Glass Houses

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There is a wonderful show business saying that if a performer is a great enough talent, “you could put him or her behind a brick wall and they will still find a way to entertain.” While I believe this to be true in idealistic theory, I also think that not putting him or her behind a brick wall would be profoundly helpful to their cause. If a website is going to be worth a visit, publicity is going to help get that visit.

I have gone viral approximately not once, so I have some expertise in the field of not being at all famous.

Some of you may not remember that last March I was almost on the verge of getting on line for the waiting room to visit the Land of the Almost Known. My “About.me” page was featured on that website’s “popular” list, and my page, which usually receives about 150 views per day, was seen by 3051 other About.me users, 2000 within the first hour of being listed. Another 1300 visited the next day.

Three thousand. I know, I know. I have lived in at least one building that had a larger population.

What does fame feel like? Living in Philip Johnson’s “Glass House.”

The Glass House. Located in New Canaan, CT, it was built in 1949.

The Glass House. Located in New Canaan, CT, it was built in 1949.


 
This post will be number 192, I think, on this website. There are a handful of columns that I am proud of having written and published, and they are these:
1. The several pieces I have published about my life with adult spinal muscular atrophy. I even explain the duck on my website. Here, I will group them together in one package: Spinal muscular atrophy.
2. A Conspiracy Theory of Conspiracy Theories
3. Guilty of White
4. Requiem for a Sponsor
5. Two appreciations of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band and its leader, Vivian Stanshall
6. A column about the Baseball Hall of Fame
7. An appreciation of one of my favorite places, Opus 40
8. Comedy: The ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’
9. A column about W.H. Auden’s character: “Auden’s Decency”

As a self-publicist, I am not certain I would hire me, but I was the only person to apply for the job. On Twitter, there are a handful of people who profess to like what appears here and even share selected pieces. That amazes me, and I am speechless.

There are also people on that service who use unpleasant names (I was called the B word recently, which was a surprise) or offer strange advice (when I shared a recording of T.S. Eliot the other day, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, one person took the time to explain what drugs I ought to get a prescription for, and that he could help). In the name of publicity, I should never block anyone, but I did in both of those cases.

No glass house for me.

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Please visit some or all of the above columns, follow me on Twitter, and please subscribe to The Gad About Town on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thegadabouttown. Thanks.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 6 asks, “Your blog just became a viral sensation. What’s the one post you’d like new readers to see and remember you by? Write that post.”

Humble-Bragging, Part 2

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The word “humblebrag” has been around long enough that even I have heard of it. (Is that a humblebrag?) A collection of examples has been collected in a book that I have not yet read, entitled, “Humblebrag.” The word is common enough that it is even in the Oxford Dictionary, at least in the online edition.

For some reason, I only recently learned the term and, egomaniac that I am, I thought that I had come up with the concept years ago. I certainly had not.

That is probably a humblebrag.

The word describes the craft of hiding a brag about oneself inside a seemingly self-deprecating statement. For instance, if and when I name-drop a famous person and simultaneously mention how nice they were to li’l ol’ me, which is something that I certainly have done, that is a pretty standard humblebrag. A humblebragger gets two social rewards for the price of one: a congratulations for the achievement that they are proud of—and perhaps ought to be proud of, even without the name-drop—and a verbal pat on the shoulder in recognition of their semi-sincere humbleness. “I met Oprah Winfrey once,” is a minor brag that is almost no brag at all, unless the conversation is not “famous people we have met,” but instead it was your reply to, “Have you decided what you’re getting yet? I’m starving.”

“I was hanging out with Oprah Winfrey the other day,” is a big brag if you merely saw her private plane near your gate at O’Hare Airport. We have been taught that people do not like braggarts and that humbleness is a positive attribute to be celebrated.

“I bet Oprah Winfrey tells just about every li’l ol’ barista (like moi) that they make the best (insert name of coffee concoction here).” That is a humblebrag. It rhymes with “Shut up.”

(In full disclosure, I am not a barista, and I have not met or otherwise encountered Oprah Winfrey. I have been in O’Hare Airport a few times and may have bought a coffee there.)

