Off Kilter

I met a friend in Dupont Circle last night. As I rode the escalator upwards from the Metro, lost in thoughts I was meeting the friend in order to escape, I suddenly realized that I was off balance and needed to shift position. I was leaning on one arm on an escalator in which the handrail moves slightly faster than the treads. My hand had gradually moved farther and farther from my body until finally I was jolted into awareness that I was in danger of falling over if I didn't readjust my position.

It made me start thinking (again) about the last few months. Recently I've been happy and content in a way that seems almost too good to be true in retrospect. I'd found companionship, intimacy, and fun in the same person, and the seductive promise of ongoing happiness hovered within reaching distance.

It was a dangerous sort of happiness, though, given what I knew about the challenges we faced. Heedless, I opened my mind to new visions of what the future might hold. With this person, I willingly embraced new possibilities and redefined my expectations.

Now things have ended, and I'm left with my changed ideas about what I want from life and without him to make them into reality. I feel adrift, off-balance, oddly not myself without him. My new dreams for the future don't fit my current reality anymore, and I'm not sure how to adjust. I'm forced to shift positions in order to find my balance again, but I'm not doing it as easily or as gracefully as I'd like.

Start with the Ending

I've been thinking lately about the lyrics in a David Wilcox song:

The secret of a happy marriage,
maybe you should write this down
If you want to keep a love together,
the best way is to end it now
Because when you both know its over,
suddenly the truth comes out
You can talk about your secret passion,
you can talk about your restless doubt

When there's no pretending,
then the truth is safe to say,
Start with the ending,
get it out of the way
Now there's no defending,
because no one has to win
Start with the ending,
it's the best way to begin.*

It's somewhat flip (especially to hear it sung), but I think there's truth to it. I've been in relationships that became really honest at the end, when neither of us was trying to posture or preserve some facade. Once I knew it was ending, there was no reason not to say exactly what I thought, wanted, needed. By that point, there was too much water under the bridge to preserve the romantic relationship, but maybe if we'd been that honest in the beginning...

And that's the point of the song. What if you took the attitude at the beginning that there's no reason to hold anything back? What you presented your true self instead of who you think the other person wants you to be or even who you'd like to be on your best days? This would require either an immense dose of self-confidence and bravery or a lack of expectations, but how much better could that kind of relationship be? Some relationships might not get off the ground under those circumstances, but wouldn't the one that did be amazing?

*Copyright 2000 published by Midnight Ocean Bonfire Music (ASCAP)/Cindy Lou My Dear (ASCAP), a division of Soroka Music Ltd.

Transported

The Wood Brothers played a local show the other night. They're a guitar/bass duo, actual brothers, who are incredibly talented. I was invited by a good friend, and it took me back to a time in my life when I often saw several bands a week. I miss that!

This was the best type of show, the kind that sweeps you up and carries you along without a sense of time or place. I watched Chris rock out with his bass like he was Eddie Van Halen, making it a full body experience. Now his fingers dance, plucking the strings. Now he glides the bow across the strings, then tossing it away. I watched the strings glint in the stage lights and saw the worn spots where he thumps the body of the bass for the occasional percussive touch. I heard Oliver rasping out the lyrics, watched him bob to the music and slide his fingers over the strings of his acoustic and electric guitars. Time ceased to pass as the music swirled around me.

For an hour or two, I was transported outside of myself and immersed in the music. I should do this more often.

Man on Wire

I saw "Man on Wire" yesterday, a movie that's gotten universally good reviews (an unheard-of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes).

A documentary of a notorious wire (tightrope) walker, the magic of the movie for me was in the characters and the dynamics between them. It's the story of Philippe Petit, a Frenchman obsessed with wire-walking in ever more daring situations. From a home setup, he graduated to stealth rigging of wires between the towers of Notre Dame, across the Harbor Bridge in Sydney, and finally, in his crowning achievement, between the twin towers of the World Trade Center (in 1974). The movie concentrates on the planning and execution of this last caper.

The man is a consummate showman, infecting everyone around him with his enthusiasm: his girlfriend, his friends, the World Trade Center employees whose help he enlisted, and even one of the arresting officers after the WTC prank, who said what he did should be called "dancing." Not content to simply walk the wire, Petit would balance on one foot, kneel down, even lay on the wire halfway across.

