Tag Archives: writing

Plutarch and Chill

At seventeen before school formal.

Back in April, I went to my 20-year high school reunion. It was a combined event of the last four decades of the graduating classes of years ending in 9. Since my cohort falls at the relatively more recent end, we were younger than two of the other groups, but staggeringly (for me) no longer the youngest at such an event. I’ve noticed this has been happening increasingly more of late. I still get a little winded when I cross over into a new age range on a survey. It seems like yesterday that I was in the final year of high school, rushing home to eat dinner before settling in to do my homework all evening while burning some lavender oil using a burner my friend Carlo had bought me. I did push myself hard in Year 12. Turns out he thought I needed to chill the fuck out…imagine that.

It was a fairly small turnout from all the graduating classes at the reunion. I imagine the school had twenty-plus year-old outdated addresses for many of my classmates. For others, they may have felt little nostalgia for revisiting high school. I’m still best friends with six of my classmates and we decided to go and make an afternoon and then, once the school portion wrapped up, evening of it at my friend Darren’s pub. We were probably the largest “group” there. The nerds shall finally inherit the earth! Or, at the very least, based on where the school sits, the valley. I don’t think we were actually the nerds in our year level, but I’m not sure where we fit. In the final year of high school, each clique had a table in the common area. We sat smack bang in the middle between the sportos (jocks in North American slang) and the boarders (the country kids who lived on site) and mingled with them and everyone else on either side of us. Then again, perhaps we might not have thought we fit a “type”, but it’s usually others who decide what type we are in high school, isn’t it?

We were taken on a tour of some of the school and I was surprised by how little it had changed. Even the small physical education changing rooms (the place where high school homoerotic dreams were made) in the auditorium looked – and, shudder, smelled – the same. I was taken aback that the library had moved to an undisclosed location somewhere else on the grounds. During Year 12, I’d start my day by reading the newspaper there and then booking in a lunch session to use one of the few computers in the school with Internet access (remember, I said we weren’t the youngest cohort at the reunion). I’d send emails from my Hotmail address (who the hell was I sending them to?) or play Hollywood Stock Exchange with Carlo. I just looked this up, and it still exists. I wonder if I still have my stocks in Mackenzie Astin.

After our night on the town, I hadn’t given the reunion much thought. But this past weekend, I was moving around some boxes and found a copy of a collection of student writing put out annually by the school. The volume was from my final year of high school. It wasn’t the first time I’d come across this small volume in recent years (see here). I was runner-up in the year-level writing competition. The winner was at the reunion – a delightful poet named Thom Sullivan. It’s probably better that I didn’t remember this humiliating (not really) defeat until after the reunion. My base instincts and a couple of beers may have led me to break his quill-holding hand and right a wrong I hadn’t ruminated on in two decades.

Over a cup of coffee, I reread my piece. Looking back from the vantage point of time, I can tell that I was very consciously trying to use every word in the dictionary. Why else would I use “gossamer” or “nadir”? My story was about a woman named Genevieve, who was named for actress Geneviève Bujold, whom I think I’d just seen in a movie. The fictional Genevieve had a life, friends, a job, and an apartment I called a “tenement”. I so obviously didn’t know what that word meant as I also gave her dwelling a mahogany door. However, for all that Genevieve had done, she had never really made her mark. The story was called “Deliquesce”, which essentially means to dissolve away. There was also something in the story about water and a seashell with the voices of the past and present, and I threw in the word “soubrette” to get my Shakespeare on. I left it open as to whether Genevieve died in the end. I can’t remember if I wanted to kill her off, but as Bette Midler said in opening her Divine Madness concert, “After many a summer dies the swan. But not when she’s stuck in a turkey the size of this one!”

When I reread the story, I smiled – if the execution was inelegant, it still isn’t half-bad. Plus, 17-year old Adam was hard enough on himself, and so he doesn’t need my help with that. My ideas were influenced in no small way by some of the giants we were reading at the time in English class – mainly, Death of a Salemsan by Arthur Miller and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller and Fitzgerald’s works dealt with the feats of two men who bought into a dream that did them no good. I had also fallen in love with the historians of Ancient Greece and Rome – Herodotus, Suetonius, Thucydides and, particularly, Plutarch. These historians of antiquity tended to focus on noble and ignoble men, alike – but men (unfortunately, so many of the women’s stories are lost to time) who had gone down in history.

