I worked on this American Ninja Warrior spot that was on Saturday Night Live last week. SNL always shoots their mini-movies on the Friday that is the day before the show is going to air, so basically the whole production is on a crazy short deadline. You’re also working around the cast’s schedule and availability, which often means they are coming and going from rehearsals at some odd hour. I’ve read (in Bossypants) and heard (on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, Fresh Air, Here’s the Thing — basically if it’s on NPR, it’s where I get my information) about how grueling the schedule is for the cast, but it really drove it home when we wrapped at 4:30 am last Friday, at which point, it said on the call sheet, the cast was scheduled togo back to rehearsal.
As you can imagine, between the technocrane, the three other cameras, and the fact that Bobby Moynihan had to jump into a pool at regular intervals (either so they could film him doing it over and over again, or in order to stay wet), the scenes on the very realistic-looking American Ninja Warrior set were no picnic to mic. Because we couldn’t wire him and I couldn’t get anywhere close with the boom, the sound guy I was working with planted a couple of mics underneath the red landing pads/obstacles/whatever those things are along the edge of the pool. On one take, when one pad was landed upon particularly hard, we heard it crack and break — a great sound effect that will never get used (and one which made me feel bad for Moynihan, but I heard that he wrote the skit, so at least he knew what he was getting into). The mics did not stay dry, but I think they all survived the day, which is always an important goal.
The problem with stuff like this is that you’re always looking for one or two moments that were hilarious when you were watching them happen but for some reason (probably time constraints) didn’t make the cut. Still, the piece did turn out to be pretty funny. And there’s some rare, immediate gratification we don’t often get, knowing that the thing I just worked on will be on television the very next night.
Also, Drake looks pretty good in a bald cap. Who knew?
The other day I was looking for a decent shirt to wear to dinner. As you may or may not remember, this is a challenge because it seems like all of my shirts, after a period of time, develop holes near the waist. But there’s another problem now, and that is that my tops are nearly all stained.
I’ve always been something of a slob. My mother likes to joke, as mothers do, that she remembers how I was always unable to eat anything without half of it ending up on my front. But when she says these things, she’s thinking about Betsy from maybe ages 0-10, who really didn’t care what she looked like, not the one who, upwards of 47, is expected to go places not looking like she recently walked through a fountain of grease. Who does this at my age, regularly decorating their shirts with globs of food in a way that most middle school students have learned to avoid? Thank goodness for Ecover stain remover, which, despite its claims that it doesn’t damage the environment, has saved many pieces of clothing – but not all, see Exhibit A above – from having to be tossed (which makes me doubt that it’s really environmentally friendly, but I’ll continue believing that it is to soothe my liberal guilt).
Lately, doing laundry has become a laughable/mortifying (depending upon whether I have the laundry room to myself) experience, because the size of the the pile that needs stain remover is rivaling the size of the pile that doesn’t. I basically had to go through my entire shirt drawer the other day to find something that had no holes and wasn’t badly splotched, or wasn’t badly splotched in especially bad places. For instance, I’ve learned that if there’s a splotch to the side of a breast, it’s in shadow and possible to overlook. If it’s right on top, where people are likely to look anyway, then it’s a problem. And of course, because my chest sticks out, just waiting to catch anything that falls from my mouth like one of those birds or fish that attach themselves to certain animal species and feed off of their leavings, it’s likely that that’s the first place where spots are going to end up. My stomach is next, and while I don’t like the fact that it’s the next protrusion down, or a protrusion at all, this is a more acceptable landing area than my chest, both because it doesn’t invite as much attention in general and because it can be hidden by a desk, or dining table, or a sweater that can be partially zipped or buttoned (unlike Exhibit A).
In overthinking about why I seem to have gotten more stain-happy lately, I’ve come up with a few possibilities. First of all, I’ve been cooking more — and by “cooking” I don’t just mean what I mainly did for most of my adulthood, which was throw a pile of food into the oven at 450 (although some of my favorite Jamie Oliver recipes still involve doing just that. They also ask for “a handful” of something, as if that’s an actually measurement, while “full whack” is an oven temperature and “smash it all up together” is considered an instruction). I actually sauté a lot now, in a pan or two, on our teeny tiny stove, which has trouble fitting two pans comfortably. It can basically do two uncomfortably, and fitting three means one of them is going to be only half on a burner, so most of my cooking has to be limited to two-pan meals, but still — I make two-pan meals. That’s something an adult does, right? This has come about partly because I have a slow cooker. Actually, it’s not mine, it’s on more or less permanent loan from friends, but I’m pretty sure they’ve forgotten I have it, which basically makes it mine, along with the lamp they also gave me. Now, you would think that a slow cooker just requires you to, again, throw a bunch of stuff in and let ‘er rip, and you can in fact make dinner in it that way. All of the recipes I’ve found for it that are really good, though, involve browning meat, and wilting onions, and possibly deglazing with wine, before you throw it all in. So I have been spending more time within the range of spatter.
I’ve also traced many of my spots back to meals at work. I think this is probably because, like everything else I do at work, I tend to eat fast, often while simultaneously doing something else. At lunch, that something else is probably just making conversation, which is challenge enough for me, but I’m still often eating as fast as possible so that I can do something with the remaining 20 minutes or so of lunch after eating: get out and go for a walk, or visit galleries (when I shoot at Chelsea Piers), or make phone calls, or grade assignments, or in some way try to deal with my other responsibilities. At breakfast, the stain-inducing speed derives from the fact that I’m often eating after call time. For those of you not familiar, “call time” is when your day officially starts on a film set, the time at which you are “in.” I’m not sure where the “in” part comes from. Inside the set? In hell? At any rate, it’s the moment at which you are supposed to be 100% devoted to your job, until they tell you you can break for lunch, in 6+ hours. Call time is often quite early, but while I may have I unceremoniously dragged the rest of my body from sleep at 5 or 6 am, my stomach somehow still manages not to wake up until at least 8 or 9, which is probably when it thinks is the right time for all of a human being’s various parts to be waking up. (If only my stomach were a producer, the world would be a waaay better place. Call times would be sane, days would be short, and there would always be fresh mango at craft service, and manchego cheese, and olives, and Iberian ham, and…well, basically it would be a tapas bar.) As a result, I often try and have my breakfast after we are already “in,” which is considered verboten by many of the people I work with, or at the very least says to them that I have slacked and didn’t get to work early enough to eat breakfast before call. So I tend to inhale my breakfast to avoid being seen eating it, and sometimes in between plugging stuff in and checking batteries, so it tends not to have my full attention which, as I said, is a recipe for sartorial disaster.
And my time not on set, lately, has been the same harried frenzy of activity. In addition to working freelance two to four days a week, I’m teaching two classes, supposedly writing this blog, and doing other projects on top of that — my own, Flat Daddy’s (yep, that’s still going on), a film or app for hire (which happens not that often but did recently), applying for a job, researching adoption, etc. It’s that one additional thing that makes it all go from much to too much, because when you add in making dinner, and grocery shopping, and laundry, and cleaning, and exercise, and sleep, and trying to have a life, there really isn’t room. Something or things must end up going by the wayside — lately it’s been writing this blog and cleaning and my sanity — and even with those gone, I often find myself eating too fast, in front of my computer. Trying to keep all of these balls in the air, and trying to move from one to the other as fast as possible, inevitably leads to something getting dropped. Apparently, on my shirt.
Sometimes I think that maybe if I finally decided to be a grown up — get one, full-time job, make enough money to have an apartment with a real stove and other appliances and furniture that are 100% mine rather than 9/10ths mine, wear an apron, adopt a child — I would stop having these kinds of not-very-adult problems. But I happen to know that my friends who have all of these things that adults have are also juggling, and the ones who have kids are used to juggling even more than I am. Women are supposed to be multitaskers, it’s what we do. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s what we’ve been forced to learn how to do. Maybe at some point my friends just managed to get better at it, or they learned to eliminate that one thing that puts them over the edge, or they earn enough to have a personal shopper and really good dry cleaning.
