:: Dictated But Not Read ::
Musings from the ''Miracle Girl''| [::..archive..::] |
|---|
| Things That Have Been Said About Me |
| You are the Minx. |
| She plays taller than her height. |
| You have a refreshing attitude. |
| You're such a renaissance woman. |
| She's not much of a biller. |
| You are very angry. |
| You are so self aware. |
| You need a more sophisticated haircut. |
| You are not afraid of anything. |
| You have a great attitude. |
| Your life is like a Seinfeld episode. |
| You are winsome. |
| You look great in hats. |
| Miracle girl. |
| I am belligerently conciliatory. |
| You've got it big time. |
Friday, December 20, 2002
SlurringWhen I interviewed for my current job it was quite the process. I cannot remember the total number of one-half hour interviews and lunches but I know I was brought in on four separate days. The last of these was to meet the then hiring partner, M. He was not available any of the three other days I had come in. The day he was available to meet I was meeting with a high level political personage in the morning and then going to the lunch interview. It worked well for me because I was not prepared to tell my employer at the time what was happening and it would have been hard to come up with yet another excuse for being out. My teeth are not that bad. It turns out that M.’s schedule got busy and so the recruiting coordinator called my office and pretended to be a friend I was meeting for lunch, found out where I was, and I was actually handed a message while in a meeting with about 20 people and this political personage. I was terribly embarrassed. I was by far the youngest person in the room and probably the least credentialed person and there I am being handed an urgent message. Even more annoying, by the time I called back, his schedule had changed again and he was available to meet me.
We had a rather pleasant talk at lunch with two major exceptions. M. informed me that the firm does not hire people who are not in the top 5% of their class at my law school, thereby making it abundantly clear that he had not read my resume. I was not nearly top 5%. By that point in the lunch he had already told me that he had no real say so in my hiring and that it was already a done deal. He was just a rubber stamp. At the end of the lunch he informed me that he was not certain how my pay would be determined since my experience at a smaller firm may not be commensurate with others at my level who had started at the big firm. I found this insulting and told him that I thought my experience was actually superior to that which I would have gotten in a larger firm. He backed down and I could see he was impressed with my moxie.
I had no real contact with M. when I came to the firm. We work on separate floors and do not work on the same kinds of cases. About six months after I got to the firm there was a retreat at a resort about an hour from town for all of the lawyers in the firm. The weekend of the retreat coincided with the weekend that my husband was moving out of our home for a trial separation. I knew the marriage was over but I was taking things in stages. I had no real friends at the firm because I had only been working there for six months and of course, had not shared my plight with anyone. It had come up in conversation, however, that my husband had switched careers from law to photography. This was a great topic of conversation for lawyers. They always expressed such admiration for my husband following his creative spirit, blah, blah, blah. I noticed none of them were quitting law to pursue their creative spirits and more importantly they were not supporting anyone else who was doing so. So, the firm retreat was not something to look forward to.
Lawyers drink a lot. This is a fact. I decided that one does not drink at a work event and so I was not going to drink. That proclamation remained in effect until about 9:00 p.m. I decided to take a break from the party and went down to my hotel room. My assigned roommate was there. I did not know her well and still do not. However, it was immediately clear that for that weekend we were as mismatched as two people could be. I came in the room and we started chatting. She informed me that she was getting ready to pump her breast milk and go to bed. This sent me running back upstairs for just one drink. It was all downhill from there.
M. arrived a couple of hours later. He had to go to his son’s football game. He came in and we started talking. By then I had been talked into trying a variety of shots and who knows what and was totally blotto. It turns out that my then husband’s former law firm was having a meeting at the same location. M. and I had the following conversation:
M: Do you know what the xyz firm is doing here?
Margot (slurring): Nope.
M: Doesn’t your husband work there?
Margot (still slurring): Not anymore.
M (shocked): Well what is he doing now?
Margot (slurring and sneering slightly): He’s a photographer.
M (even more shocked): And you’re O.K. with that?
Margot: Of course not.
