Category Archives: Lame excuses

Goodbye Easy, Hello Happy

Recently a string of minor inconveniences has detoured me from getting any kind of daily exercise, and the combination of this with the holidays, a nasty recycled virus, and some extra responsibilities have left me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and now, according to my all-wise therapist, depressed. I am Patient Zero for mental illness. I already have SAD, ADD, and chronic Just Let Me Take a Nap-itis. Now I’m depressed. Really? Just now? I thought I was born depressed.

In all seriousness, this happens to me every winter to one extent or another. This winter, though, I have gained weight. More than the usual oh-no-its-time-to-give-up-the-second-glass-of-wine weight. This is a sneaky, perfidious weight. My sluggish mind acknowledges that action must be taken, but it is cold outside, and I’ve been playing phone tag with the trainer at the gym to get a new workout planned, and my jeans HURT me. I should take them off. There’s not a lot one can do without wearing pants, except nap. I should nap.

And so it goes. I just want things to be easy.

I was talking to a friend recently who was returning to the grind of medical school after a month off. He was remarking on how easily he had adapted to doing absolutely nothing, and how that scared him because he had some relatives who’d ballooned to four hundred pounds and had not left their house, had not left their sofa, in a decade. “It runs in my family!” he said, looking mildly horrified.

I don’t have to shake the family tree too hard to find my own versions of what I might become if I let things slide, but this only occasionally prevents me from practicing a slew of bad habits. This winter it’s getting harder and harder to find external motivations for doing what my internal motivators have decided to nap through. What if my internal motivators don’t wake up? What if they just go on a long, long holiday and leave no forwarding address? I can see the handwriting on the wall, folks. Inside me there is a fat, alcoholic, hoarding, crazy cat lady living on the public dole and the only thing I have to do to let her emerge is nothing at all.

I don’t want to have to exercise to be thin and fit. I don’t want to have to get up early to get anything done in a day. I don’t want to have to wrestle out all the terrible paragraphs onto a page before one beautiful sentence emerges. I don’t want to have to fight with an acquaintance to have her become a friend. I don’t want to have to embrace a lot of ugly truths about myself before I find the grace to extend forgiveness to someone else, and yet I’m greedy. I want to be, and have all these things.

I just need to say no to the Easy Button.

My therapist says to start with one thing at a time. Get back to exercising every day. I’ve promised him I will, so now I have to do it or lie to him next time. I hate the cold. I’ll blow my knee or shoulder out if I start a new workout without the trainer. The fat lady in me wants to take a nap immediately. But the greedy lady in me wins. I put on three complete layers of clothing and waddle out into the arctic freeze to do three miles.

It is positively blissful.

Support for Victims of Writers

Being a friend or relative of a writer is exceedingly difficult. Because we writers are shameless users of people, we view your lives through the narrow slits of our ambition. Not only is all you do and all you are fodder for our wicked profession, but all you don’t do and all you aren’t and never will be is equally at risk for exposure. We writers make things up and we make things believable, a particularly nasty combination for the innocent by-standers in our lives. Driven by larger than life egos, we believe that what we think, and what we imagine we might think, and what we think we might imagine all belongs on the printed page. Yes we put ourselves in your shoes daily, but only so that we might exploit you as material. We struggle mightily to put aside our quivering qualms about using you because we are chasing the high that comes like a shot of pure heroin when a reviewer calls us “fearless”, “honest”, “insightful”.

So what can a person do to shield themselves from the carnivorous pennings of a writer who lives close at hand? I’ve given some thought to this and would like to make several suggestions.

The best and most effective response might be to become a writer yourself. Wreak revenge in the very same way your writer has injured you, through the printed word. Be better, sharper, snappier than your writer. Become the competition.

Not up for the printed page? Gossip can be a powerful tool. Get on the telephone and talk about your writer to all their friends and relatives. Spread half truths about things they’ve written that you haven’t actually read but that you have on good authority from someone else is about you or someone you love.

Remind your writer that you are vigilantly fact checking everything they write. This is an especially pernicious weapon if your writer writes fiction. Saying things like “I didn’t actually say that,” drives fiction writers crazy.

