I sort of just strung the first three exercises together. The fourth is sort of all it’s own.

Too Cool

I met my partner when I was nineteen. I knew Lorin as an acquaintance from participating in the same young adult group. We were both on the same committee for an upcoming event and while I could get to a meeting I didn’t have a ride home so he agreed to drive me home. We sat in front of my house, talking for about three hours after that meeting. It was a great conversation. We touched on so many topics: family, school, art, philosophy, religion, and so much more. I remember getting out of his Subaru and watching him drive away. My exact thought was, “I would totally date that guy, but I am WAY too cool for him.” I’m not certain why I thought I was so cool. I was far from a cool kid but I totally had high thoughts of myself and was convinced that I was something special. I’ve always been overly confident.

Regardless of if I was in the cool kids club or not, I had a lot of fun back then. I had a terrific social network and from that network a core group of friends that included Lorin. It only took a month or two for me to figure out that he was absolutely cool enough for me to date. Within the next year, I figured out that he was someone I could hang out with for the rest of my life. We have been together for almost thirty-five years. In those thirty-five years I have realized that I am often a dork and he is almost consistently one of the coolest guys I have ever known. I can still spend hours talking to him and that is now what I consider the coolest thing about both of us.

I could be described as a social butterfly when I was younger. I almost always had plans to go somewhere or do something during the weekend and I had different young adult groups that kept me busy a couple of weeknights as well. Just because I was busy didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy being alone and taking long breaks to read a book and just be by myself. Because I am able to talk in front of crowds and I like to entertain, people assume I am very extroverted. It surprises people to find out that I actually have many introverted tendencies. As I’ve aged and changed professions I have had way less opportunities to be social. I don’t miss it. The joy of being home with my partner each night is so much more satisfying than the ordeal of going out. There are all the steps I have to take: getting ready to go somewhere, driving there, interacting with a group of people, and then driving home. Don’t get me wrong, I still love seeing friends. I’m just glad that I don’t feel so obligated to be part of the group or have such a frenzied and busy social life. It’s nice to be home with the ones I love best. If I am totally honest, sometimes that means just the dogs, cats and perhaps a book. When the pets are too needy, sometimes just the book.

I will be starting my 54th trip around the sun in a few hours. I have figured out that I am often a combination of opposing things. I am both cool and nerdy, introverted and extroverted, and I can be busy or still. I enjoy who I am in all the combinations those aspects mix into. I wonder if the key to contentment is just accepting that I don’t have to be just one way? Maybe I am not yet fully defined and maybe I never will be. Maybe just being content with where I am and realizing that my joy is in the unfolding of the story and not in getting to the conclusion.

exercise 4

I wrote about an embarrassing moment that I could reflect on. I might have cheated not looking for some deep troubling idea, but when thinking it over, this is the moment that kept popping up. I liked this story and wanted to tell it.

Timing is Everything

I have lived my life being way more confident and sure of myself than I have the right to be. Because of this overconfidence, I often go full steam into things I should probably approach with caution. I have learned not to dwell on embarrassing moments in my life and just allow them to fade away to a long lost memory. They only resurface if someone else dredges some awkward moment up. This ability is important because otherwise, I would have no time for anything other than obsessing over the humiliating things I have done in my life.

There are a few choice moments that I do pull out to mull over every once in a while. One in particular reminds me that my ability to be goofy is only eclipsed by my epically terrible timing.

This memory stars one of my dearest life long friends. This friend has a great name that he has not always fully appreciated. I do not have permission to share the name which makes the telling of this story a little more difficult but not impossible. He has two middle names. One honors the Saint’s day he was born on, and the other is his maternal grandfather’s name,

His name doesn’t matter so much. What matters is my friend’s ambivalence for his name. I thought it was an elegant name that he would grow into and fully own as an adult. (This story happened forty years ago so I will go ahead and claim that I was correct in that thought.) My friend spent all of his elementary and middle school years using his first name. However, it is one of those names that was ambiguous as far as gender, and the older he got the less favor it had as a male name. When he started high school he decided to use his saint’s name because his other middle name was unusual and could be a potential source of ridicule. He did get teased about his name from time to time so I understood his sensitivity, but I liked his name. It was a good name. I didn’t tease him about it which makes the entire story so ridiculously ironic. Timing truly is everything!

As our friendship developed, I started hanging out at his house for hours on end. I became very close to my friend’s family. I turned into that extra kid a family with too many kids often seems to collect. His mom is a second mother to me and I adore her. My typical daily, summer routine as a teenager was to wake up and go visit my second family. The children in the family ranged in ages from twenty to two. The two eldest were already out of the nest and making their own families. Since the four oldest left in the house were male, I became an extra caretaker of the younger kids. Which meant I was a help to my friend’s mom. Most of the time. At least as long as I wasn’t bickering with the boys. If I’m honest I was only sometimes helpful.

One day I walked over to hang out and found most of the family outside in front of the house. My friend’s mom was in the front yard sitting on lawn chairs visiting with an elderly couple while kids ran and played around them. As I walked up to join everyone, my friend made some teasing comment to me. I could not tell you what the comment was. It was just one of those silly comments boys say to girls to bother them. I reacted by doing something I don’t recall doing before. I called him by his other middle name in a sing-song teasing way ensured to make him cringe. I have no idea why. It's just what I did on the spur of the moment to retaliate.

The weird thing was that after I said it, everyone's reaction was just off. No one said anything for a few long seconds. His mom didn’t give her normal good-natured chuckle and the elderly couple seemed almost puzzled. My friend seemed to go through several emotions at once. Horror, embarrassment, laughter, and oddly enough compassion all rolled over his face in a matter of seconds. It was off-putting. I don’t know my motivation for using this rather weak form of teasing on him. I had never thought he should feel embarrassed by his name, so I had no reason to go there. After an awkward moment, my friend’s mother took my hand and told me that she’d like to introduce me to her guests. It was her father and his wife visiting from across the country.

I had teased my friend about his name in front of the man he was named for and who just so happened to be visiting from thousands of miles away! It would have been just the typical moment of embarrassment for me but for the perfectly synced set of circumstances that added to the awkwardness. Also, I didn’t normally tease him about his name. So I had this dual feeling of horror that not only had I put my foot in my mouth, I also looked like the kind of person that made fun of people for their name. I only went there because I thought I would get under my friend's skin.

I know he enjoyed that moment of knowing the punch line before I did. At the same time, he was kind enough to also be empathetic about how embarrassing it was going to be for me when I found out. He may have been my intended target, but that particular shot ricocheted right back at me.

I have a feeling he has no recollection of this moment. This is probably just one of my moments. A moment where, because I tried to embarrass my friend I ultimately just embarrassed myself and ended up looking like a buffoon in front of people I would have rather only impressed. It was not the last time. I am actually quite talented at embarrassing myself. I kind of hope he has no recollections of all the other times too. Hopefully they are all only one of my moments.

Just Janet

2 hours into the 10,000 needed to be an expert!

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