Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.

When I am feeling dreary, annoyed and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look – the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that bother me? It’s so… endearing.

To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a few moments inside. I'll glance at the first couple pages, then flip around to somewhere in the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It's like dating, only with sentences......It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word (tangerine). We're meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know.

My brother, who grew up with three sisters, was I won't say how many years old when he finally realized that he did not have to wrap the towel around his chest when he came out of the shower.

In most cases, it is more satisfying to get a friend's answering machine and leave a cheery, tangible trace of your sincere commitment to the friendship than it is to engage in actual conversation.

If you really love someone, you want to know what they ate for lunch or dinner without you.

A good soup attracts chairs. This is an African proverb. I can hear the shuffling and squeaking on the wood floor, the gathering 'round. This, from just five well-chosen words.

On the occasions where we do have to participate, to do more than nothing, it is desirable to have a glass of wine to soften all the everything.

A friend sat next to a nun on a plane. He asked her what she missed most. "Wearing blue jeans," she replied.

A rainy day comes as a relief. Rain is your pass to stay inside, to retreat. It's cozy and safe, hanging out on this side of the gray. But then the sun comes out in the afternoon, and there's disappointment, even fear, because the world will now resume, and it expects your participation. People will get dressed and leave their houses and go places and do things. Stepping out into the big, whirling, jarringly sunny world--a world that just a few minutes ago was so confined and still and soft and understated, and refreshingly gloomy--seems overwhelming.

It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.

Who am I? Oh, yes: I'm the kind of person who doesn't like fiction, country music, or cilantro. We use these defining truths to help us stay in the lines of ourselves. We think we have to hold on to these labels, we feel comfortable holding on to these labels, but it turns out the labels are removable, you can peel them right off.

Work must reflect the randomness of life, with its incessant, merciless, almost humorous bombardment of highly contrasting emotions and experiences.

I think 90 percent of what/who we are is never really verbally communicated....

WABI-SABI: As a single idea, wabi-sabi fuses two moods seamlessly: a sigh of slightly bittersweet contentment, awareness of the transience of earthly things, and a resigned pleasure in simple things that bear the marks of that transience.

Hold on to what is good, even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it is a tree which stands alone. Hold on to what you must do, even if it is a long way from here.

As kids, our stock answer to most every question was nothing. What did you do at school today? Nothing. What’s new? Nothing. Then, somewhere on the way to adulthood, we each took a 180-degree turn. We cashed in our nothing for busy.

There are proponents of New Year's Eve, and there are proponents of regular Tuesday nights. I am one of the latter, much happier residing in the wake of the mundane.

I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn't understand why Presbyterians always had the right of way.

People are just dying everywhere, all the time, every which way. What can the rest of us do but hold on for dear life.

DISTRACTION I recognize that everything I do, from my work to going to the movies to raising children to vacuuming, might also be viewed as just one big distraction—Hey, look over here! And now, over here!—from belaboring the real issue at hand: One day I’m going to die.

OTHER PEOPLE It’s hard to accept that other people’s lives are as full and real and now as yours. You look at someone and sort of think, against your intellectual knowing better, that they have a less complex life, they’re able to flit about, their lives aren’t clogged with the same kind of pressing deadlines, they don’t really have cousins like you have cousins, they are free tonight, of course they are free, or if they have plans they can easily break them to be with you. Our lives just feel so impossibly big to us; we’re breathing versions of that Saul Steinberg poster, where New York is in the foreground, prominent and massive and drawn in colored-pencil detail, and the other states and Asia and Africa are tiny lumps fading into the horizon. This egocentric/inner bigness

Being yourself seems like the most effortless thing in the world—duh, who else are you going to be? But it’s deceiving, tricky, a summons laden with meandering and failed attempts—and then at last, so wondrously simple.

HAPPINESS I’m turning left. Look, everyone, my blinker is on, and I’m turning left. I am so happy to be alive, driving along, making a left turn. I’m serious. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing at this moment: existing on a Tuesday, going about my business, on my way somewhere, turning left. There is nothing disconcerting or unpleasant or unfortunate about this moment. It is exceptionally nice, plain, and perfect.

DOING SOMETHING It is so much easier to not do something than to do something. Even the smallest task, like filling out a Scholastic Books order form or putting away the butter, requires time, focus, and follow-through. It’s astounding, actually, that anything gets done at all, by anyone. But then, let’s say you finally are prepared and determined to do that thing, whatever it is, but you wake up to find that your basement has flooded and you must spend your day making phone calls to the contractor, plumber, and carpet people. Or not that but something else—perhaps you must stand before a committee for approval, a committee that neither grasps your intent nor appreciates your ingenuity, and anyway, they are in a bit of a hurry to break for lunch. Yet. Still. Somehow. I am encouraged to see that despite the colossal effort, despite the odds against one, despite the mere constraints of time and schedules and sore throats, houses do get built, pottery gets glazed, e-mails get sent, trees get planted, shoes get reheeled, manifestos get Xeroxed, films get shot, highways get repaved, cakes get frosted, stories get told.

When I read a magazine, I feel connected to the world, in on everything. When I read a book, I feel removed from the world, isolated, as if I’ve slipped off into a soundproof booth. It is the same with listening to the radio (connected) versus listening to a CD (removed). Both fill a certain need, balance the other out. There’s the getting away, and then there’s the coming back.

First (but not last) lesson about futility of trying to replicate good thing or good experience—never as good second time, only causes disappointment.

I have remembered, I suppose, what I wanted to remember; many ridiculous things for no reason that makes sense. That is the way we human creatures are made.

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I’m essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic.

When we were speaking on the phone, I envisioned not a distinct person with a face and body, but rather a vague, faceless essence, as if their whole personality manifested itself into an aura that wasn't exactly physical as we know it.