And thus a friendship was born. We talked for about three hours that night. M. was not remotely judgmental about me and my situation and offered practical advice and a lot of humor. M. is now one of my closest friends. I have derided him for his arrogance and failure to read my resume but understand that underneath the sometimes arrogant exterior is a truly honest and truly kind person. A rare find indeed.
D.B.N.R.
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Teaching ToleranceSeveral months ago I was attempting to meet a man I had never met. We had “talked” via e-mail and maybe once or twice by telephone. The context of our meeting is complicated and not relevant to this particular story but suffice it to say it was not without its discomfort.
I had written to him that I “live, work, and play” in a particular part of town. So, when it came time to meet I suggested a bar in my part of town. I was there on time and took a seat at the bar. I had not seen a picture of my new acquaintance and so I was looking for someone meeting his description of himself. It was not an especially busy night at the bar and so it would have been impossible to miss him. I do not mind being at a bar alone if I choose to go to a bar alone. I do mind being that women sitting at the bar looking around anxiously for the person she is supposed to meet. I also mind having to leave after nursing one drink for 45 minutes and realizing he is not going to show up. I was fuming mad when I got home and I fired off the following e-mail:
“There must be a special place in hell for a man like you who would keep a woman waiting at a bar alone.”
The response I got the next day was actually nice and apologetic. He wanted to understand how it could be that he was waiting at the bar too. The bartender even felt sorry for him and bought him some shots because he had been stood up. He then wrote you do mean the R&C on x street? That’s when the light bulb went off and I had the sinking feeling that I was the most evil person alive. There is a sort of chain of British style pubs in my city. They each have clever Britishesque names which to the untrained American sound alike. Unfortunately, although I have been to the bar in my neighborhood many times on this occasion I named the fake British pub in another part of town. It is a part of town that I would never go to especially on a weekend night. It is the haven of the partier, the frat boy, and those who are about 10 years younger than I.
My new acquaintance, not surprisingly, being my age and not being a frat boy, was not a fan of that part of town either. Nonetheless, being a bit shy and very polite, he went there and waited for about 2 hours. I suffered that indescribable feeling of being the smallest person alive. I was crushed beneath the weight of my own stupidity. There really is no apology sufficient for the e-mail I sent initially but I made a lame attempt. I figured that would be the end of it. I mean I doubt I would want to meet someone who had acted the way that I had acted and yet remarkably he did still want to meet. We did meet and are still friends. This was a major lesson in tolerance for me and I am grateful for the lesson, his tolerance, and his friendship.
D.B.N.R.
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Online Dating in the Twilight Zone(with apologies to Rod Serling)
About a week ago I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail. I was a bit stunned to find I had a note from someone on J-date. The online dating mechanism of choice for Jews all over the United States. I was crossing my fingers that maybe just for once it would not be someone who would let me know in the first five minutes of conversation that he has 200 DVDs and that I would discover within minutes later that none of the 200 was a Woody Allen movie. Maybe he would not have 3 kids who live 5 states away. Maybe he would be under 50. Well, I do not know how many DVDs he owns and whether any of them are Woody Allen, I do know he does not claim any children and he claims to be under 50. I also know a lot more about him. He is the most active overweight person I have encountered in a while. He cannot spell and he is NOT Jewish. I cannot describe him better than he described himself so here is what he says:
about me
XXX Law, third-year, from Buffalo, NY but here in South 18 years, I'm smart, funny, ireverent, considerate, sometimes shy sometimes assertive. I am somewhat overweight but I don't lead a "couch potato" lifestyle--I like biking, rollerblading, hiking, camping, etc. I don't mind parking in the farthest corner of the parking lot--a little exercise is always a welcome thing. Have been caving, rapelling, parachuting, bungee-jumping, etc. I wish I had more time to do such things, but it's tough as a full time law student. And my student loans do not allow for significant spending on entertainment, but I try to do the best I can on a shoestring budget. FINALLY, I am not Jewish myself, but I am trying this "J-date" thing because I hear it is a very good service, and I would like to meet some of the many nice Jewish ladies in and around this part of XXX County.
