Secrets

Lots of people have life-altering secrets.

Some of them aren’t even Harry Potter characters.

I have a few secrets of my own, and of course they are clearly in the same class.

There’s an art to keeping this stuff out of the public eye. Like the Dread Pirate Westley up there, I invest a lot of energy and cunning in misdirection and subterfuge to keep the people around me from discovering the dark truth.

The need for secrecy comes from a firm conviction that none of them share in my transgressions, and that the full revelation would be too much of a shock to bear.

It’s not as if I imagine other people to be devoid of complicated inner lives. I just tend to suspect they might be better than I am.

Also, no, we never had a second flavor of pudding. Why do you ask?

Objects in Head Are Further Than They Appear

I’m finally watching Breaking Bad. For my fellow latecomers, it’s a TV show that follows the heart-warming story of a middle-aged chemistry teacher destroying his family as he becomes a drug lord to pay for cancer treatment.

The whole series is set and filmed in Albuquerque, so I keep seeing familiar locations and/or high school drama classmates in every episode. It’s a weird feeling.

People who live in sexy cities like New York experience this all the time, except that their shows are about witty friends or witty cop friends or witty crime scene investigator friends or teenage mutant ninja turtles, and mine is about crystal meth.

I imagine that New Yorkers and Angelenos become desensitized to seeing their landmarks on TV, just like I assume that people called Ashley or Jessica get used to encountering strangers with their names. I, however, am not accustomed to this phenomenon at all.

The combination of gritty, violent intensity and local surroundings is messing with my grip on fiction versus reality. I’m going around with the feeling that something dire and unpleasant has recently happened to me and resulted in amnesia. People ask what I’ve been up to lately, and it seems like I have a lot of important news that I can’t quite recall.

It doesn’t help that I’m also halfway through the last Hunger Games novel, since stories about teenage deathmatches don’t really create a feeling of security.

This pathetic level of limbic system gullibility is why it’s always a bad idea for me to watch horror movies. After five minutes of possessed hotels or masked strangers, I’m positive that those events could repeat at any moment and the next victim will be me. I have to venture out into the farthest reaches of bizarre improbability to find a film that will still let me stay in a house alone within the next six months.

After some harrowing Girl Scout experiences with urban legends (“Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody NONONONONONOIQUITDON’TLETHERGETME!”), I took a lot of comfort in the Snopes.com page debunking them. Then I realized that the site has a whole category for legends that nobody can prove didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, I hear that the words “embarrassingly suggestible” aren’t in the dictionary.

The Future Is Now

I was writing instructions for my office fax machine last week...

...when I made an error that opened my eyes to the possibilities we could have realized if technological development had taken a different path.

Of course, rewriting history is a double-edged sword.

Not Writing

Not writing is so, so, so much easier than writing. Even so, it is a specialized skill, and you can improve through dedicated practice.

The art of not writing is different from regular procrastination. Procrastinating is putting off work until the last minute by playing tetris, going out for ice cream, or watching three straight seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix.

Not writing is the next step. It’s the stage that begins once your guilty conscience strips the Blendtec YouTube channel of its power to thrill. In order to feel better while still avoiding work, it’s time to start lying to yourself.

I was already pretty accomplished at not writing in college, but deadlines and grades kept getting in the way of truly perfecting my craft. Now that all of my literary deadlines are self-imposed, though, I am rapidly approaching mastery. My most effective techniques for not writing fall into two categories:

Things that I tell myself are more important than writing

The key to satisfaction in not writing is believing that the other stuff you are doing is just as worthwhile, if not more so. In school, this category includes finishing the next three weeks of astronomy homework or putting 20 hours into that papier-mâché diorama of the Boer Wars that’s due after Christmas.

In the post-collegiate environment, I’m more likely to start with baking duck-shaped cupcakes for work or finally listening to that band my brother likes. These activities are obviously legitimate uses of time, I explain to my blank Word document, because I’m doing them for others. How could writing narcissistic comedy even hope to compete?

As the level of self-reproach increases, I escalate against it with home-upkeep oriented tasks, like alphabetizing the spice rack or trying on everything in my closet to decide what should go to Goodwill.

Eventually all of the sinks and toilets are really clean, and I sit down at the computer. I’m still open to more self-delusion, though, so it’s time for the second category of crafty ploys:

Things that I tell myself actually are writing

This is the real balancing act: avoiding the project by pretending to work on the project. The secret is developing ironclad mechanisms for achieving imaginary progress. In school, these tricks include picking fonts, setting margins, organizing sources, creating headers and footers with automatic page numbers, and figuring out how to type the accents in “papier-mâché diorama.”

Now, I prefer to start off by rereading my own existing material. This process is absolutely intended to help Maintain a Consistent Style; it is clearly not about Reliving Past Accomplishments Instead of Doing Anything. It also means that every post I finally finish gains me a few more minutes of delay for next time.

After all that staring at a screen, it’s about time for a round of cleaning out my purse while focusing single-mindedly on writing ideas.