Then somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember that the other person my mom said couldn’t keep food off of her clothes was my grandmother. She also worried a lot. So maybe I’ve started the inevitable slide toward my second childhood early (I always was precocious), or maybe being a slovenly worry wart is in my genes. The nice thing about this answer is that it’s not a solution, it’s an opportunity to throw up my hands and say, Well there you have it. These stains are not a life choice, they’re not a sign of things out of whack, it’s just me becoming who I would inevitably become. I should just accept and embody my identity as a slob, the way I’ve accepted my bad knees and grey hairs. I don’t remember seeing “The Stainer” on the MBTI, but they probably just gave it a better name.
I’ve been living in the same building since October 2009, when I moved in with my then-boyfriend-now-husband. He owned the place, and before we decided we were going to get married, we decided I was going to buy his ex-wife out of her share of the apartment. This was partly why getting married didn’t end up seeming like such a big deal. When you’re bound by real estate, that seems much more consequential than a bunch of words and some silly license from the state.
This building is mostly owner-occupied and you can immediately tell the difference between a place that is and one that isn’t. In a renter-occupied building, you never know if people are going to say “hello” to you in the hallway, but in an owner-occupied place, you can be pretty sure they will. Having been a renter for so long, it’s clear to me why this is. There was a time when I was moving either every year or every other year. I developed a reputation among my friends for finding great places to live, and then having to move out of them. Over the 25.5 years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve had in 11 different residences:
1990-91: NYU student housing three-bedroom in East Village with two roommates
‘91-’93: large Village studio with boyfriend
‘93-’95: post break-up, East Village two-bedroom with friend
‘95-’98: for cheaper rent, three-story house in Park Slope, Brooklyn with three roommates — until house is sold
‘98-’99: another three-story house in Park Slope with two roommates — until house is sold
‘99-’01: duplex half of house with garden in Park Slope with one roommate — until house is sold
‘01-’02: very tiny two-bedroom, which is the first apartment I ever had all to myself. Less than six months later, new boyfriend moves in with me.
‘02-’06: bigger apt in Park Slope, with dining room, with boyfriend
‘06-’08: two bedroom in Park Slope, with new roommate (after breakup with boyfriend, 7-week trip to Guatemala, and two months of couch surfing) — until crazy landlord forces move
‘08-’09: studio sublet in owner-occupied building in Kensington
‘09-present: one-bedroom with then-boyfriend-now-husband
So, you can see why someone might not feel a need to put down roots. It’s not like I didn’t know any of my neighbors before I landed in my first owner-occupied building, I generally did get to know the ones who lived on my floor, and the ones who were really friendly (there’s always a few), but there was no sense of that being the norm. The norm, as a New Yorker, is not to greet anyone you don’t know — because between the door and your corner, you could encounter anywhere from five to fifty of them. Imagine walking just three blocks like that when the average New Yorker walks two to five miles a day. It would be nuts, and there are too many crazy people on the streets of this city already. This is why we aren’t friendly: not because we’re jerks, but because there are just too many of us. And when you live a building that can contain hundreds of people, that you might not be staying in for that long, it’s the same.
If you own your apartment, though, you are quite literally invested, and generally, so is everyone else who lives around you. So people say “hi.” Once you get used to it, it’s nice. Sometimes, when I get home from work exhausted after a fourteen hour day and an hour each way of commuting, it can be hard to make conversation, but people generally don’t expect much in that department. In fact, a lot of people clearly don’t want to talk beyond saying “hello,” they’ll immediately turn to their phone or their mail or the wall to signal you about that, or they’ll make conversation with the person(s) they got into the elevator with, as if you’re not there. It’s kind of a weird etiquette of being friendly but not, and you never know exactly how much is expected. I will generally chat about superficial things with the people who live on my floor, and one or two others who I’ve had conversations with before due to extenuating circumstances (like running into one of our neighbors who’s an artist at an open studio tour, or finding one of them trying to take my bike hook in the bike room).
In my case, there’s one whole other level of weirdness, because my husband originally moved into the building with his ex-wife. When you have a talk-about-the-weather-or-say-hi-only relationship, it’s not like you’re discussing the intimate details of your life. You’re not invested deeply enough for that, plus, you might only run into that person once every few months, and a lot can happen in the interim that you don’t have the time to catch up on in the minute or so you that spend together in the elevator. So for some of our neighbors, it could have been like one day Damon was living with this one woman, and the next time they saw him, he was living with this other one — despite the fact that there was, in reality, close to two years in between. How do you surface chat about that? “So, uh…what happened there?” Yeah, no. Plus, people aren’t going to know for sure that you live there until they see you at least twice. So I think for some the thought process was like, “Oh, he’s with someone new,” then, “Oh, she lives here now,” then, “Oh, I guess she’s here to stay,” and for some of them, “Maybe she was a home-wrecker but now they’re married so it’s legit,” and then they would finally talk to me.
Still, while I say “hi” to everyone in my building, I hardly know any names. I know the few names Damon knew and told me about, of people who were on the board when he moved in, or with whom he used to smoke cigarettes in front of the building back when he smoked (Damon made his one building friend this way, but now that he doesn’t smoke any more, they only hang out when they happen to run into each other during an international soccer tournament, since that was the other thing they have in common), or because they lived on our floor and were especially outgoing (like our neighbor down the hall who is in a wheelchair and orthodox, so he occasionally needs a person/shabbas goy to do things for him, plus he likes to talk. He doesn’t remember either of our names, so instead, for some reason, he calls Damon “the general.”). Damon and I use descriptive made-up names for everyone else, like, “the woman from the lesbian couple down the hall with the short hair” (since we just surface chat and we hardly ever see them together, we only felt confident that they were a couple when they had a baby), or “the short, Latino-looking woman who wears big hats who’s married to that older Black guy,” or, “the older English guy with the bike,” or, “the musician’s wife.” When they started a building email list, then I finally had names attached to emails, but the names still weren’t associated with actual people. I exchanged a series of emails with someone named Traci (who never listed her apartment number) about giving away some ink cartridges that I bought for my old printer, and when I finally met her, she turned out to be my next-door neighbor. I’d run into her and her husband and her kids so many times, but I’d never have guessed that she was Traci with an “i.” When I refused to take money for the ink cartridges, she said I should come over to her apartment some time for a glass of wine, but I didn’t really know how to make that happen. She’s married and has two little girls, it didn’t seem like I could just drop by at any time and that would be okay. So I said, “Sure,” but that was last August, and I have a feeling the offer doesn’t still stand. This all seemed so silly, so last November, I emailed the idea to have a holiday party to the building mailing list – I knew other buildings had them, why not us? Not a single person responded, so I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t have the time and energy to make new friends, maybe I’m simply the only one who feels bad about it. It just seems weird to be surrounded by this diverse group of interesting- and nice-looking people — artists, musicians, lesbians, these are my people — and not actually be friends with any of them. (Plus, it would all be different if I had kids, as so many people in the building do. It’s automatically something they have in common, and an additional reason for them to become friends, so that their kids have friends in the building too. So thinking about it that way enables me to feel bad about not having friends in the building and not having kids at the same time.)