He is the man of my dreams. A combination of ireverent (sic) shy and assertive. I am somehow skeptical about all that and why he is trolling for Jewish women on a Jewish dating website. The irony of my inability to attract eligible Jewish men and to always attract ineligible non-Jewish men is not lost on me. However, where there is irony there is humor and I find this situation hysterically funny. I had so many responses in my head but my favorite was to suggest to him that J-date is a horrible service and I have not met one decent person on there. I should have told him to move on. I sent his profile to an acquaintance with whom I had been discussing J-date and its pitfalls. His response was priceless. He wrote, “So…did you sleep with him?”
D.B.N.R.
Monday, December 09, 2002
Talk to MeI attended college during the height of the political correctness movement. In retrospect I see its excesses but at the time I was a quite the apologist. Among other things I participated in a theatre troupe called Talk to Us. We went from dorm to dorm on our large college campus presenting skits that were of interest or that the university thought should be of interest to students. We covered racist comments, date rape, sexism and other such topics. We would present a short skit on a particular topic and then the facilitator would freeze the scene in the middle of the action. The facilitator would then solicit questions for the characters in the scene from the audience. Frequently the facilitator would ask a particularly emotional audience member, “how does that make you feel?”
Among my friends there was a lot of Talk to Us humor. One of the classic jokes stemmed from parental visits. Proud parents of actors were forever dropping into town to see a show and it seemed that each and every one of these parents would call their student actor the next week and tell him or her how much mom and dad enjoyed the “talk to me” performance. This struck us as hysterical for some reason and it still makes me chuckle as I type this. The other favorite joke was my boyfriend’s creation. Whenever someone was becoming impassioned about something, which as college students we frequently did, he would ask in a condescending tone, “how does that make you feel?” This also made my friends and I break up in laughter.
My boyfriend and I dated from the end of sophomore year until the end of senior year. Other than the aforementioned joke, my friends found him irritating and our relationship gross. We defined codependent. We used to schedule time to spend apart from each other because otherwise we would spend all of our time together. I have grown up a bit since then and realize now how unhealthy the relationship was and what his faults were. Still, it was something that worked for me at that time and I do not dislike him. We have remained friends and he came to my wedding. Someone told me that he made a comment at the reception to the effect that my parents always liked him better than my husband. I have not verified the comment with him and I cannot find the source of that information so maybe I dreamed it in a post-wedding haze.
We talk every couple of months. He called me about two years ago on a Monday night to tell me that he was engaged. I was curled up in a ball waiting for Ally McBeal to start so I could have a good solid cry. I had kicked my husband out of the house about two weeks before and I was indulging in serious self-pity. He told me the news. I was stunned. He was not only afraid of commitment but he was also seriously fearful of marriage. His parents had been through a nasty public divorce while we were in college. I gave as cheery congratulations as I could muster and he rushed off the phone. He had to catch the train home. He knew my situation and was never particularly good with difficult emotional situations so he fled. I curled back up on the sofa and had my cry.
The “I am engaged” telephone call came in September. In December he called me one night fairly late. I do not recall specifically but it is likely that I was in the process of negotiating a divorce settlement with my husband. The college boyfriend called and said he really wanted to know what went wrong with my marriage. As I see it now the inquiry was both stupid and insensitive. How could you ask someone in the midst of a divorce that question? At that time though, the guilt and the wounds were fresh and I was quite defensive. I tried to explain but even today all I can do is relate events. I cannot exactly distill a theme or explain the underlying disease that led to the death of the marriage. My relation of events sometimes falls on deaf ears, particularly male ears. It seems a lot of men need a list of concrete reasons or sins that have caused the down fall and if you cannot provide those they become suspicious. In any case, he was not interested. He really wanted to talk about his upcoming nuptials. He let me know that he and his fiancé had been in counseling for several years. He was not at all sure about the marriage but figured if it did not work out he could always get a divorce. The conversation was lengthy and his fiancé beeped in on his other line several times from her parents’ house where she was visiting for the weekend. I had little to say in response to all of this. I did not feel my advice was being requested. Still, several times between December and June when the wedding took place I was tempted to make a call or a visit and try to put a stop to it. I did no such thing but I also did not attend the wedding. I did not have the stomach for it.