When I eventually run out of fuzzy hard candy, I’ll turn to practicing ways to draw facial expressions in case I need them later.

As it turns out, not every picture is worth a thousand words.

In college, the not writing always had to end before the paper was actually due. But as a graduate who is neither graded nor paid for writing, I get to decide when everything is due. Sometimes I decide it’s never. When all else fails, though, there’s always writing an entire column about not writing things.

Trust Me

I like being an expert on things. If there were a way to harness this “internet” thing to regale imaginary strangers with long stories they don’t care about, I would definitely be all over that. I might even draw pictures.

The best times, though, are when you get expert status as a bonus—it just so happens that everyone else in the vicinity has less knowledge or skill in this area than the paltry amount you’ve got, plus no way of judging your own ineptitude.

A sudden snowstorm recently handed me one of those glorious moments of unearned authority. I was checking the freezer for ice cream around midnight when I noticed the snow through the window, and I went out front to look at it in case it melted before morning. That’s where I found my next-door neighbors and their abbreviated dog, staring around them at all of the weather and looking awed but apprehensive.

With a hand to my sagacious chin, I dispensed the deep wisdom of the ages.

They listened, confident in their newfound guru, as I nudged them toward enlightenment through sticking to major streets and looking for closures on the news. They had no way of knowing that I had spent the previous February frantically Googling how much road ice it would take for me to die of fear before even starting the car.

Of course, operating under unearned credentials is a risky game, and there’s always a chance they’ll figure you out. During the summer educator-training program for Teach For America, I once spent about twenty minutes as the person in the room who could draw. This is not typically a title I can claim in the presence of an even moderately capable fifth grader, so I was as surprised as everyone else by my answer to a colleague’s plea of, “Help! Can anyone draw a pet that kids have?”

However, in that rush of sudden exalted proficiency, you have to be careful not to push your luck. With everyone else thinking you have superior skills or knowledge, you can start to believe it yourself…

It’s easy to ruin the illusion.

Sometimes it’s just better not to reveal your expert knowledge in the first place. For example, the assortment of 65-and-older ladies assembled for Sunday School do not necessarily want all of their questions energetically answered.

In any case, you can definitely trust my advice on all of this. It’s pretty clear that I’m the expert.

Pretempathy

I am not always exactly the tops at compassion and human fellow-feeling. Various individuals who have been patient enough to live around me over the years can attest to this quality; they have all discovered my impressive ability to get aggravated over offenses that, in retrospect, might not actually require a full Red Alert.

As far as I can tell, this penchant for escalation is not a universal human trait. A few people I know seem supernaturally capable of seeing the best in everyone.

I, on the other hand, am considerably better suited to making up nonsense than to consistently appreciating the value of humanity. Luckily, this is a power that I can use to disguise my shortcomings.

In order to infiltrate productive society, I’ve started to artificially approximate empathy by inventing stories to explain other people’s behavior. It works particularly well with the phone calls I get at work.

These calls come in a variety of flavors, so I get a lot of practice.

My own demeanor, of course, never requires explanation.

Sicko

I caught a cold this past week, which was not a raucously awesome time. I didn’t get sick last winter, though, so this year I was pretty much doomed. It’s like hitting too many green lights in a row: You can only cheat the system for so long before getting stuck behind a bus for five cycles at the same intersection.

Actually, I’ve grown so used to getting a head cold for Christmas that the first warm rivulet of post-nasal drip oozed with the nostalgia of holiday tradition.

The saving grace was that my job offers not only sick days, but also the special bonus of actually wanting me to use them instead of coming to the office to spew contagion like a germ land mine.

This culture of not infecting others (Ha! Culture!) is taking some getting used to. In college I would just snargle my way through classes and into a puddle of pitiful, late-night studying and nose-blowing. During fall-semester finals of my senior year, I eventually followed the combination of an overflowing waste basket and NyQuil-induced forlornness to its natural conclusion:

In twenty-five years of phlegm experience, though, I’ve only ever lost my voice once—naturally, at the least convenient time possible. I’ve already mentioned my abortive stint as a 1st-grade teacher with Teach For America, which put me in front of a roomful of six-year-olds over whom I had effectively no control even when I could shout.

The day I started to lose my voice, I stubbornly decided not to need a substitute. I tried to encourage the class to keep their volume down so that I wouldn’t have to overtax my vocal chords, and since my go-to tactic is “THREATEN WITH RIDICULOUS THINGS,” that’s what I did.

In the end, I did have to take a couple of days off. I left some helpful notes for the sub, though.

Weirdly, when I got back to school, the students turned out to be better behaved than usual until my voice came back. They were oddly accepting of games like, “OK class, we’ll be learning about even numbers in Impossibly High Squeaky Voice today.” Maybe I was right about the substitute in the first place.

A helpful friend made sure to preserve my dulcet tones for generations yet unborn. This video features me attempting to sing our class song—music by Woody Guthrie, lyrics by me, and hand motions/frantic jumping by Miss Boling’s Class.

ARE YOU READY TO LEARN NOW?