The movie was paradoxical and moving.

What should have been Petit's biggest triumph was his downfall in my eyes. His newfound fame went to his head, and his first action after being released from jail after crossing between the WTC towers was to hole up in a hotel with a new groupie, abandoning his friends and girlfriend to wonder where he was. His relationship with his girlfriend and his best friend fell apart shortly afterward. The girlfriend, 24 years later, seems to still idolize him and feel it was inevitable that he would move on to other things. The best friend, however, is clearly still haunted by loss of their friendship, which is never fully explained in the movie.

Petit does not seem to be bothered by the human toll of his obsession. He is depicted as being alone in the world now, save for the wires set up in his backyard, and that suits him fine. Should we be happy for this man who's achieved what he wanted and seems completely self-sufficient? Or should we pity him that his fixation has left no room for the other things he might have done with his life?

While his triumph left me depressed, the images of the World Trade Center were strangely soothing. We've all become accustomed to the scenes from 2001, including the fall of the towers and the steel reinforcements surrounded by debris. The footage in this movie was of those same reinforcements being erected, of the workmen who built them, of the architectural details, and of the intact roofs, with a concentration on how their features could be used to make a man's dream come true. It made me hopeful to remember that there were good elements in the buildings' histories and they're not entirely defined by their ending.

Being Handy

Today, my big accomplishment was fixing two leaky faucets.

For a month (two? three? how long can you ignore such a thing?), two of my faucets have been leaking. They're in the two places in my house most likely to annoy me - I can hear the dripping when I sleep and when I work. Lack of time, lack of knowledge, and laziness have prevented me from fixing them so far. I close the bathroom door when I sleep and turn on the TV when I'm working.

I decided today was the day. It was either do work or fix the faucets. Faucets seemed like more fun.

It required a little research in the Time-Life book for Home Improvement, a little more research online, and only one trip to Home Depot (including a tool I was afraid I'd never use again but was worth the entire $13 I paid for it!). Plus one call to my dad and one call to Moen (where they collected information for a call-back instead of putting me on hold).

The biggest challenges were actually solved by the Home Depot tool and by a little elbow-grease.

Now my faucets turn on when I turn them on and turn fully off when I turn them off. Almost as good, they turn hot when you expect it and cold when you don't. I'm living in a brand new world, where delights await me every time I wash my hands!

Life is good.

Laughing in my Sleep

This morning I had the delightful experience of waking up laughing! I had a bizarre dream that started off with a life-threatening experience and ended up with a bowl full of tiny multicolored water balloons with a life of their own. They started slipping out of their bowl and through the cracks in the table. I cupped my hands under the table to try to keep them from bursting on the floor, but they just filled my hands and squeezed between my fingers, as if their mission was to throw themselves on the floor. I woke with the memory of a handful of brilliant water balloons and what felt like an audible laugh.

Not a bad start to the day!

My Life Past Midnight

It's been a long and stressful week as I get closer to my big July deadlines. I swore after February that I was not going to be up until all hours writing documentation for the next release. Things looked promising until our tech writer got sick (he's dropped 30 pounds in the last three weeks, so clearly something is very wrong).

So I'm writing again, and it's become my second full-time job.

The line between night and day has blurred. I'm sending email at 3AM and taking naps at 5PM. I go to the gym at 11PM and eat a second dinner at 2AM. Business calls at 8AM and 2AM. After a while, it stops feeling so strange, and I just stumble around in a fog.

The silver lining in it all is that I've developed a surprisingly rich post-midnight social life. One friend on the other side of the world regularly checks in around 2 or 3AM to catch up and then encourage me to go to sleep. I've forged another surprisingly important friendship with someone who stays up with me for hours each night, talking about everything and nothing. (Is editing docs and IM'ing at the same time multitasking or being distracted?)

Strangely, I'm a little sad that there's only another week or two of these crazy hours. After it's all over, what happens to these friendships? Are they going to survive the light of day and competition from real, live people and the daily run-around that keeps me from spending hours on the computer every night? Time will tell.