Just as there’s no coincidence that these books are chosen for final year high school – a time when you’re figuring out who you are and who you want to be out in the world – my homing in on these themes wasn’t just because I had no other inspiration. Essentially, I remember how much I grappled with the question of “what is a life well lived?”. I imagine this to still be a pertinent question for a kid going out into the world today, although I probably wouldn’t have phrased it like that back then. For my 17-year old self, I thought a life well lived meant a life where I achieved something and was known. Wanting to “be known” was not restricted to the wider world, but I was very conscious of building a circle of friends and acquaintances, perhaps at a bar where everybody knew my name. Indeed, one day after school I went to a lunch bar/café in the city, ordered a cappuccino and Berliner bun with pink icing, and people watched. Though I spoke to not a one, I left that café determined to get to know these people, whom I imagined were regulars, in the coming months.

What struck me about this story, though, is how little my values have changed in 20 years as reflected in the story and what I remember from Year 12. Much more recently, I’ve been delving into the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), particularly what the approach has to say about values. As my teacher in the techniques of ACT has shown me, the commitment comes from wanting to commit to actions that move us towards living life in line with our values, even when negative experiences, emotions and thoughts abound (that’s the acceptance part). As ACT expert Russ Harris succinctly puts it, “The goal of ACT is to create a rich and meaningful life, while accepting the pain that inevitably goes with it”. I didn’t realise how much ACT is reflected in many spiritual traditions until I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose on the recommendation of my friend Donna Loren. She often seems to know exactly what I need, even before I do. Donna’s worked to understand her experiences, and, in the process, her insight has helped me and others to look more deeply.

Utilising the work of Dr. Harris (p. 23), it turns out three Cs are most important to me:

  • Contributionto contribute, help, assist, or make a positive difference to myself or others.
  • Creativityto be creative or innovative.
  • Connectionto engage fully in whatever I am doing, and be fully present with others.

It seems that while my more nebulous “being known” goal at 17 has evolved, it still has at its core a want to be known for doing and contributing something of importance. I think the need to be creative is a part of that overarching contribution value. The importance placed on connection has moved beyond wanting to know the patrons of a café to paying mind to the relationships I do have and being in the moment when I’m with those people. When anxiety takes over my brain and turns it into scrambled eggs, as it is apt to do, I find being present and in the moment with people terribly difficult.

Where does one get the most chance to contribute or be creative? Lots of places, but it’s often at work. And here’s the kicker. If I’m totally honest with myself, I spent a good part of the last decade in a job where, by and large, I don’t feel like I made that positive difference. While there were certainly exceptions of which I am proud, I stayed too long, even when I knew early on that this wasn’t the right fit for me. Yes, I had to pay the bills, I had just met my partner, moving away from family and friends for work wasn’t something I wanted to do, and so on. But I felt controlled and, in response to that, chose the path of least resistance and went with it. The genesis of this blog was my chance to be creative at a time when I didn’t feel I could find creativity anywhere else. As a result, I now feel at a stage where people who started their careers at the same time as me are really hitting their strides in an area in which they chose to research. More than that, they look like they are really enjoying the chance to be innovative and creative.

I’m now somewhere where I do think I can make that contribution and do more engaging work. At first, I was very anxious that I must hurry to catch up to everyone. Now with help from ACT principles, I’m realising it’s more about being conscious of the goals I want to achieve and to what end am I striving towards these things (that is, what are my values?). So long as I’m working towards them, that’s a good start. Again, I need to chill. Maybe I should get out that oil burner.

Being fully present with others is still sometimes hard. I’ve had to find mindfulness activities that work for me in all sort of circumstances as I wrote about a little while ago. I tried the raisin meditation once, where you essentially focus on the sensations associated with putting a raisin in your mouth and – here’s the important part – eventually swallow it. I put it in my mouth and down it went. Worrying that the person leading me through this would think less of me, or at least not have another raisin to give me, I pretended it was still in my mouth for a few minutes and swished around this imaginary withered old grape. Best imaginary raisin I’ve ever tasted!

Oh, you might be wondering what ever happened to that café. It barely lasted the year and folded before the close of the millennium. But I do now have another place to get a drink where a few people know my name. It’s all good.

