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Daily Prompt: Life Is Steep

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I read a phrase today that I think should be used more commonly. Where I saw it, though, I do not remember. It appeared to be a typo, but if it was written like this on purpose, it looked like an artful accident. The writer described a learning experience as a “learning curb.” How great a pair of words is that?

I like collecting phrases like that. I enjoy proudly coining them myself even more, so I wish I could claim credit for this one. But I can not. I wish I could credit this writer—but does he or she know that there were was this epic phrase in their post? As I said, it looked like an accident, a typo. In the context it looked like they thought they had typed “learning curve.”

Many of my learning experiences did not have mere learning curves or even steep learning curves; indeed, there were “learning curbs,” on which I banged my forward progress to a sudden stop or flipped my vehicle.

Learning to drive, of course. An easy example. My first driving teacher was my father, and he is still with us and driving, and I am still here, so he must have done a good job. (I no longer drive, because of my spinal muscular atrophy; more than once I have watched my right leg move when I meant to move my left leg, my left for my right, and neither leg when motion from either one would have been good, which sucks and is sufficient to keep me unambitious about driving again. There are cars with hand controls, though.) My sole memory of my father teaching me to drive is his selection of an unreasonably steep hill in the City of Poughkeepsie (Noxon Street) to test my parallel parking skills. It was smart in that it made the lesson difficult and made the point: For my dozen years as a driver, I successfully avoided all parallel parking situations. I parked across town and walked to avoid parallel parking. I still have dreams in which I fall off the side of a city.

My next driving instructor was a coach at my high school, and he made me aware of something that I have struggled with my entire life, and not only when driving: I am a control freak, to use that overused expression. He gazed on my white knuckles pushed against the steering wheel, my fingers spread wide to enclose as much of the wheel as I could hold in my hands at once, and said, “Relax your hands. Those cars have drivers, too. You can only drive this one.”

I failed my first driving test. Of course. Sixteen years old (or whatever age) and a white, preppy-ish, suburban kid, like the boy-child I was? If anyone reading this is a driving tester, I hope you please flunk anyone matching that description, at least once. I earned my license on the second test, which my memory tells me I took later that same day, but knowledge of how things actually happen on Planet Earth tells me that this could not have been so.

I am a control freak. And I usually fail the first test, the tests in life where any coincidences between information in books and the facts in reality are revealed to be rare or nonexistent. (Any script that any retail manager has given me, no matter how well I have memorized it, has been blown up by the first real customer on the sales floor, who inevitably asked me something that did not appear anywhere in the script. Like if I knew the location of a bathroom.) But life has given me more than my share of second chances at these tests, more than I deserved or expected, deserve or expect. Eventually I learned that you can drive your vehicles far better than I can drive yours for you, as long as I pay attention to mine. Life gives us some steep learning curbs.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 25 declares, “Our free-write is back by popular demand: today, write about anything—but you must write for exactly ten minutes, no more, no less.”

Daily Prompt: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You will meet some people who find themselves unreasonably perfect. Unforgivably, unbelievably golden. Stay away from them.”

No one said this to me as I ventured into life as we know it. I do not know why; if I am blessed enough to be referred to by someone as their father someday, it might be one of the first things I tell the little one. In the hospital. Well, not the first. It might be a part of some advice I give as he or she heads off to college. Perhaps. Or maybe he or she will need to learn it on their own.

“They will tell you that they are their own worst critic themselves, but they will fight you bitterly if you ever criticize them or offer suggestions.”

* * * *
“I am my own worst critic.” I have heard this sentence many times and I have even heard me say it about myself. I probably said it about myself a few days ago. It is bunk. Most (not all) of the people who declare this (including me) are asking you to verbally pat them on the shoulder, tell them they need to go easier on themselves, congratulate them for their high standards. (Some people truly are too hard on themselves, but they tend to not declare this.)

A critic’s job is to attempt to figure out how something works, usually a work of art, and point out the spots where it is not working or not seeming to work well enough. Where it is failing to communicate. Ironically or not, it is not a job for someone who likes tearing things down. That’s what a reviewer does, and not a good one. (Someone should produce an annual book, “A Guide to Reviewers.” Very few reviewers are critics in the strict sense, because doing real criticism is grueling and gets into the nuts and bolts of a thing. It is a job in which one writes 25 pages on a two-page long, 48-line, poem. [It was “Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell.] On the other hand, there are a lot of writers who call themselves reviewers, but really they are critics who figure things out and explain it all to us, and I love reading them.)

I was the type of kid who liked taking things apart and putting them back together, enjoyed the search for the one necessary part that appeared to make the thing run when it was in place. The one part in whose absence the thing did not function. Now, I know that one could call this “slow-motion breaking things,” as very few gadgets that I played with were ever restored to a state one might call “functional,” but it is the outlook of a critic. I also loved doing magic tricks. How does a magic trick work? It isn’t by magic.