Take offense on behalf of someone who doesn’t bother to take offense for themselves. This strategy works well if your writer has actually named someone, because they will have had to have gotten permission from that person. Be all about protecting that person from your writer. Find other people who will be outraged on behalf of your duped friend. Taking up this kind of cause makes people feel good about themselves, gives them a reason to get together and work up a righteous anger.

Help other people to recognize how your writer has alluded to them personally. Say things like, “How are you holding up after reading that short story?” Or, “You must be a saint to be able to smile after that last column.” Of course, if someone comes up to you and says this, you must smile and say “Oh I’d be silly to take any of that personally.”

If all else fails, and the writer in your life continues to pillage your life in order to attain fame and profit, you must simply stop living it. Do nothing. I mean this in the most literal terms. Be the most uninteresting, unengaged, lump of a person you can be. Granted it will be a sacrifice, but persevere long enough and your writer will either stop using you or stop being read. That’ll really show us.

What happened between me and Anne

This is not a paid advertisement, although it might as well be.

I had coffee in D.C. with a friend and afterwards he bought me a book by one of his favored authors, Anne Lamott. The book, called “Some Assembly Required,” is her journal of the first year of her grandson’s life. I’m reading it, savoring it, laughing out loud at it, and am now a fan of all things Anne Lamott. I fully intend to read everything she’s ever written, and will write in the future. I am now money in her back pocket.

I do this with writers, fall in love, gobble up their every word, pine for their next book. I am very faithful. Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, you will have me forever. But I feel a kinship with Anne Lamott. She is a writer. I am a writer. She is a messed up person of faith. I am a messed up person of faith. She is a grandmother. I am a grandmother. She is an anxious worrier with friends who impart great wisdom to her which she mostly ignores. I am not an anxious worrier, but my husband is, which is why I am determined to find ways to read parts of her books to him. He needs her. He needs the kind of friends she has. He has me, but he doesn’t appreciate me. Anne doesn’t always appreciate her friends either. Her die hard, last resort friend whom she only turns to when she is on the verge of spinning off into outerspace from anxiety, she calls Horrible Bonnie. Horrible, because Bonnie never worries.

I never worry either. I am very, very laid back. I am sure that my husband sometimes thinks of me as Horrible Lara. Worriers like to be validated in their worrying. Worriers worry about people who don’t worry. We make them crazy. We are icing on the cake of worries. They have to wring their hands doubletime to make up for all the ways in which we are failing to hold the universe together. But anyway, back to Anne Lamott.

I am sure that if I were to meet Anne, we would soon be best friends. How could she not feel the same way about me as I now feel about her? There is only one thing about Anne that bothers me. She has a more highly evolved work ethic than I do. She must have, because she is about my same age, but she has written over a dozen books and I have written just one. My one is a very good book, but still… Maybe Anne has written so many more books than I have because she is such a worrier and she worries that if she doesn’t write lots of books, people won’t want to be her friend. But I want to be her friend in spite of the fact that she’s written lots of books! So once she and I are friends, she can slow way down with all that book a year business. That can’t be good for her health.

The thing about Anne is, she writes not only novels, but also books about her life. Maybe I should be writing books about my life too. How hard can that be? You live a certain amount of time, then you write about it. It’s probably much easier than making up a bunch of people and then having to figure out what they’ve done with their lives before you can even write the book. Maybe, once Anne and I are friends, and seeing as how she already has so many books about her, she will want to write a book about me. I’m not that fascinating, but neither is she and she’s managed to write lots of funny books about herself. Anne would be able to spice me right up.

Anne lives in San Francisco and I live in Baltimore so that will make being best friends challenging, but it will be fun to fly back and forth to see each other. Being friends with Anne may actually improve my productivity as a writer. Although it’s hard to imagine how Anne even has time to live her life with all the writing she does. Anne is so prolific that it’s kind of annoying. I enjoy reading Anne’s books and they make me want to write more, and better, but Anne herself makes me feel kind of lazy. And who wants a friend who makes you feel like an underachiever? Anne’s problem is she just keeps on writing, even when the rest of us are stuck. Anne could make being stuck as a writer into a book.

Which is too bad, because I really think we could have been friends.