Why do I feel this way? Friendship hasn’t always exactly been a bed of roses for me. In my childhood, I was a year younger than everyone, I switched from public to Catholic school (and I’m not Catholic), then moved from the city to the suburbs, then started a gifted program which kept us on a different schedule from all of the other kids and made us natural targets for ridicule (it was junior high, after all), and all during that, had friends move away to different schools or states several times. Even when I got in with a solid group of friends in high school, we still weren’t exactly nice to each other, that just wasn’t really done. Being cutting to everyone was how we proved that we were cool. All of that contributed to making me afraid to put myself out there. I could point fingers and name names of those who were bricks in the wall of the edifice that is my fraught relationship with humanity by taunting or turning on me (yes, I’m talking about YOU Susan Matthews), but given the circumstances, and that I was a kid who was always too much in my head, I think I would have ended up here eventually regardless. It was only when I arrived at college that I discovered that people didn’t have to be like that; that, in fact, the presumption was that everyone was worthy of friendship until proven otherwise, not the other way around. Needless to say, it was something of a revelation — the Friendship Revelation of My 20s. Suddenly, I felt like I could be friends with anyone, or at least anyone who I had an excuse to talk with, like a class or a dorm in common. That meant even the those in the Bible study group, or the sorority girls, or even the one person I knew from high school who ended up also going to Stanford — and was placed in my freshman dorm. I mean, seriously, Stanford, I came all the way across the country and you put my past one floor down? Still, it really was like we were entitled to be entirely new people at college, which just felt like we were being ourselves.
I managed to keep this friendship open-door policy through much of my 20s, although I learned that it had its limits. Film school was somewhat backstabby, and I also figured out there that it wasn’t worth it to have guy friends who would hardly ever let you finish a sentence, much less treat you as an equal, and there are a lot of guys like that. As I entered my 30s, I found that some friendships just weren’t deep enough to grow and mature as we did, or only had room for the other person to grow so much that there wasn’t room for me any more. I still met people at parties and on buses and in hostels when I traveled, but I didn’t have the same expectations about what those friendships would be. Maybe I couldn’t be friends with anyone, but I could be friends with anyone for a few hours or a few days, and that can be great too. That was the Friendship Revelation Addendum of My 30s. Which is irrelevant when it comes to making friends in your building. You pretty much know that you’re going to see them again at some point, so if you decide to take that next step to being friends and then find out that you don’t really like them that much, you’re stuck with them until somebody moves. You can’t ghost friends in the building, you can only hurry into the elevator, pretending not to see them and trying to get the door to close before they can get on (which you’d have to be a jerk to do to pretty much anyone else).
Now I seem to be at a point where I’m not sure I want any more friends, but I’m conflicted about it. With all of us so busy, it feels like I don’t have time to see the friends I have. Plus, as I get older, I find more and more that I really am that introverted kid, which means talking to people can be fun, but damn it’s exhausting. So, the Friendship Revelation Addendum of My 40s is that while maybe I could be friends with anyone, maybe I don’t have to be friends with everyone. And yet I can’t decide if this one is a failure — me giving up because of my issues with friendship — or a victory — me triumphing over my other issues with friendship. I mean, can you really just decide that you have enough friends, that you should maybe even pare it down? Because I do see that I’m not the only one who’s changing as I get older. Certain aspects of everyone’s personalities become more prominent while others diminish. Sometimes we don’t like the things that become more prominent in our friends, or we just notice them more because of how we’ve changed, or we’re less tolerant of the things we used to ignore or excuse just because they were our friends – or they feel that way about us. We start to wonder (or at least I do), What is the basis of this friendship anyway? Was it just an accident of fate or geography, that we lived down the street or in a certain dorm, or had so many classes together? Is it because we just happened to meet at work at that time when neither of us knew anyone, or we shared an interest in something, like going to bars and picking up men, that’s not so relevant any more?
A pile of boxes has amassed outside of Traci’s apartment (I still don’t know her husband or her kids’ names), which leads me to believe that they are moving. Another chance at a building friendship down the tubes, or is it just as well, since they’re leaving anyway, and that’s one less friendship I’d have to maintain or feel guilty about not maintaining? I haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe it’s going to be the Friendship Revelation of My 50s — although just saying that gives me hives. “Of My 50s.” Guess you gotta have something to look forward to.
To my great chagrin, I often find myself having thoughts these days that make me feel like a fogey. For example, how those rings that pierce the septum and hang in the center of the nose are just a bad idea. I mean, at what point did making a semi-permanent fashion choice that’s gotta hurt really badly when you sneeze start being considered attractive? But in my head, I sound like Scar-Jo’s mother (or maybe she’s fine with it, I don’t know) when I think these things, so I tend not to say them out loud. I don’t want to be one of those over-the-hill types who complains about kids today and thinks that all new trends are bad because they’re new and she just can’t deal. Cultural change is always derided at first as shocking, improper and indecent. Women’s suffrage, jazz, television, Dungeons and Dragons, people actually thought these things were going to tear down America, but where would it be now without any one of them? I believe that questioning authority, and the status quo, and the cultural norms that keep us in line is vital to progress, so I tend to tell myself that any impulse I have to instantly dislike a new trend that I’ve noticed is telling me that I’m getting old, and I should keep it to myself.
But this time, I’m just going to come right out and say it: the level of our political discourse now truly sucks. What I’m seeing is really two trends fusing into one unholy ball of nasty. It’s one part the way that people are regularly attacked, demeaned and threatened on the internet in the most hateful ways, particularly ones that insult and degrade them based on race, ethnicity, gender/gender identity, and sexual preference; combined with the way in which our “discussion” of politics is becoming the piling up of lie-, hearsay-, and hyperbole-based bullshit, recycled and repeated again and again in the echo chamber of the internet, purely for the sake of winning. A lot of this is just human beings calling other human beings — who I personally think deserve respect just because they’re human beings, much less because they’re as indisputably accomplished as, oh, our president, or Hilary Clinton, or Ben Carson, or even John Kasich — “retard” or “cunt,” just to name the two epithets that leap to mind since I’ve seen them most recently, and because they really do just epitomize how truly awesome we are becoming. Yay, America. But some of it is abusing fact just enough to create a name or catchphrase that sounds good and sticks. In some ways, flat-out lies like saying Barack Obama is a muslim from Kenya, while they have been used effectively on the gullible, are easier to fight than the reductive oversimplification and exaggeration that’s being used this season: “commie,” “fascist,” “criminal,” “liar,” “war-monger,” “lightweight,” “crazy,” “wimp,” “Bernie Bro,” “Shillary.”
You can blame assholes on the internet, or in the Tea Party, or Fox News and talk radio for calling right-wing talking points “news,” or the media and the 24-hour news cycle in general for repeating everything regardless of whether it has any basis in reality — and believe me, I do. We all know that the Republican presidential candidates in particular, with Donald Trump leading the way, really made a name for themselves with this kind of fact-neutral bullshit this season. It was so bad that even the head of the RNC was telling them to cut it out. But now that the Democratic race has heated up, it’s happening on the left too — and even if Hillary and Bernie themselves seem to be still largely sticking to civility, their supporters no longer are. Nope, turns out this is not so much a trend as a contagious disease, infecting us all.
Moreover, hardly anyone seems to be even trying to stop the spread. The Bernie Sanders campaign told its supporters to back off with the nasty comments about Hillary and women who support her, but then that itself became a news story, and then certain Bernie supporters took that as their cue to say that the whole “Bernie Bro” issue was just a campaign tactic, using that as their campaign tactic, until nobody cared any more about the fact that this campaign season does, in fact, have a lot of liberal men saying bad things about women. Madeline Albright admitted that what she said about women who don’t support other women having a special place in hell at a Hillary Clinton rally (which she didn’t explicitly say about female Bernie supporters, but said at a Hillary Clinton rally, so duh) was a mistake, but it’s already been repeated and spun into fuel for both sides, fed by the whole “news story” about how young women support Bernie and older women support Hillary — again, with the point about how such comments reduce the level of debate about gender in this campaign to a mean-spirited popularity contest and how Albright was trying, with her apology, to focus the discussion back on women’s issues and why they still matter, getting completely lost.