Hasten Slowly

Billy (Zach Galligan) learns a valuable lesson in water conservation in Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
Billy (Zach Galligan) learns a valuable lesson in water conservation in Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Can you believe we’re approaching August? This year a lot of friends have mentioned how they feel the days and weeks seem to be flying by. Last Saturday on our way into town for dinner, Bob and I saw three young men dressed in festive sweaters heading to what was probably a Christmas in July soiree. It was a very cold night, and I can only imagine that this trio felt very wise indeed in their warm garments as they crossed Pulteney Street. We both wondered out loud where exactly they had bought their Rudolph sweaters with bright red pom-pom noses. Then it started to rain and the traffic became the focus of my attention. Please tell me if this isn’t specific to my city, but I get the distinct impression that Adelaide drivers experience a type of Gremlins effect when it rains. Just like little Gizmo in the film who gets wet and spawns some ballistic creatures, the ability to drive or act in any rational way on the roads seems lost when even a few drops fall.

I emailed my mentor and friend, Professor Emeritus Rosalind Cartwright, at the end of 2012 about how the last couple of years had seemed to fly by. I must have given her the impression that I had been drifting along, rather than using my time and talents effectively. Writing back just a few hours later, Professor Cartwright advised me to “spend your young adulthood wisely so that in the following decades you will have something valuable to do that lasts”. And her reply ended with “I saw promise in you that needs to be a focus so that time does not continue to slip away”. I return to her email often. It really was the start of three years of more productive work in my day job, as well as the start of this blog.

Professor Cartwright’s words echo whenever I resist the urge to do what I love the most: write. Two other psychologists, Hugh Kearns and Maria Gardiner, discussed procrastination and time management among other topics in a series of seminars I attended last year. They’ve also written some pithy columns on these issues for Nature, including “Waiting for the Motivation Fairy” and “Turbocharge Your Writing Today”. Their take home point regarding time was that you are never going to have more time than you do now. Hugh also had some cool visual props, but I keep their trade secrets fresh for attendees. From these seminars, I learnt to be really honest with myself as to when I was procrastinating and avoiding writing, and when there wasn’t enough time for everything I wanted to do, which meant some things had to go to make way for others.

And so I write to you after not posting here since May. Being honest with myself, there has been maybe 5% procrastination and 95% of what feels like a faster-ticking clock than usual involved. Procrastination is peculiarly strong in writers. Anyone who writes for a living or a hobby (and I do both) will tell you that writing is the hardest part of writing. Odd given I’d be concerned if a teacher told me the hardest thing about teaching was teaching, or a doctor telling me it was, ah…doctoring. Wait, that’s forgery, right? Which a good doctor would never do, unless it’s one of those “based on a true story” TV-movie doctors who someone like Judith Light or Melissa Gilbert has to bring to justice.

Like those doctors, a lot of writers believe they’ll be discovered for the frauds that they imagine themselves to be. Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes came up with a memorable title in their psychology research for this tendency: impostor phenomenon. I rarely see 200 lightbulbs of recognition go off so consistently than when I introduce this concept to psychology undergrads. My other consistent mental patterns are overgeneralizing and catastrophizing. If I can’t come up with a new idea, a coherent way to get my point across, or if I write a piece that I am not happy with, I start to think I’ll never write again, I’m a bad writer, and I’ll never write a piece as good as that last one. Although that last time was pure chance you impostor, you.

Owning the title since 1919 (via Wikimedia Commons).
Owning the title since 1919 (via Wikimedia Commons).

But I don’t only operate on a diet of procrastination, fear, and tapas alone. There are also more practical reasons for finding it hard to write. Since returning from Japan in late April, work has been incredibly busy and, more to the point, mentally taxing. Usually I write for the blog at night, but I haven’t had the energy after days of particularly complex and difficult research. It’s been all I can do to sit in front of the TV and watch MasterChef while thinking, Why can’t you cook like that 23 year old, you impostor… But I’ve had to realise sometimes it’s OK. I also made the decision to put on hold some initial ideas for articles as I work on three very large projects for the blog. The first is an interview conducted in late May, and is now in the writing-up stage. The second and third are two articles I am researching on actors who have passed away, but who left big impressions and much love for them behind. Although I do wish that I could increase the speed of my progress, I relish the research phase.

What do I do when I have ideas but not the time to write about them? I have notebooks all over my home office with the beginnings of articles. These may be a paragraph or two; sometimes even just an opening line. Some of these will be completed and others may fall away. But I find so long as I write them down, put the notebook to one side, and return to it every now and then, I will finish these initial ideas at some point. For those occasions when I don’t, I usually realise that’s OK, too.

Doing my best impression of The Lettermen at Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, Kyoto, Japan.
Doing my best impression of The Lettermen at Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, Kyoto, Japan.

