictures of her turns you on, and why, and how.

There are a million impersonal beautiful women who are naked on the internet. You can look at them anytime. But there is only one lady you're asking to do this right now. So what you need to do is think hard and honestly about what makes her special, and why her pictures would be uniquely treasured, and why you want to see her, above and beyond all the other women in the world, in this light.

Then you have to tell her that. Many (read: all) women are self-conscious about perceived imperfections in their bodies, so this is where you really need to bolster her confidence that yes, she's attractive; yes, she's desirable; yes, you want to see her in pictures, and no one else in the world will do. Write it in a card if you can't work up the nerve to say it aloud (Valentine's and anniversaries are good for this, especially in combination with gifts as suggested below), or say it aloud if you can't work up the nerve to write it down -- whichever's easier. But tell her. Make it personal. Make her feel special, and make her understand why it's special to you.

2. Do the legwork for her.

Some women prefer to take charge and control their own projects from start to finish, and if your partner happens to be of this mindset, then you can safely skip this step. But if you're looking to make this as easy and stress-free as possible, then one of the ways you can do that is to look up boudoir photographers in your area. Figure out what's in your budget, who's got solid reviews, whose style you like, and whose aesthetic seems most likely to flatter your lady friend. If you know that she's more likely to be comfortable shooting with an all-female team, look for that.

Then, when you're ready to move forward with the proposal, you can point her to one or two of your top choices. Be ready to discuss why you picked out those photographers, and what in their portfolios made you think that they'd be able to put her at ease and portray her in the best light. Go through the samples together, if you like: this gives you an opportunity to talk about what she is and isn't comfortable showing, to get her thoughts on different poses and outfits (if you're thinking of buying lingerie in the future, listen carefully to what she likes), and to tell her (again! you can never do this too often!) how you'd like to see her.

3. Provide some inspiration.

Again, this might not be a step you need to spend much time on (if she prefers to work independently or wants to make it a surprise, step on out of the way), but if you think your partner would find it helpful, you might offer a little bit of inspiration as to her props or outfit.

I don't recommend laying out the entire ensemble and storyboarding her whole shoot for her -- it's supposed to be about what she likes and how she wants to be seen, and it's not for you to dictate her whole shoot -- but if you happened to buy an extra-nice piece of lingerie for Valentine's, or a special necklace for an anniversary, it might be a romantic gesture to ask for its inclusion. If the purpose of these pictures is not only to commemorate how lovely she looks, but her personal and irreplaceable importance to you, then including signifiers of your relationship in the shoot can add to the romance.

Besides, I'm a big advocate of building sentimental value into pieces by using them as touchstones as often as possible, e.g. giving a lovely trinket one year and then including that gift in a personal photograph the next year. It's a way to remember who you were at that moment in time, and how you felt about each other. Including the object as a symbol can help anchor the sentiment.

4. Offer to cover costs.

Good boudoir pics ain't cheap. You're paying for the time and talent of a photographer who's spent a lot of years building up those skills, and you're probably also paying for a makeup artist and hairstylist to help those pictures look as good as they possibly can. The investment is well worth it (really, you do not want to be the one who kicks off the Pinterest Fails of boudoir pics), but it is an investment.

So cover it. If you want the pics, don't ask her to pay for them. More than that, make a gift of the shoot. As I've discussed in prior posts (and there are lots of other accounts on the internet that will back me up on this), doing a boudoir shoot can be a great experience in building up a woman's confidence and helping her explore and embrace herself as an unabashedly sensual, beautiful creature -- but many women don't feel comfortable spending that much money on themselves, and for something that they might perceive as vain or frivolous.

If she doesn't have to pay for it, then she doesn't have to worry about that. Making a gift of the shoot removes both the financial pressure and the emotional pressure of having to worry about whether she's vain for wanting to do such a thing. Instead, her participation -- and the pictures -- becomes her reciprocal gift to you.

The flipside of this, however, is that I don't recommend springing for a shoot before you've discussed it with your partner and cleared it as something she really wants to do. This is not something I'd recommend as a surprise gift. If it's really not her thing, then she's stuck with a choice between doing something that she doesn't really want to do (and, spoiler, the pictures never come out looking great if the woman doesn't really want to be there, because confidence and enthusiasm are pretty key to boudoir), or potentially wasting a lot of money.

I think it's much better to wait until you've talked it over, settled on a photographer, and figured out a reasonable timetable for when she wants to do this (maybe she isn't totally happy with some aspect of her appearance right now and wants to take a couple of months to work on that first; for example, I totally ruined my nails recently by stripping them with acetone polish remover way too often, and it's probably going to be a couple of months before I have anything but stubby finger nubs going). Then you can go ahead and buy the gift shoot. But please, please don't lock her into anything by putting money down before you've talked.

And that concludes today's episode of Unsolicited Relationship Advice from a (Not-Yet-Existent) Romance Writer.

Some Thoughts on Valentine's

The other day, a friend of mine -- a relatively recent immigrant from a country where Valentine's Day isn't really a Thing -- asked me what the deal was with this peculiar American holiday.

For a minute I thought about giving him the cynical, flip answer: that it's a fake commercial holiday invented to keep jewelers and chocolate manufacturers afloat. But that isn't what I actually believe (you'll be shocked, shocked! to know that it's a bit wordier and more complicated than that) and also I didn't know that it would really answer his question, so I begged off and said I'd blog about it sometime.

So here is what I really believe: that Valentine's Day is a stress test for relationships, and also that it's an interesting insight into what happens when you ask (mostly) men to perform emotional labor within those relationships.

A stress test, in the medical context, usually means asking the patient to undergo some mild physical exertion in order to put a little extra stress on the heart and thereby reveal problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If you're healthy, a stress test is nothing. But if you're not, it can be alarming -- and not infrequently, you might have thought you were just fine, only to discover that, if you subject the system to a little extra demand, there's something amiss after all.