Instead, people now just seem to accept this as if it’s the norm, or inevitable, to the point of sometimes even denying that it’s a problem. “Oh,” they say, “that’s just the internet.” Or, when they get called out for doing it, they say, “Well, their side is doing it.” Or they justify it by saying that the other side is just so bad and wrong, the implication somehow being that it doesn’t matter what you say about them, no matter how bad and wrong. And when you try to bring up the fact that this is a problem, this, specifically, the ugly and bombastic way we talk about the candidates and their supporters, the disrespectful way we often talk to each other when we disagree about them, the sexist and misogynistic way women are shouted down or discounted for supporting a particular candidate, or people of color or immigrants are typed and slurred in racist ways for saying what they think, or either of the two is “‘splained” to about how wrong they are for having the nerve to have their own ideas about who they want to support, that this itself IS the problem, the other person often just rolls right on into an argument about why their candidate is better — or really why the other one is worse, since that’s what it always comes down to: who can be demonized more. And that is not the fucking point. And maybe if you were actually listening to what we were saying, you’d get that.
If you — yes you — are simply repeating something you heard on the internet without giving thought where that “information” might have originated; or saying something without considering that the way you’re saying it might not be okay, might be something you think is okay because you’ve heard someone else do it, who heard it from someone else, who maybe…learned it from Rush Limbaugh? Yeah, you’re making us all sicker. Think about it: terms like “commie,” or “war-monger,” no matter how much you might claim that you are “just being honest” by using them to label the candidate who isn’t yours, have never been used by anyone who had respect for the opposition, or who wanted to give a fair airing to the issues. They were developed out of a desire to bend the truth to serve a purpose, usually to cause damage or stifle opposition. In our political era, I could point my finger at the worst of the right-wing — the birthers, the climate-deniers, the anti-choice activists — as examples of those who have become adept at using such language to tell lies and make them sound like the truth, but that’s just the most recent version of the phenomenon. It’s propaganda, friends, plain and simple, and we humans have had a thing for it forever. Never before, though, could it be spread so widely and so quickly and so far from the source as to make it nearly untraceable, and never before, in my lifetime, have I seen people seem so credulous and unquestioning when it comes to repeating it verbatim.
Yes, I think opposing new trends is generally wrong and pointless. We need to try and see the good in them, beyond the confines of what small amount of change our small brains can handle. This one, though, is just a new spin on a bad old story, and I find it hard to believe that anything good can possibly come of it. If this is how the “right” candidate wins, we still all lose.
So I know everybody’s doing it, but don’t. Think for yourself. Don’t stoop. Be better than that.
My husband, who on Twitter is @cnco, recently started getting a strangely increased number of @-reply messages, in Spanglish. Things like “My amores lindos @cnco" and “I NEED A GROUP CHAT WITH @CNCO…PLEASE PEOPLE HELP A GIRL OUT,” and “@cnco what makes your favorite chica?” So he googled “cnco” and found out that it was the name of a nascent Latino boy band, five guys who had just won a Univision reality show competition and then been turned into a new product, CNCO. When the world — or the small subset of it that cares about Spanish language boy bands — became aware of them, they immediately started tweeting at them, as you do, not realizing that the handle belonged not to the boy band CNCO but to a middle-aged developer/musician in Brooklyn, who doesn’t sing or dance and whose Spanish is marginal at best.
It was amusing at first, but quickly became a nuisance. Still, at first he just blocked the press and PR outlets.
“I mean come on, they should know better,” he complained. “But I don’t want to be mean to some little teenybopper.”
Soon, however, he had to abandon that policy. There were just too many teenage girls @cnco-ing too often.
“I mean, they’re tweeting at me AND at @CNCOmusic, which is the band’s actual handle. Why would they be doing that?!”
The truth is that while the band uses the handle @CNCOmusic, rather than @cnco, they promote the hastag #cnco. Twitter isn’t exactly full of brain surgeons, especially teenage ones. Heck, you don’t have to be particularly young or stupid to not know the difference between a handle and a hashtag, plenty of adults whose mastery of Twitter isn’t quite on point don’t get the difference (like probably those PR and press people and the social media division of Sony Music Colombia, which tweeted at him yesterday, despite that Sony Music Latin is their record label. In other words, all the people who are supposed to be creating the handles and hashtags since they’re creating the boy bands). And teenage girls in love will just blanket the world with anything they think might reach their heartthrobs. If Twitter had been around when I was a teenager, I’d probably have been tweeting @sting and @JT (for John Taylor of Duran Duran, not James Taylor, though I think he also went by JT. See how confusing it is?) before I bothered to check who actually had those handles, especially if I saw other people doing it. i clearly remember what it’s like when your hormones are raging with so much desperate pop star infatuation that any potential connection with its object must be attempted – I mean HELP A GIRL OUT.
Thus the @replies keep coming, cluttering up Damon’s feed, which he, as someone who actually uses Twitter, finds pretty annoying.
“The worst thing is that everybody hates the name,” he says.
It’s true. A lot of the tweets at him are saying how stupid the name is, or defending it, or defending the band in spite of the name. It’s also supposed to be spoken as "C N C O,” not “cinco,” which, come to think of it, really isn’t a good name for a band, especially one that will sound kind of different in two different languages.
So why doesn’t he just give up the handle, you might ask? He could actually just substitute a new one for the old one and keep the same account, without losing his followers, so it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Still, he’s kind of hoping that either people will stop tweeting at him when they finally figure out that @cnco isn’t CNCO, or, failing that, that Sony Music Latin will just pay him to take it off his hands.
My take is that the name “cnco” wasn’t really anything significant for Damon when it first came into being. “Cinco” was a nickname that his best friend called him “for maybe five minutes,” because it was the speed dial number for Damon on the friend’s phone: five, which became cinco. Once he got over the fact that he wasn’t number one, Damon decided that he liked the name. Right around then, the internet came along, and he needed usernames, as you do. He couldn’t get “cinco,” but “cnco” was available. When he joined Twitter, he used @cnco for his handle, and he got the domain cncocnco.com in order to have a blog there (cnco.com was taken by a CPA firm in Illinois called C N & Co. I bet their traffic is up alot). So it’s not like the moniker actually meant much of anything to anyone, at any time, exactly. And yet, once you take possession of a name or a nickname or a handle, once you start to identify yourself with it, even just in your own head, you get attached. Not just to the name, but to the identity, the new incarnation of yourself that you see in it. When I asked him how long he’d had the domain, he looked it up.
“2011,” he reported. “That’s how long I’ve been procrastinating doing the blog.”
“You actually posted a bunch of stuff here,” I said, scrolling through it. “Especially in September 2013.”
“Yeah, I did, but…”
Not as much as he had wanted to, or had intended to. He’d also thought about putting out new music under that name. It’s not like those things still can’t happen, but not as cnco.
Sometimes it feels like, by the time we get to this age, we’re changing identities all the time. I personally have already had geek girl, teen Duranie, Stanford student, single 20- to 30-something, aspiring screenwriter, ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend, and traveler of Latin America, among others, and now I’m currently choosing between filmmaker, teacher, sound grunt, writer, game designer, and who knows what else might come along. Even if the old identities don’t really go away, we learn how to let them go, how to let each one get subsumed into the next. Not usually because some boy band takes them away from us, but because we realize that they don’t work to define us any more. It’s not necessarily bad. In part thanks to the haters, Damon is starting to feel like maybe cnco really isn’t such a great name.
Yesterday, when we were talking, he glanced at his watch – it’s an Apple Watch, so he gets Twitter notifications there – and sighed. “I think they must’ve just released a new song.”