There are lots of ideas in those notebooks. One of them is reflecting on the end of Mad Men in May, specifically critiques of the final episode. A lot of reviews centred on how much of a conclusion the final episode was to the series and its lead character Don Draper. Many of the shows I loved growing up didn’t have finale episodes. Often they had already been off the air for almost 10 or 20 years by then, and finales weren’t really the done thing when those shows were made. My favourite, Bewitched from 1964-72, certainly didn’t. Another favourite, M*A*S*H* (1972-83), did. It was even released on video. When I found it in Video Mania, I rented it, watched excitedly, and ran (not really, it was a distance from our house and I didn’t really run anywhere in those days) back to ask the 15 year old behind the counter if they had the last episode of Bewitched. He looked a little surprised, but to his credit he did type it (or something) into the computer. To this day I don’t really expect a show to have an end episode, although cancelling a show on a cliffhanger was done to maddening effect a few years back for my friend Paul with Kyle XY, and for me with the reboot of Dallas just last year.

I was happy with the way Mad Men did it. There was a good balance of the change required of central characters in a fictional narrative and the continuity of personality and behaviour in a person that is real life. Don would get up the next morning and his life would go on, whether he learnt to develop trusting relationships with his children, friends and co-workers, and a partner; and whether he returned to advertising. I think it was a good choice in the final season to have Don work at the real-life McCann Erickson, an agency that had existed in its merged form for 40 years when Don entered it, and which is now in 2015, 85 years old. We know that the agency would go on with or without him. When I left my first university job, I walked down the corridor, past the room where I had taught (and was, before that, a student) and almost expected the walls to come down. Metaphorically, at least – I’m sure the structure was sound. It’s like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes the voice of a cartoon dog named Poochie and advises the scriptwriters, “… whenever Poochie’s not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking ‘Where’s Poochie?’” I had to realise that’s not the way the world works, and Don had to do the same. Mad Men stops telling the characters’ stories in 1970. I am sad that’s where I leave them. But, come what may, I wish them all well.

I was also pleased with a nod Mad Men gave to Bewitched in one of its final episodes. They have done this many times before. I’ve always felt that inspiration for Don Draper and co. was drawn from their adman predecessors in Bewitched. I guess since Mad Men is set in the ‘60s and briefly in the ‘70s, Darrin, Samantha, and Larry Tate from Bewitched are actually contemporaries of Don, Betty, and Roger. I’m sure it was no coincidence that that decision was made to film part of the Mad Men episode “Lost Horizon” at the Warner Bros. Ranch, formerly Columbia Ranch. On this lot is the neighbourhood known as “Blondie Street” that is home to the facades of a whole range of shows, including Bewitched. It is here that Don’s attempts to track down the mysterious waitress, Diana, end. He rocks up at the home of her husband, which was used 50 years ago as the home of Samantha and Darrin’s nosey neighbours, Mr and Mrs Kravitz! Well, The Partridge Family house if you prefer dreamy Keith Partridge. When Don leaves, Samantha and Darrin’s house can be seen across the street! I like to think Samantha was at home at the time, waiting for Darrin to come home from a hard day at his office on Madison Avenue.

Don Draper stops past the old neighbourhood.
Don Draper stops past the old neighbourhood.
Meanwhile across the street with Samantha and Esmeralda.
Meanwhile across the street with Samantha and Esmeralda.

I haven’t started a new show since Mad Men finished. However, I have been engrossed in Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, which has also given me some ideas for a piece. In fact, about how quickly time feels like it passes. Of course, I went away to Japan in April and I should really write about that. But I know if I try to write about all of these things while I am so busy, I will probably end up writing about none. Ah, my old friends anxiety and catastrophizing, we meet again.

I am actually sitting down to write this on July 24. Some 46 years ago the Apollo 11 mission ended with the safe return to Earth of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. The date was one I remembered from school, but I was reminded of it after watching a story on TV about the discovery of an earth-like planet, Kepler-452b. What a title. Guess “Earth” was already taken, but still.

Marge: I don't see any anger. I see a yearning for freedom. Do you have a title? Jack: A Time to Kill. Marge: Titles are hard.
Marge: I don’t see any anger. I see a yearning for freedom. Do you have a title?
Jack: A Time to Kill.
Marge: Titles are hard.

I’ve just put on the record player an LP of The Walker Brothers before I go to get ready for my friend Adam’s birthday in the city. I usually prefer original albums to buying compilations or “greatest hits” on record, but this one was on sale. One of my favourite songs is “Stay with Me Baby”, and besides their version being included there are other great tracks. Right now “Make It Easy on Yourself”, the lead from their album Take It Easy with the Walker Brothers, is on. All right I see what you’re doing Scott, John, and Gary Walker. I’ll take it as easy as I can as I navigate the rain soaked roads, and likely more Gremlins.