Most of the above was written a few months ago (“Humble-Bragging and Secret-Keeping”) on the subject of keeping secrets. My thesis then was that if one is asked whether one is good at keeping secrets, there really is no good response to that question. It is a social logic double-bind: If one is good at keeping secrets, there is only one way to prove it—by keeping a secret—and any new acquaintance who might test one’s skill in this realm by sharing a secret is either sharing something not worth keeping secret (“Can you keep a secret? I’ve been wearing blue all week!” “Yeah, um, you’ve worn the same sweater three days in a row.”) or is worth avoiding at the next Anonymity Anonymous meeting. (Friendships offer enough challenging—and rewarding—situations without the addition of tests.)

In a similar vein, one can ask about another person’s bravery; my sad life experience has been that those who tell you spectacular stories about their personal experiences with their own honest-to-goodness bravery sometimes do not show up when needed. (Sometimes they do.) I have been friends with people who have had to dig deep in themselves for physical and emotional bravery—people in the military, a member of the NYPD who was buried in rubble on 9/11, one of the first female firefighters in New York City—and none of them volunteered stories. Each of them would volunteer a story about a time he or she had screwed something up far more readily than speak about rescues they had authored.

I am no hero. I hope I have helped out some people, but since I do not know, I assume I have not. So I keep myself available.

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I chose a new layout. I was using “The Columnist” all 2014, was happy with it, but thought I would change things for the new year. I am still using the free layouts but might invest money in this website. Any suggestions? Advice? Does this layout make my ideas look good? And thank you to those who have responded so far.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 5 asks, “Tell us about the time you rescued someone else (person or animal) from a dangerous situation. What happened? How did you prevail?”

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Firsts, Lasts. Somewhere in the Middle

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are many “not-yets” in this particular life. A lot of firsts yet to come. In my clever disguise as “me,” one consistent fact about my me has been its surprising lack of aplomb when doing something for the first time.

My reactions are aplomb-less because they are reactions, not responses, usually. It is often as small a matter as declaring out loud with my outdoors voice, “This is the first time that I have … .”

There is one thing I recall from my first day of kindergarten: Being shoved off a three-step cube that bridged two sides of the classroom together. I had decided to greet each new classmate with a handshake and that was my reward for acting like a grown-up. To this day, forty years later, I am rarely the first to offer a handshake in social situations, and on the annual occasion when I do offer my hand first, the party whose acquaintance I am making usually reinforces my reasons for not offering my hand first.

(A couple years ago, I met someone, stuck out my hand, and then watched as the guy looked at my hand, at his hand, and then back at my hand. He did not shake my hand. Had I challenged him to a duel or something? We did not become friends, and the one time we hung out with each other he spent several minutes verbally lusting for one of my female friends, which I ended by walking away after pointing out that she and I were friends. A first impression may not always be right, but they can be.)

I do not often wear life like a loose garment, as it says somewhere that I should, but there are exceptions: The moment I met my girlfriend. (Her name is Jen, by the way. I have not formally introduced her to you or you to her: Jen, readers; readers, Jen. This is probably because I consider her The Reader and have told her that “Dear Jen” is at the top of the first thing I wrote after she and I met, and that everything I have written since has been the body of that letter, including this website.)

I aspire to wear life like a loose garment. A condition that I have, spinal muscular atrophy, is helping. SMA is a genetic disease, but for me, an adult with the adult-onset version, it is not a life-shortening illness. It reduces my mobility. I move slowly and sometimes walk like I am a flat, two-dimensional, cartoon character. But I can walk. Sometimes, but not often, it hurts. I am not as sadly intimate with pain as so many others are, but what little I get to suffer as my muscles fight a silly fight against atrophying make life into a tight garment for me and every role I embrace—lover, writer, son, brother, friend, handshake specialist—goes out the nearest window.

There is a last first and I hope it is faaaaaar off. It is reported that W.H. Auden desired that his last words would be, “This has never happened to me before.” In a great speech, the basketball coach Jim Valvano explained life:

There are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.

 
A full day in a loose garment and life will offer no more rude handshakes. As the sadly late Stuart Scott used to say, “Boo-yah!”

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In answer to no one’s question: Yes. I chose a new layout. I was using “The Columnist” all 2014, was happy with it, but thought I would change things for the new year. I am using the free layouts still, but might invest in this website. Any suggestions? Does this layout make my ideas look good?

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 4 asks, “Tell us about your first day at something—your first day of school, first day of work, first day living on your own, first day blogging, first day as a parent, whatever.”

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