a life more ordinary

Embarrassingly, the moments directly following this year’s “Best Picture” Oscar montage found me in the kitchen, red-faced, and crying over the fact that somehow, in my inadequate movie-viewing past, I had missed Ordinary People. Just irrational enough that I felt the need to move it right to the top of my list. (After the time it took to track it down, it wasn’t rented painlessly--the smart-ass video store guys had a thing or two to say about it’s relative inferiority to Raging Bull, which was “robbed” of the Oscar in 1980…)

And so last night was the night I laid (at least those) inadequacies to rest. After 2 hours of a film about therapy, it makes sense to talk out my feelings about it.

What I watched last night picks up on what I’m loving about certain radio pieces right now: when, and how, we "hear people out. " With so much scene-changing of our own, with so many interruptions (many of them self-imposed), how do we learn to just let people work through what they’re thinking, to finish what they started? We like to think we’re listening to people when they discuss something difficult, we like to think we’re giving people the time they need, but we cut in when it's awkward, or we see an opportunity for ourselves to speak, or when it makes us uncomfortable. We’re constantly editing our own conversations for the best result. We do it in the name of keeping the conversation lucid, but increasingly, I'm becoming an advocate for indulging people occasional incoherence.

With the constant fear that listeners will “turn the dial,” radio-makers have relaxed into creating flawlessly-edited stories that are undeniably interesting, but predictably revelatory--a style tends to create reality instead of reflect it. I’m more and more drawn to the radio pieces that are conscious of that fact and that make some specific changes to reverse it—keeping the less-than-perfect cut, the off-mic quote, letting people speak as they come across, instead of how you wish they’d sound. By encouraging people to keep talking, the revelation happens on its own, and not through the grace of good editing.

Now is as important a time as any to let ourselves, to let each other finish what we started. Not to edit our long awkward silences, to avoid the urge for polish, for professionality. In life, just as in Art, the revelation will happen on its own.

dinner dates, roommates...

Brandishing a bunch of red romunculi (a congratulatory gesture for launching this blog, finally), Meg showed up right on Jess and David's heels. Still adjusting to this new kitchen, and my new housemates, but if anything's going to shorten the distance between all of us, it's a dinner date.

Cooking together, eating together--we've done it enough times for it to feel unexceptional. But I have a fascination with the fact that it's a rite we carried from our families into college, and from college into our lives now, our City lives, where we make comfort anywhere we can get it. Our time, our energy to reach outward to our families, our far-flung friends--it's dwindling. We approximate home with those closest to us.

And this is ultimately what we do for one another: we read articles aloud, chop fennel for large, shared salads. We brew the coffee, set the morning alarm. We send one another out the door, we wish one another good days, or good nights, and we mean it. But we cannot follow one another to work, we can’t take on each other’s troubles to ease them (even though we listen tirelessly to the sadness that never quite seems to go away).

This is why, despite our convincing re-creation of a family, it’s impossible to make it true: we can only read so many articles, pour so many cups of tea, before we’re out the door, back out into the night. Alone, again, taking the long, quiet trip back to our dark, empty rooms. We produce our own keys, we turn on the hall light.

and so it begins.

This is what it takes: a complete lack of shame, a moratorium on modesty. This is what else it takes: a microphone.

I have the microphone: a thin silver attachment for my ipod that's discreet (if a bit rough on the ear when it's played back over the radio). I've urged it toward people before, but always in the name of the Saturday Evening News. Until now, its use has been assignment-specific. I've never thrust it in the face of my friends, asked them what it means to be here, now, in far-flung cities at the blossoming age of 24/5, what it means to shift between delirious happiness and stomach-gripping anxiety in the time it takes to tunnel under the Bay.

We cling to the recent past, and move forward more slowly for it. This is what I want to discuss. Imperfectly.

And here is how I want to discuss it: with the voices of these friends, all of you who are reading this now, smiling at my flimsy effort to move forward, all of you who recognize my need to take my microphone and record your voices so that it can dissolve my fear of whatever's not-quite-ready and propel something else. Someone has to take record of the fact that we are Of Interest, if not in the grand scheme of history then at least to ourselves. Who of you doesn't feel a sense of urgency? Quick! Call me! Talk to me! Let me turn the microphone on, shrug off anything that tells me it's useless.