 

Thanks to David Pierce for verifying that I did, indeed, see the Kravitz house on Mad Men. I was more focused on Samantha and Darrin’s.

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

SpringI don’t tend to take a computer with me when travelling for business. My most pressing task when I’m out of the office – unless working to a tight deadline for a project – is keeping on top of emails. This can usually be accomplished on an iPhone. However, the main reason I don’t travel with a computer or even an iPad (most of the time) is one to which a lot of people can probably relate. The idea of going through airport security with both a carry-on and a computer bag, and having to remove the computer to be x-rayed while fumbling around with getting things out of my pockets fills me with dread.

As a result of this concern, my bag from a recent trip to Melbourne is stuffed with complementary Sofitel writing pads. On these pages are notes and not fully-formed essays so it may take a while for the ideas to see the light of day here. In high school, I would always draft an assignment with paper and pen. The computer was essentially nothing more than a word processor. That’s if it was used at all. This was at a time during the transition from writing an essay with paper and pen to typing it (and probably writing the whole thing) on the computer. As with most things I do, there was a modicum of method to this madness. Often by the time I got to the third paragraph of an Ancient History essay, I had run out of things to say. With pen and paper, you could be creative with spacing and make it look a bit more robust than it actually was. These days my process for writing is different. While I can write notes or parts of paragraphs on paper, I really need a computer for the wonderful switching around and editing of paragraphs. It’s a bit sad, really; if I were to write someone a letter by hand for the personal touch, I’d probably have to type it before I wrote it out.

My travel worry is not all bad. Anxiety can be a motivator, and I think that I’m a very good passenger. My phone and wallet are out of my pockets before I even reach security and everything is neatly contained in a moderately-sized bag. When a group of friends and I travelled the U.S., shoes, belts and jackets were off with lightning speed. If you took us all out for a night on the town with the only thing on your mind to get us out of our clothes, we’d be a very cheap date. I’m reminded of how a sleep-deprived Jimmy Wayne, the country singer and all-round good guy, misunderstood a security-officer’s instructions once and ended up handcuffed in his boxer shorts. I’m sure that even my preference for an aisle seat began because I wanted to be close enough to the overhead baggage locker when the plane landed. That’s if I wanted to live on the edge and not use the much safer option of under the seat in front of me.

My friend Paul probably wouldn’t understand why I’d avoid taking an iPad on board stocked with the latest shows, particularly for long flights. But I’m usually content with a book and the in-flight entertainment. On a flight back from Singapore, I watched back-to-back episodes of the then-new Dallas. Putting fingers to keyboard today, I was originally going to write that I watched them on my way to Dallas, Texas. But I realized that I’m just fusing my memories of going through the airport in Dallas and seeing many men with the “ten-gallon” cowboy hats with watching the wonderful Larry Hagman on TV. I’d imagine he would tell me that “that’s an understandable cognitive error, darlin’.”

This update is also an attempt for me to make sure that I continue to post regularly. Conducting and writing up interviews is very much an ebb and flow business. Sometimes, I’ve got back-to-back interviews and am deep in research for more with little actual output to put here. My friend Mark would admonish me for not posting more regularly in the last couple of months. When I started the blog almost a year ago, he advised that to get people to come back, there’d have to be regular content. Admonish is probably too strong a word and I can’t imagine he’d admonish me. If I did suggest to him that he was being hard on me, he’d ask me over our regular Negroni (it’s Negronis this season), “Are you projecting?” I hate when he’s right. I’m being hard on myself. That being said, I’m happy to say in the next few days there will be an interview here with Kellie Flanagan, an actress on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir when she was a child and now a writer. But do be sure to stop by regularly here; in fact, you can subscribe so you never miss a post. Brendan O’Brien has a web page for his late father, Edmond, and I love a quote on that site: “Love is many visits”. I will be more direct: Y’all come back now, y’hear?

The title of this update post doesn’t really reflect what I’m writing about, but serves two purposes. The first is that the other day I was walking around the garden. To my astonishment, flowers were all of a sudden blooming, there were blossoms on the trees, and the grapevine was covered with green leaves. Mercifully there were not yet grapes to step on. After thinking winter would never end, it finally has. The second reason is when I look over the ‘Updates’ I’ve posted during the last year, there is a lot of weather talk. I’m just trying to be consistent. But you would prefer me making small talk about the weather, rather than that local sporting team. Right?