I Am So Popular: You Are Here

Last Saturday, I was lucky enough to have momentarily forgotten my self-imposed boob ban. I was out at a beautiful ranch just past Dripping, on hand to perform a wedding. We had a rehearsal early in the day, all of us in our regular clothes, and I noted the best man had a t-shirt with a picture of an astronaut on it. I looked closer. The slogan: Not All Dreams Come True.

I instantly loved that shirt, and quizzed him on what the message meant to him. Was it supposed to be cynical? It was, he said. But to me this message was freedom in a simple statement. Permission to slow down, abandon goals, give shit up. And, my life being serendipity central, the sentiment also dovetailed nicely with other thoughts I’d been waltzing and moshing with earlier in the week.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. And again and again and again. My life is too busy. I mean it is insanely, comically, tragically, wildly, ridiculously too busy. Of course we can chalk this up to the fact that I AM SO POPULAR. But let’s look at other contributing factors. One is that I suffer from a severe and chronic case of freelance head. In short, what this means is, if you work as a freelancer, you learn early on not to say no to jobs. You wish, beg, and plead for work. Often, the way it shakes down is you have no work for long stretches, until you want to puke with anxiety. Then you get a glut of gigs, which seems great at first, but all the deadlines land at once and, also, it’s more than a little likely that at least half the work is totally not up your alley. You take it anyway—revamping websites for hemorrhoid cures and home security systems— lest you have to go the other route: office job.

Next factor: FMS. This is short for Fraid of Missing Something, a syndrome whereby if you say no to an invitation, you can bet that you will later hear the event was more fantastic than any anticipated Second Coming. My FMS started when I was very young and forever excluded by my older sisters. Every month I say to Warren, “We are going to do less this month,” and then ninety invitations come in and I say yes to 89 of them because god forbid I should miss out on a particularly delish tray of snacks, a fascinating guest speaker, or an opportunity to feel professional jealousy as I mingle with my more successful peers.

A third reason I am too busy—and I’m guessing why all y’all all are also probably too busy—is OPTIONS. People? We have so many more options for occupying ourselves now than we did a mere ten years ago. What with everybody and their mother now capable of making movies, records, and books and uploading them; and what with new gadgets coming out at an alarming pace (however did I live without the Wii Fit Hula Hooping option?); and what with WiFi so utterly ubiquitous as to make getting unwired an Amish-inspired wet dream… well yeah, of course we’re busy. Hell, I just read about an app called Freedom that, when launched, will block your Mac from accessing the Internet for eight hours at a time, unless you reboot. (And I’m guessing there’s a whole lot of rebooting going on out there.)

The biggest culprits, I say, are the Internet and the iPhone, the latter, of course, allowing us fulltime gluttonous access to the former anytime, anyplace. And no, I am not here to suggest, in a curmudgeonly fashion, that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and we are all doomed courtesy of technology. (Though from time to time I wonder…) Just making some observations here.

I just saw Regina Spektor at Stubb’s. She was wonderful, and I was really lucky. I had a pass that allowed me to watch the show from a deck above the crowd. My bird’s eye view allowed me to watch however many thousand people were there. And it really blew me away that apparently the majority of them were more focused on recording a virtual version of the show with their iPhones than they were in being present for the actual show.

This reminded me of the time Warren and I were in Hawaii, and we went to watch the lava crash into the Pacific, a stunning natural phenomenon. The place was packed, no one would shut up, and along with the cacophony of drunken merry widows and fidgety families and Japanese tourists chattering about this event, there was the nonstop sound of cameras clicking. (Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny, since that is a synthetic sound, designed to emulate old-school cameras.) I felt like the only one who wanted to watch in quiet.

This in turn, brings me around to another one of those sayings I count as being in my top ten favorites. It’s an Alice Miller quote: “Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings.” I refer to that one frequently, whenever I am feeling judgmental about others, and remind myself to recognize what it is they are doing that reflects back things I do that I wish I didn’t.

So maybe I don’t take endless photos, maybe I was the only person at the Regina Spektor show (and the lava place) trying hard to just watch and listen. But all these busy, busy videographers and photographers and texters and amateur backup singers screaming along with the lyrics? They serve as a good enough symbol of my own insistence on near constant multi-tasking—consuming audiobooks while dogwalking, answering emails while talking on the phone, knitting while watching movies and, no really, recently meditating while in a hot tub, because I just didn’t have time to do those activities separately, so I mashed them up.

Getting back to the astronaut t-shirt. I was thinking how we are told as children, and then grow to tell our children, “You can do/be anything you want!” And how this is a lie. I, for example, could never do a double spinning jumping back kick or whatever the hell it was that precluded me earning a black belt when I studied Taekwondo. I just did not have the physical capacity. But I imagined looking at a brand new little baby and cooing, “Honey, you can’t do/be anything you want!” and how cruel that would sound to some.

Not cruel. Permission. As in, “You can’t don anything, so pick a few things you really dig, and have fun with those.” It’s a thought I played with as I hiked around the wedding ranch, telling myself it’s okay if I don’t meet all 90,000 of the goals I set for myself, that I’m doing enough, and that things are so good now, the most important goal is to stop long enough to remember this. Or, as a bumper sticker might sum it up: You Are Here. Dig The Now.

But then, I must confess— I had my iPhone with me, so I could listen to Bright Eyes offering a soundtrack for the cinematic landscape before me—all that sky, all those trees, all those. And then, yes, it’s true, I switched the phone to camera mode to capture same landscape. I can’t wait to make a multimedia collage to remind me of that moment of bliss.

Spike Gillespie will be throwing her modem away any day now. She blogs at KnitBuzz and spikeg.com. And she’s selling t-shirts with a REALLY COOL SLOGAN. Check it.