Sure enough, his Twitter feed is an onslaught of “gracias @Cnco por darnos tan Buena musica,” and "@CNCO HERMOSA CANCION BENDICIONES" and “muuuyyy linda la entreviistaaa <3 <3 <3 .@CNCO muy linddooo toodo hrmoosooosss” and “It’s my friend’s birthday & all she wants is for u to notice her so plz notice her 🙏🏻 @Cnco.fans on ig 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻”. And so on. And they recently announced they’re going on tour, opening for Ricky Martin, so there’s no chance it’s going to get better.
“The bright side,” he says, “is at least I never got a cnco tattoo.”
For a while now, I’ve been dividing the world into two categories: people who are younger than me, and people who are older than me. Everyone I encounter (or pseudo-encounter, like on TV or on Twitter) gets sized up and put into one or the other. This probably started in my late 20s. Before then, because I was a year ahead in school (and I was in school through age 24), my world was pretty reliably older than me. Then a few big moves happened, but they were clear and finite. I started teaching in Undergraduate Film at NYU and suddenly I had students — of course, they were all younger than me. My brother got married and then I had nephews who, sooner than anyone could have expected, were walking, talking humans with thoughts — who, again, were of course younger than me. But then, slowly, whole categories of people started to shift. Athletes went first, though not super noticeably since I only really paid attention to them during the Olympics, the World Cup, maybe Wimbledon. Bigger ones were roommates and dateable men. Once I hit my mid-30s, the movement became fairly tectonic. Musicians, actors, artists, crew people I worked with, with each category it would begin at the lower level — the new and unestablished and unimportant — and then slowly slip toward the successful, the Oscar winners, the department heads, Beyoncé. I’m right at the midpoint now with writers and directors, where a lot of them are right around my age, which you can see from the jokes that are being written, the cultural references, the choice of music. No more the jazz of Woody Allen, the vintage rock of Scorcese, the obscure 70s b-sides of Tarantino, now it’s all Beastie Boys and Men Without Hats. And can you believe the number of 80s period pieces that are out there? Will people ever get tired of big hair and shoulder pads?
Now, I’ve reached a new milestone. I was reading an article about Marco Rubio in the New Yorker and found out that he was 44. So we are finally into the era when presidential candidates are starting to be younger than me. What’s the big deal? you may ask. One of my friends pointed out that Obama was only 42 when he was elected. “Yes,” I replied, “but at the time I was 39!” Presidents, of all people, are supposed to be old and wise. Never mind that this particular crop of Republican candidates feels more like a bunch of brawling kids in a schoolyard (even if some of those kids are in their 70s). Now, I just went and googled youngest world leaders and it turns out that the situation on the world stage is even more dire. I thought there’d only be Justin Trudeau (44), but as it turns out, the presidents/prime ministers of Belgium, Iceland, Kosovo and Italy are all only 40! The heads of Qatar, Bhutan, Estonia, San Marino and Yemen are all even younger (35 or 36), but three of them were not democratically elected, one of those countries has only 1.3 million people, and one is an “enclaved micro state” inside of Italy. And then there’s Kim Jong-un, who’s 33, but he’s Kim Jong-un. Nevertheless, none of them are in line to potentially be my president. I just don’t think I’m ready for anyone who’s got a shot at running this country not to be older than me.
Now, I would never vote for Rubio, and I knew from the beginning of the article, reading abut his flip-flop of immigration and all the other ways in which he’s trying to prove his ultra-conservative credentials, that I would not like him. But then I read the part about how he’s complaining about his allergies on the road, saying, “but I’ve never had allergies before,” and I remembered how I said the same thing when I started sneezing for no reason at 44. I also read the thing about how his throat is always bothering him, and I totally identified with that too: I’m always clearing my throat because of my acid reflux, yet another issue I developed in my late 30s/early 40s. Then I read how he answers questions, how equivocal he sounds when he’s talking about all the issues – like he’s pretty sure he knows what he’s thinking right now, but he’s also pretty sure he’s going to change his mind. Sure, it could be because if he wins the primary he knows he’s going to have to tack heavily to the left to accommodate the general electorate, but it was starting to sound like he was at that point where he was realizing he’d changed his mind about so many things so often — like, for me, what type of men I like, what I want to do for a living, what my ultimate goals are in life, what my favorite color is — that he’d basically realized that anything he thought was only going to be temporary. And I thought to myself, is Marco Rubio running for president because he thinks he’s the best man for the job, or is he just having a midlife crisis?
Think about it. He’s challenging his father figure, Jeb Bush, in sort of a retread of adolescence. That’s classic midlife behavior, which I compare to the way my brother and I have trouble not fighting with my Dad whenever we have to spend more than a few days together, like on those Christmas vacations we take every year. Rubio was talking about a show he used to go to in Vegas with his family as a kid called “Legends in Concert,” and said, “You know you’re getting old when the Legends in Concert are people you used to listen to in high school.” Yup, I know that one, it’s the same as me and my friends talking about how we can’t handle that the oldies stations are playing all of the music we listened to in college. He poses for selfies with people on the campaign trail and he used to like Tupac and now he says he likes Drake, obviously trying to prove he’s really not old and unhip. He’s been in six elections and never lost, so he, too, is just now learning what it’s like to not succeed at everything he’s tried. He attends both Catholic Mass and Protestant services, like he’s realizing he’s going to die someday and he wants to hedge his bets. When asked about if he might be running for president too soon, he said, “I’m not afraid of running too soon. I’m afraid of waiting too long” – totally identify with that. He’s positioning himself as a realist, someone who used to have ideals, but can’t afford them any more – totally identify with that. He’s impulse-buying new, sassy clothes. He’s reading a book on Churchill. I mean, come on, could it be any more obvious?
Rubio’s doesn’t seem like the worst way to have a midlife crisis. You could take out the angst you’re going through on the people around you, like I sometimes do, or Ted Cruz does all the time. But on some level what he’s doing makes me feel better about my behavior. I’m going to be turning 47 in less than two weeks, officially hitting my late 40s, and I’m not dealing with it very well. Last week, I was so preoccupied with the usual what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-why-can’t-I-ever-get-anything-done-is-that-yet-another-new-body-pain obsessing, I put two different sneakers in my bag to wear at work. (For those of you wondering why I have two different pairs of sneakers that look somewhat similar, it’s because one’s for hot weather and one’s for cold and that totally makes sense for my job. Really.) But no matter what crazy things might go through my head, I know I’m never going to be that crazy. Holding the highest office in this country is a terrible job to have, especially now, and I’m just not that self-destructive.
Right now it might seem irrelevant, because Rubio’s not winning in any polls. But there is one group predicting that he’s going to win the nomination: professional gamblers who, as you might expect with people who earn a living betting on stuff, have a tendency to get this sort of thing right (one number I saw is they’ve called the presidency 91% of the time). So for all of you independent undecideds out there (and who the heck are you people anyway?), it might be a good time to think about if you want to vote for someone who decided to run for president instead of getting a 22-year-old blond girlfriend and buying a Ferrari. Sure, I identify with the guy much more now, but the last thing I want is someone going through the shit I’m going through making decisions for all of us.
I know I’m always talking about how doing location sound can be an uphill battle. Just to fill you in if you haven’t been following along, the problem is, while pretty much every other department on a job — lighting and camera and art department and make-up and hair and wardrobe — is concentrating on making the shot look good, we, just three or two or sometimes only one of us are are in the lonely position of trying to make it sound good. This, even though, since we stopped making silent films and started writing the dialogue on which many films and certainly most television shows depend for their storylines, character development, exposition, humor, and profundity (even if they shouldn’t, because you should really never be dependent on dialogue to tell your story), sound is easily an important half of the finished product. No, because 1) we are grossly outnumbered and 2) looping exists (even if it costs money and sounds like crap and actors hate it), the sound department seems to be the one whose work is always demoted and discounted when deemed necessary.