Recently my two college roommates and I decided to meet in a central location for a weekend reunion. Randomly we picked the city where the college boyfriend currently resides. I called him for some hotel recommendations and he said he really wanted to see us while we were in town. My roomies reluctantly agreed to have breakfast with him one morning. His wife was conveniently unavailable. Much of the breakfast was spent chiding each other about silly college behavior and reviving jokes about things like Talk to Us. The remainder of the breakfast was spent with the college boyfriend interrogating the roomies about their lives. I am no shrinking flower and yet I doubt I spoke 10 sentences. I am also fairly confident and egotistical and yet I felt incredibly small and unimportant during that entire breakfast. I would like to say that it was his complete lack of confidence that produced my discomfort but I am sure that is not true. I was seeing a live confirmation that my choices of mates are just bad. I felt sheepish in front of my friends who were visibly rolling their eyes about the fact that he had not changed a bit.
Despite all the embarrassment about my choices, the most appalling aspect of the breakfast was my desire for the college boyfriend’s attention. I was on the verge of yelling out in the restaurant: Talk to Me!!! Now that I am away from there and back home safe I wonder why I cared and what he could possibly offer me. I wonder if it was not just simply nostalgia. Milan Kundera defines nostalgia as the suffering caused by the yearning to return. College was certainly a simple and happy time and maybe if he paid me some attention it would have brought me back to those days. Just as you can never go home again you really can never go back to college again so I plow ahead with a happy life and put my nostalgia away for the next time I talk to the college boyfriend.
D.B.N.R.
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
Boom. Boom. Boom.I had opportunities to do things while still a teenager that most people never get to do. When I was 17 years old I did not want to spend another whole year confined (as I saw it) with 80 or so other inmates in my high school. I do not mean 80 in my class, I mean 80 in the school. So, I talked my parents and then the headmaster of my school into letting me spend the last 4 months of my senior year in Israel. It was an organized program and there was a course of study in Jerusalem for 2 months and then a 2 month work assignment on a collective farm. The program was mainly populated with students from two Jewish high schools in the northeast. I would be one of the few “independents” on the trip.
The experience was unbelievable and included only two months of studying Israeli history with one of the best teachers I have ever had. I had a tremendous crush on him. We also spent a few days in a simulation of basic training in the Israeli army. The culmination of that training was about 3 rounds of target practice with an M-16 rifle. We also had numerous weekend trips to different parts of the country which brought us into contact with several different cultures.
My favorite weekend was spent on a Yeminite moshav. A moshav is a collective farm similar to a Kibbutz but the people are able to keep some of their funds separate from the collective. All of the people who lived on this particular moshav were Jews who had emigrated from Yemin. We were paired with a family who we stayed with for the weekend. My friend Josh and I stayed with a fabulous family. They were the most generous people I have ever met. Although I can eat as much as anyone I know I spent the entire weekend feeling sickly full because they never stopped feeding us. No sooner had we finished a meal than they would bring out some nuts and olives to snack on. If we did not eat they would get upset. The couple, Yaacov and Shira had 2 small children. Yaacov ran a successful tow truck company. They were a relatively young couple. Most Israelis have a passing knowledge of English, not so of Yaacov and Shira. My Hebrew at the time was good but not perfect. Josh’s Hebrew was better than mine and in general we had no trouble. In fact, by the end of the weekend I found myself thinking in Hebrew. The best moment of the weekend came when they shared their music collection with us. It turns out that although they understood no English they were quite fond of American music. This is common in Israel. The man who supervised us on the collective we lived on had a dog named Luca. A tribute to the song, “My Name is Luca”. It turns out that Yaacov and Shira’s favorite song was one that was popular in the 80s. My apologies for not knowing the artist but the lyrics are: “Boom. Boom. Boom. Let’s go back to my room and we can do it all night.” It was quite amusing to hear this song blasted throughout their lovely 2 story home with their children listening. Obviously, Yaacov and Shira had no idea what the song meant, they just like the sound of the music.
I was struck then and still am by the way that language, which is so fundamental to the way we interact, could become so irrelevant. I have no ear for music so lyrics have always played an important part in my understanding of music. It was bizarre for me to really see how completely secondary words could become.
D.B.N.R.