That's what V-Day is to relationships. The extra pressure of societal expectations to Do Something Romantic and the near-universal human temptation to compare your situation to your friends' and peers' creates a little extra stress that isn't otherwise there (sure, there are other stereotypical romantic occasions like anniversaries, but they don't all fall on the same day for everyone and thus don't impose the same pressure to compare; you'd never go to a restaurant and know that every other couple at every other table was celebrating their anniversary too).

If your relationship is healthy, your communications are clear, and your expectations are aligned, V-Day is easy, even fun. It's an excuse to do something nice for each other, or to affirm your own relationship by making fun of everybody else doing stuff.

But if your relationship is new and fragile, then it's hard to know how much stress it can withstand. And if you're not in great shape and there are deeper underlying problems, they're likely to buckle and crack under the strain.

It's these uncertainties that make V-Day as profitable as it is. It isn't the people in secure relationships who make V-Day profitable (the ones who like doing stuff spend money on each other anyhow; the ones who don't care about it aren't going to be pressured into dropping dollars on a holiday they perceive as fake). It's the insecure ones. People spend money on V-Day because they're trying to buy strength into their relationship.

This isn't meant to be a criticism, btw. Sometimes it's actually a very good idea, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it's inevitable (if you've only been dating someone for a couple of months, you can't have as strong a relationship as someone who's been happily married for 20 years; you simply don't have that reservoir of shared time). But the fact is, people who only spend money on V-Day are doing that because they're trying to buy what they don't already have, and what is not actually possible to purchase directly.

Which brings me to my second point: V-Day is pretty interesting in what it says about how difficult it is for (some) American men to perform emotional labor in relationships.

The general dynamic in most relationships (and let me underline that it's general, and I know there are plenty of exceptions, but generally I still think this is true) is that the woman does most of the emotional labor, by which I mean that she's the one who is primarily responsible for maintaining social connections, being "fun," and "keeping the romance alive." More often than not, it's women who arrange social plans for the couple, who write the thank-you notes and everyday emails to their friends and family, who stereotypically make the candelit dinners and wear the expensive lingerie and make sure their toenails are painted and don't "let themselves go" and all of that.

(Again: I realize I'm generalizing. I realize that social norms are, however slowly, changing. I realize there are plenty of men, especially young men, who take an active role in these things. That's great! But by and large, for decades, women in This Dumb Society have been conditioned by TV shows and movie rom-coms and well-meaning peers to feel like they have an obligation to be pretty and vivacious and maintain the relationship's romance as part of their feminine role [and if you don't do it, you know you aren't doing it, and you probably made that choice intentionally vs. doing it automatically without a moment's awareness that it was anything other than "normal"], and by and large, men have not been subject to the same pressures in the same way.)

V-Day is the one day a year where that expectation is reversed. The expectation on V-Day is that the man will be the one who does the primary romantic gesture, whether that's taking his girlfriend out on the town or bringing home a box of chocolates or surprising his wife with a diamond necklace or whatever. It's pretty explicit in the way this holiday is marketed that the man is supposed to do something romantic on Valentine's.

And that is really interesting to me, because the main thing you see as a result is that lots and lots of men have no idea how to be romantic. They just don't have the emotional vocabulary for it. They don't have any independent conception of what this is supposed to mean or how you would even articulate it.

So, lacking a real ability to express themselves on a deeper level, they buy the pre-packaged sentiment. They let greeting cards do their talking, and they let chocolates do their courting, and they let more expensive presents stand in for any deeper sentiments that they might want to share. And what should be a thoughtful and individualized expression of a unique and special relationship with a unique and special person instead gets transmuted, literally, into a mass-produced commodity. Whatever you wanted to say is trammeled and limited by the options available on the shelf, and many men never even consider that they might want to express themselves in some other way.

And then -- and this is really interesting to me too -- there's a certain resentment, half joking but half not, about doing even that, because doing emotional labor is hard (it's work! that's why they call it "labor"!) and it's frequently not something guys are accustomed to doing, and when you have to do something hard and unfamiliar on cue because Society Says So, then the natural unexamined reaction is to look for a way out of it.

It's so common to hear guys joking about how they "have to" do something for Valentine's that I think even guys who want to do things often feel obligated to shrug it off, like they're only doing it because they have to. There's a lot of joking about how much money you have to spend, or how you totally almost forgot about it because lol who pays attention to Valentine's, or how you forgot and your girlfriend never let you hear the end of it and women, so emotional and needy, amirite?!

The upshot of all this is that men often go to their significant others with some version of "honey, V-Day is a fake commercial holiday anyway, you don't really need a dumb card and a box of drugstore chocolates, do you?" And women feel a pressure to be agreeable, to not be emotional-and-needy, to signal that they're easy to get along with and not shrewish or demanding, so plenty of them will laugh and shrug it off and say "no, of course not!"

Some of them mean that. Some of them don't. Lots of them say it and think they mean it and then wonder, later, why they feel unappreciated when everybody knows that Valentine's is a fake holiday and they genuinely don't care for flowers or diamonds. And then their boyfriends or husbands might wonder why they're being frozen out when they talked about this and everybody agreed not to do anything for Valentine's.

The answer is that it isn't about the cards or the chocolates. It's about signifying to the woman that she's appreciated, and that the relationship is worth putting time and effort (and, yes, sometimes money -- but money is the paradoxically cheapest option here; time and effort count for more) into. It's about recognizing that this holiday is an externally imposed social ritual of no significance in and of itself (so by all means, skip out on it if that's what you both want to do), but it is also and because of that a stress test for your relationship, and ignoring it may mean ignoring a valuable early warning that something deeper and more serious is at risk.