Believe it or not, though, recently, it’s gotten even worse — or maybe I’ve just been noticing it more since I’ve been spending so much time working in TV. I seem to have had even more conversations on set recently that have made me nuts, like when an actress said, when we were trying to figure out how to get her not to dump a whole bunch of silverware into a sink in a kitchen scene so that we could actually hear her dialogue — which basically just meant starting as if the silverware was already cleared from the table, which would have made a difference to exactly nobody because god knows the silverware was not the point of the scene — “We’re just going to have to loop it anyway.” Really? Why, aside from your prophecy-self-fulfilling attitude? I seem to be hitting even more resistance when I’m trying to do my job, like when I asked a camera operator for information about the frame about a month ago, and he turned to me and said, “You know, we’re not shooting that kind of show.” Really? Then what kind of TV show are we shooting? The kind where we just don’t give a fuck? And I seem to be hearing even more stories like the one a sound person told me last week, about how he was on a TV show and was told he had to move all of his equipment to the other side of a huge park for a turnaround, they decided to start rolling without telling him while he was still doing that, nobody noticed that the boom wasn’t on set to not say “speed” so they had no idea they had no sound until they’d done two takes, and the response of the show runner, who was directing that day, was to say to the sound guy, “Keep up.” So, wait: you’ve made the show you’re running so chaotic that evenyou don’t know what’s going on on your own set, and we’re the ones who are supposed to “keep up”? Right.
Ironically, the reason things are worse seems to be in large part because technology has gotten so much better. For one thing, digital sound equipment has improved by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years. Wireless microphones in particular are much more reliable and free of interference than they used to be (unless you’re in an RF-heavy area like Times Square, or in some weird line-of-sight from the Empire State Building that many neurotic sound people are convinced is an outer circle of hell — and I’m not saying it is, only that I’ve heard about it often enough to think that they can’t all be crackpots). The result of this has been that assistant directors want everyone to be miked all the time on TV. And “Why not just mic them all the time?” as one DP recently asked me? For one thing, all of the other problems with wireless mics that I talked about here have not been solved: clothing noise, distortion when actors get loud, the fact that, no matter the size of the shot, they always sound like they’re on the actor’s chest because they are on the actor’s chest, the fact that they are just tiny and overall crappier mics, the fact that actors don’t like to be wired, and that many outfits are tough to wire and many wardrobe people seem to think it’s their job to stand back and complain about what you’re doing to their clothes rather than help you get the mic on them so that nobody sees it, all of which guarantees that wiring people will not, in fact, be quick or easy. Then, once wiring everyone all the time becomes the norm, if sound wants to try and get good sound by booming a scene, getting frame lines and working out how to deal with shadows and reflections, you inevitably hear from somebody, “Well, they’re miked, aren’t they?” Add to that that mixing multiple mics is always harder to deal with as a sound person, and having the wonderful multi-track recorders that are now ubiquitous doesn’t necessarily make that easier. TV shows still want mixers to deliver a mono mix that they might be able to use for dailies or if they are pressed for turnaround time before airdate (which they usually are), and a decent-sounding mix is way harder to do with five mics than with one or two. And even when you have every mic isolated on a separate track as a back-up (as we now generally do, thanks to the aforementioned wonderful multi-track recorders), you have no control over what the people in post are going to do with those tracks. So even if you did manage to boom the shot and the two booms sound much, much better than the four crappy wireless, you can’t be sure that the post sound people might not go and use those four crappy wireless microphones anyway, just because it’s easier/faster for them. Which is not to say that we don’t trust post, but, they have different priorities, and…okay, sorry, but people in post have fucked things up often enough that no, we don’t trust post.
Meanwhile, really good digital HD cameras have come along. The main thing about that is, as I’ve said before, the lower cost of shooting digitally means we can just shoot and shoot and shoot way more than before. Rolling for 45 mins or so without cutting until a card was fills up is a booming challenge, but there are ways to deal with that (there’s always a chance to rest when everyone is resetting and the director is giving the actors direction or giving the operators notes or they’re changing lens sizes – in other words, when they should be cutting. Somehow, they think it’s faster to not cut and save like five seconds by not slating, even though they’re going to be wasting much more than that of the editors’ time when they have to sort through this useless footage, but whatevs). But then came using two or more cameras for everything, thinking that this, too, always made shooting faster, and therefore cheaper. I’ve got news for you, directors/producers/UPMs: IT DOESN’T. Now, rather than lighting for one angle and/or one part of a scene and making that look good as fast as possible while also considering that you don’t want to make life too difficult for the sound department, DPs light for the 270-degree view of a room in which the cameras are not, and in which the director will run the scene from top to bottom, even when the angles being shot — say, a gigantic wide shot or the back of someone’s head — will be of absolutely zero value for most of the scene. The thinking seems to be that even if one camera is only getting one tiny piece that works for one short part of the scene, one of the other cameras can surely find some other tiny usable piece in some other short part of it, and even if they don’t, heck, drive space is cheap. So we spend a shit ton of time setting up shots that might never be used, rather than figuring out just what, exactly, we will use, and shooting that until we get it right, both in terms of how it looks (because you’re often stuck lighting and shooting from not the best angles either when you have to hide all of the lighting and camera equipment from two or three cameras) and how it sounds. Which we can tell we clearly aren’t paying attention to with two cameras most of the time, because even if you can get a boom or two in the room with them, directors will also often choose to shoot “wide and tight”: a wide shot and a close up at the same time. This means your boom mic has to stay out of both shots, which means the mic is going to be farther away from the actors, putting the actors farther off mic and letting in more outside noise. On top of all that, add that these cameras are lighter, so that an increasing number of shows can be styled to be shot mainly handheld to give them a certain “look.” When camera people are working handheld, it’s rare that you get to see the actual frame before you shoot, so you have to do guesswork, again, about where the boom can be, which is not helped by the fact that camera operators get tired and cranky from doing all that handheld, and are therefore not particularly thrilled at the idea of having to put the camera up on their shoulders again, just to give you a frame line (see the aforementioned conversation that ended with, “…we’re not shooting that kind of show.”). Oh, and did I mention that many TV shows don’t like to rehearse any more either, because, again, drive space is cheap, and people seem to think not rehearsing also saves time and therefore money (rather than considering that your first few takes will be your rehearsals, so, again, you’ll just have more bad material to sort through in post)? Which really basically sucks for everyone on a film set, except PMs (who only care about money), ADs (who only care about time), certain actors who are better on the first take because they’re new, and a certain type of director who can’t make decisions and therefore likes to cover everything six ways to Sunday.
What does this all mean for TV, ultimately? Well, for one thing, you will be hearing more shows that don’t sound great, maybe even bad enough that a normal person might notice. Wireless mics will often be EQed (equalized, which means diminishing problematic frequencies and pumping up others) if post-production is trying to get rid of clothing rustle or other sound problems we won’t wait on (planes, cars), making already not great sounding mics thinner and tinnier, and they will have to be mixed in with other mics on other takes and shots, which can sound noticeably different. Post can do a decent job with this given enough time, but in TV they often aren’t, due to, again, short turnaround times, combined with adding extra shooting days at the last minute to cover more stuff they don’t have time for because they thought that more cameras = less time to shoot = we can shoot something that should be shot in ten days in seven = just plain idiotic. But TV audiences will get used to the new way TV sounds, because people can and do pretty much get used to anything.
Just as we are all getting used to this new way of working, even if it also means that sound people in NYC — the majority of whom work in TV these days because that’s most of what’s shot here now — are getting pushed closer and closer to the brink of losing their minds. See, I’ve discovered that something that drives you crazy as a human being is not when your job gets more challenging, but when you add on to that the fact that people seem not to care about how good a job you do. I mean, in theory it could be liberating, because obviously they’re giving you license to not care either (although not to the point where it gets you fired, and sometimes it’s hard to tell where that point is), but in practice, it’s just demoralizing. You start losing any sense of what it even means to do your job well, and then it becomes just about the paycheck.