I enjoyed diagramming sentences, which is a similar thing. (My sentences do not vary in structure, much, I know, I know.)

If I had been truly my own worst or harshest critic, well, my life might have headed somewhere else. (I might not be writing.) No, I was my “worst” critic in that I did not see things clearly, how things worked and did not work. I was my “harshest” in that I liked, perversely liked, tearing myself down. And then I would feel angry at myself for my failure to: Get published, or finish a degree, or father a family, or something else. (Hey, you! Yeah, you. You want to know how to get published? Shhhh. Come over here. I’ll tell ya. Closer. Ready? FIRST, WRITE SOMETHING!) I never began anything so how could I legitimately moan at the absence of the sweet rewards of success? That is a terrible critic; really, it is just a bully. I was my own worst bully. (I am not that anymore.)

I was perpetually caught between my devil and the deep blue me.

The above is an honest assessment, briefly sketched. Honesty is a rare social commodity. One ought to attempt, at least attempt, to be rigorously honest. Not brutally honest. That particular word pair, “brutally honest,” has become a common phrase of late, and while I do not know its origin I do know that it is empty. A completely empty phrase. Any honest communication, from “I love you” to criticism, is not brutal if it is honest.

“Let me be brutally honest,” she said. “I like that cologne.”

We can be brutal, and it can be honest, but “brutal” trumps anything the word is modifying. When I was young, I learned the art of telling complete truths, honest truths, about TMI matters just to deflect questioners about things I really did not want to talk about. That is brutal honesty, I suppose.

Criticism, or anything, offered as brutal honesty is neither honesty nor is it criticism. It’s just brutal.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 24 asks, “How are you at receiving criticism? Do you prefer that others treat you with kid gloves, or go for brutal honesty?“Because the question was titled, “Handle With Care,” well, here:

The Fish-Slapping Dance

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“If you had to come up with one question, the answer to which would determine whether or not you could be friends with a person you’ve just met, what would it be? What would the right answer be?”

“That’s a great question. Oddly comprehensive, yet a little intrusive at the same time.”

“I agree, but my usual ice breaker question is to ask people that I have just met what their ice breaker question is. So, what is it?”

“Did you want more coffee?”

“That’s your question?”

“No. Your cup is empty. Free refills, hon’.”

* * * *
The speed with which one can determine the depth or length of a friendship—somewhere between forever and not at all—is inequal to the facts of a friendship. How many reminiscence-conversations have you had with friends in which you have learned that either your memory of meeting a friend is faulty or that the friend did not like you on first encounter? I have had both types.

I hinted in a recent column, okay, I explicitly stated in a recent column that if you find the “Fish-Slapping Dance” funny, you and I will more than likely be friends for life.

It may be the Monty Python troupe’s quickest route to the biggest laugh. I wrote, “If you do not find the ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’ funny, it may be because you find the waste of intellectual effort offensive. Or perhaps fish jokes generally turn you right off. ‘How is this funny?’ becomes the same question as ‘Why is this funny?’ ‘Why is T H I S on my screen?’ The ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’ actually can be seen as a depiction of the ‘How is this funny?’ conversation. Michael Palin, the ‘little fishes,’ dances the question, and then John Cleese, the ‘big fish,’ delivers the only possible retort: ‘It is or it is not.’ Splash.”

I can over-intellectualize and explain how the bit does not work, but every attempt I make falters the moment Michael Palin hits the water, when I laugh, sometimes quietly and sometimes out loud, every time.

I knew approximately two things when I wrote this a couple of months ago: that my girlfriend, the closest friend I have, probably does not know much if any Monty Python material and that I do not know if we share a sense of humor, even though she and I laugh a lot at many of the same things and same comics. For instance, her response after listening to some recordings of my radio show was to say that it was nice hearing my voice and that I sounded like I was enjoying myself. It is a comedy show.

Thus, I was rather nervous when I posted the Monty Python video above, several weeks ago, as she might very well read what I wrote, view the classic bit of comedy, and then instant message a break-up with me. I did not know what I did not know, but I was going to learn sooner or later. Are we companions for life, based on one sixteen-second joke?

“I’ve been sitting in my office, laughing at that.” she wrote me that night. Thus, my belief that the Monty Python “Fish-Slapping Dance” is the litmus test of comedy, a proof of companionability, was sustained.

Kindergartners may have the most effective conversations for establishing a friendship: favorite color, up versus down, best food. Matters of eternal importance like those. I try to remember this and always keep track of what is important to me, just in case someone wants to know on the spot: Green, the number 4, the letter N, the word Yes.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 23 asks, “If you had to come up with one question, the answer to which would determine whether or not you could be friends with a person you’ve just met, what would it be? What would the right answer be?“