And it’s not just old farts like me who are feeling this way. Recently, I worked with a really young sound team — everyone was early 30s or younger — on a TV show that is really tough for sound. The last thing I worked on with them was the kind of scene we literally have nightmares about: six-pages, five speaking actors, three cameras, and two mirrors; one of the characters got attacked and thrown around so he couldn’t be wired; in the first several set-ups, at least one camera was wide enough to see the ceiling, while others were tighter; even when we got into tighter coverage, because there were three angles, a boom was nearly always going to be seen in the mirror at some point; and the tie of the actor with the second greatest number of lines sounded so scratchy as to make his mic often unusable. It’s the kind of situation where you just have to do triage, cover what you can when you can and hope you get every line decently — not good, necessarily, but decently — at some point. I felt so bad for these young guys who have to work on this show every week, for 12-plus hours a day, for nine months, who got into sound thinking it was going to be a decent career and are now finding that it’s just destroying their will. The boom and mixer joked that they were going to turn the third into “the oldest-looking 25-year-old ever.”
Often in these situations, it’s like I’m spending half my days as a therapist. It starts out with, “How does so-and-so wire people?” “What mics do most other people use?” “Does anyone else use a system like mine?” Then it turns into, “How do other sound mixers handle this type of situation?” “Would so-and-so put up with this?” Then at some point it stops being questions, and it’s just me listening: “I feel like people like you [aka old] learned the right way to do things, and I’m never going to learn that.” “I feel like I can’t remember more than one page of dialogue any more.” “I know that was a bad mix, but they’ll just compress the shit out of it in post anyway.” “I think I’m a decent third and a pretty good boom operator, I don’t even know if I’m a good mixer any more.” “I know, not everyone’s cut out for this job…” Plus, feeling this useless and stressed all the time is also really hard on our relationships — and I mean within the sound department (I won’t go into how bad it is for people’s personal relationships outside of work, although my therapy sessions do occasionally go there). This leads to other, passive aggressive or just aggressive conversations that I participate in or overhear:
“What happened there?”
“So you missed that cue, huh?”
“I am doing that, you just didn’t have me potted up!”
“Do I need to come in there and talk to them for you?”
“No, it’s fine, just let me know when you take your headphones off, so I’m not talking to myself!”
“You are way too far, you can definitely get closer than that.”
“Just don’t push it, I don’t want to see you in the shot, okay?”
Sigh. PEOPLE: it doesn’t have to be this way. I do work on shows sometimes where the director comes in knowing what he or she wants, where they only shoot with more than one camera when necessary, and work out problems, and rehearse – they do still exist. Just because the tools have changed to make production easier, faster and cheaper, doesn’t mean that we should take advantage of that to the point of forgetting everything we already knew about the process. What if we planned and shot coverage the way we used to when every frame was precious instead of rolling every camera every time, because we can, just to see what we come up with? What if we communicated and rehearsed, so we all knew what was going to happen in a shot, instead of just rushing through the day in a frenzy — again, just because we can? There is nothing artful, or economical, and certainly not collaborative, in that way of working. TV production is supposed to be a process whereby a whole little village of people — because that’s what you need to make a show — work together to not just “get” good visuals or good sound or good performances, but to tell a story in an engaging way. For that, we need all of those things combined into some wonderful whole that is more than the sum of its parts. That’s what happens when you make a movie or a TV show the right way — and as side benefits, you get a safer, less chaotic set, a happier crew that feels proud of the work they are doing, and a sound department that remains sane.
A TV production is a high-speed train. Once it really gets moving in a certain direction, it’s not easy to stop, and the lowly sound department is the last thing that’s going to be allowed to slow it down. But if we can all get on the right track from the beginning, working together to make everything good — yes, even the sound — we’re going to arrive at a much better destination, and have a much more pleasant ride.
Recently I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday. I liked candy, of course, and being given it was way better than spending my allowance on it, but more than that, I loved dressing up. I thought about what I was going to be for weeks in advance, and I always made my own costume (or at least the 10-15% of it that wasn’t made by my mom). I remember being a black cat a few times, wearing a leotard and stuffing half a set of tights with cotton batting, then safety-pinning it to my butt to make a tail. I remember being a clown, which I somehow enjoyed despite having to wear a layer of really uncomfortable grease paint that felt like I’d smeared butter all over my face and a horrible Ronald McDonald wig. I even remember having fun as the Grim Reaper, even though I didn’t wear the hooded rubber mask that pretty much was the costume (a hand-me-down from my brother, Grim Reaper the Elder) for most of the trick-or-treating because it was too hot. I also got really into carving pumpkins — one happy face and one scary face were de rigeur every year — and trying to decorate our house in some creepy way, mostly by propping something in the window, like the aforementioned grim reaper mask on a stick after I was done with it, or clothes stuffed with other clothes and posed to conjure someone headless. It’s kind of funny that Halloween was my jam considering that I was not generally into scary things; I didn’t like horror movies (except for a brief period in high school, but that came later) or haunted houses (except for the one at Disneyland that wasn’t actually scary). I guess it was the opportunity to use my imagination and get all artsy-craftsy about it that made the holiday appealing for me. And the Tootsie Rolls.
This love of Halloween diminished somewhat in high school, when I was trying to avoid candy (although my passing interest in caving to peer pressure did lead me to see A Nightmare On Elm Street in the theater with my friends, an experience which scarred me for life. Note to teens: do not see this film if you are going to come home to a dark and empty house afterwards because your brother is away at college and your parents are out to dinner, JUST DON’T DO IT). It reemerged in college, however, because Stanford had a great Halloween party every year at the Stanford Mausoleum, where Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents are buried. I know, it sounds macabre, how they’d get a DJ and everyone would dress up and go dance on the poor kid’s grave, but tell me that isn’t that just exactly how Halloween is supposed to be! My freshman year roommate and I made a plan to go together, as soap and toothpaste. We took this very seriously, going to stay with her sister in Oakland for the weekend where we could get materials at an art supply store — mostly paint and lots of white vinyl — and construct our costumes. We looked pretty amazing, even if, as a bar of Ivory Soap, being large, square and somewhat rigid wasn’t great for dancing, or sex appeal (the shower cap that topped it off didn’t help). Still, the shtick I came up with of going around blowing bubbles and telling everyone that I was 99.9% pure kind of made up for it. I had an awesome time.
That was when I discovered the other appeal of Halloween: using the costume to be not just an animal, harbinger of death, or household product, but a different kind of person: someone bold, who walked up and talked to random people of she felt like it; someone, if not sexy, then at least someone who actually knew how to flirt. This was to make Halloween my favorite holiday again, or at least in the top three, for the next couple of decades. Post college, when it became harder to meet people in the real world, where you needed an excuse to go to parties with strangers and start conversations with them, wearing an inventive costume became even more of a way of getting outside of my self-consciousness and my comfort zone. I wasn’t comfortable doing things to get guys’ (or really anyone’s) attention in my everyday life, but on Halloween, I could become someone who didn’t look, talk, or act like me, who was totally fine with it. For example, one thing I’d do was pull out the clothes from my closet that I’d bought in fits of feistiness but that I didn’t normally have the courage to wear and see how they could be turned into a costume. One year, using a plastic gold halo I’d acquired in Santa Fe as the jumping off point, I dressed up in all of the white or transparent sample sale items I’d acquired and called myself “The Angel of Park Slope.” Another time, I pulled out a slinky silver shirt that felt like it was made out of petroleum that I couldn’t resist buying but had only worn once (on New Years of course) and a matching very short silver skirt from a thrift shop that I covered in cloud-like cotton batting and became “A Silver Lining.” And it tended to pay off: between the outfits and the attitude, I always talked to strangers, and often gave out my number. The dates never led much of anywhere, but neither did most of the dates I had in my 20s and 30s. Halloween meant casting myself in a new role, and that meant possibility.
The holiday started to get less fun when parties in general got less fun: when I got into a serious relationship. Parties could still be good, if there were friends and good food and alcohol and perhaps dancing, but they no longer had the same excitement. Now, meeting new people was all about — uuggghhhh — networking. In between boyfriends, I did do Halloween again (and did meet some more unsuitable men that way), but now that I’m married, I’m no longer looking to be sexy flirty me-not-me, and I’m basically too old, tired and lazy to dress up for any other reason (certainly for candy). What did we do this year for Halloween? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We had been planning to be away that weekend and then didn’t go, which you could say was an excuse, but really, we just didn’t have any reason to make any effort whatsoever. Kids don’t trick-or-treat in our building, so we didn’t even have to pretend to care.
And by and large, this is true of other holidays too. Chanukah (if you’ve read this, you already know how I feel about Christmas) certainly has very little appeal these days, now that I am officially a-religious (when I was a kid my family pretty much was too, but we still went through the motions for the sake of tradition, which I have even less of in my life now that I’m married to a non-Jewish atheist) and getting presents is more about having people buy me either exactly what I’ve told them that I want, which is useful but not very festive, or things that I have no use for that I have to pretend (poorly) to like. I still like July 4th because I still like barbecues and fireworks, but getting to a place where you can see the fireworks in NYC is generally way more trouble than it’s worth — and let’s face it, this is true of most holidays in our fair city, especially if there is a parade, which more or less officially makes whatever holiday it is into Excuse For Public Drunkenness Day. Birthdays are fraught as I’ve also written about before, and you are no doubt aware if you’re anywhere close to or, God forbid, beyond 40. Valentine’s Day has shown some improvement, since it’s a holiday I never liked, so I guess I dislike it less than before or at least feel more neutral about it now that I’m married, but again, celebrating it in NYC? Nightmare. And that goes triple for New Years. The only holiday that retains something of its former luster, for me, is Thanksgiving, because my enjoyment of cooking and eating really hasn’t diminished, thank goodness, and I’ve never had to host one myself so the cooking part is minimal.
Now, of course, if I had kids, this would be totally different. Once you have children, you are fully licensed to regress and enjoy the things you used to like — dressing up, presents, decorating, playing games — by participating in them with your kids. I’ve gotten a small taste of this with friends’ kids and my nephews. Going trick-or-treating with them, opening presents, even tree decorating (which I never did as a kid) was fun for a while. Eventually, though, those children started to outgrow the occasion, and I started to feel like a sad wannabe who had to borrow someone else’s kids to somehow enjoy being one again myself. I’m also at that weird, limbo point in life where people wonder why I don’t have kids if I’m seen hanging out with them, and feeling like I need to come to a holiday armed with some explanation of my career choices and fertility woes definitely diminishes the sense of carefree enjoyment which was supposed to be the point.
I suppose holidays are like everything else: before I became a grown-up and things got complicated, they were easy, and now, they really aren’t any more — and probably never will be again. Different things matter to me now, which is not all bad, considering some of the things that used to matter to me were how many snack size candy bars I could amass in under three hours and how I looked in heels. Something worth celebrating when I was eight, like getting a new tooth, or even when I was 21, like finishing a 20-page paper or knocking a ping-pong ball into someone else’s beer, just don’t seem to be as big a deal any more, compared to, say, finishing my first documentary, or finding some really nice juice glasses. And maybe it’s not so bad that the idea of “fun” once represented by getting drunk and trying to get unavailable men to notice me has now been replaced by something I can do any time I have a day off. Is Binging on the New Aziz Ansari Show While Eating Korean-Style Short Ribs I Made in the Crockpot Day at thing? Well, maybe it should be. And even if it isn’t, it’s what we are doing tonight.
I think that making this statement is a requirement when you see people you haven’t seen in five to ten years. If you don’t say it, they will think that you are thinking that they look old, or fat, or bald. And if you are thinking any of those things, then you feel especially obligated to say it.
“I think we look younger than everyone else.”
This is what your friends tell you, sotto voce, after having said, “You look exactly the same!” to all the other people that they have greeted (and probably to you too, at some point). But of course, this is also required, it’s what friends are for. Also, all your other friends’ friends are saying it to them.
“Remember when we [did that crazy thing that wasn’t really all that crazy]???”
"I have two kids.”
“My parents are in Florida now.”
“My husband/wife is at home with the kids.”
This seemed to be the year not to bring your spouse/kids who are not Stanford alumni to the reunion, because they’re sick of going — unless you didn’t have one of them at the last reunion (like me), in which case you still had to make them come to prove that they actually exist.
“My story is unusual because things didn’t work out the way I planned and so I changed careers.”
Said by everyone on the Class Panel. So, not really that unusual.
"Oh, my story is boring.”
Said or at least thought by most of the doctors and lawyers at the reunion, especially those who went to the Class Panel, because their career paths were pretty straightforward. I’m not sure when uncertainty and instability came to qualify as “excitement,“ but I suppose this works to my advantage in reunion situations.
“What is ____ really like?”
This is where my conversations about the film business often go, although not that many this time around, probably because I don’t really bring up the famous people thing all that much any more. It’s getting to the point where I’m feeling a bit ridiculous talking about the celebrities I’ve met, even though I know it’s one of the things about what I do for a living that people at parties are interested in, because I know that working with them really isn’t improving my lifestyle in any way other than being able to talk about it at parties. On this trip, most of the queries were about Andrew Luck, with whom I worked on a commercial this past year (it was the husband of a friend who said, “Please tell me he’s as handsome in person!”), and who was genuinely nice and excited to meet another Stanford person. And one friend who is a fan of The Good Wife was curious about Josh Charles, but that was pretty much it.
“I took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do next.”
This is something you hear a lot in Silicon Valley. Most of us know that it basically means, “I’ve made enough money at this point that I don’t really need to work any more.” My friends from Class of ’90 who were among the first in the tech industry who could say that say this instead because they aren’t the kind of entitled tech people — like, say, those from Class of ’05 and younger — who feel comfortable saying the other thing. It’s really still kind of strange to they themselves that many of them have become people with literally more money than they know what to do with. Another phrase that means the same thing is, “I’ve been getting really into cooking/sculpting/nature photography/stand-up.”
“You have to let me know next time you’re in _____, were have a place there, and an island.”
No, that’s not a typo, it’s not supposed to be “on an island,” and only one person actually said this. Also, to be fair, the friend who owns the island kind of tried to sneak it past me, and seemed to feel a little sheepish when I asked him about it. Again, that has a lot to do with how and when the tech boom hit our generation.
Some variation on, “Did you get lost?/Everything looks so different!/Everything is so much nicer!/What did they do with all the books?”
Thanks in part to that boom, Stanford has a lot of money, and that’s reflected on campus, which has a lot of new construction. I think there are more construction barriers and caution tape now than there were my senior year, thanks to the earthquake. One of the biggest, most recent changes was knocking down Meyer Undergraduate Library, where I used to work and many of us used to “study” (Meyer was also called “the social library”). For now, it’s been turned into a big garden, at least until they figure out what else to put there or someone gives them another giant bequest. But it has to make you wonder all sorts of other things like, Will they eventually get rid of all the libraries? Where do students go now to pretend they’re studying? Is that another thing kids today just do online instead?
“Wow, they do sell a ridiculous variety of Stanford shit at this bookstore.”
My husband was the only one who said this out loud, but I’m sure a lot of us were thinking it.
