November 28, 2010 - Breakfast

I found this old email resigning from a client gig, written when I was 22. I'd taken a full-time job and I was too swamped to meet the web needs of a cultural organization (paying maybe $15/hr all told). The email goes on too long, but re-reading it I was taken by surprise by how incredibly together I sounded. Were I to receive that email from someone in their 40s today I would be entirely happy with their professionalism and gracious attitude. I was perfectly clear about why I was leaving, made sure it would be an orderly transition, and offered to help in any way necessary to make the client's life easier. I did do that, according to followup emails.

It was, I'm sure, written in a room without much light, with a mattress on the floor without sheets. But that's beside the point. My memory of myself at that age is of a sullen incompetent, incapable of sorting his thoughts into even the vaguest order (paradoxically furious with the world for refusing to recognize his awesomeness). But this is the email of a competent. Given how little I actually knew it's a fine performance.

Before this gets too bad, I'm declaring a sort of personal amnesty. I get to return to something more calm without making any apologies, without explaining and unburdening myself. I don't need to tell sad, funny stories about sneaking into the other room at my brother's place with some pumpkin pie while my wife yelled at me. The moments when I looked at cake with cunning. I don't need to explain why my occasional bouts of depression make it hard to get work done, and instead draw me towards insane projects that may never be finished while other tasks sit festering in the TODO. I don't need to document any of it. I just know that right now, at this point in my life, given a bottle of bourbon I will drink it; given a steak I will eat it; given a nap I will take it; given some work I will do it, but only after hemming and hawing. The moral consequences of smoking are unbearable--cigarettes damage my reproductive issue to a point that makes fertilization a problem, which when my wife is hepped up on damaging chemicals anything but real potency puts her health at risk. (I seem to have beaten cigarettes down, aside from that time every day when I think, my, I'd like a cigarette.) Anyway, every story of weight loss includes a kind of relapse, right? The moment when you start to head for the bottom again, budging and compromising. Why? Because I have concrete knowledge of how to dig out, and so one more compromise won't kill me. I want potato chips, and tomorrow I will ride my bike. Riding my bike will lose the weight. Of course this is not reproducible; this is not something I can keep doing. But I wish it were, and I like wishing. Plus being married, and having a family, and needing to do all this work, and all this writing is a pain in the ass. And what will I earn from moving in the other direction again? The approbation of morons, more friendliness from strangers. I've discovered the country of the normal-looking, of the merely heavyset, and found it sorely lacking. But that said, the corpulence equals only death, the slow droopy death of oxygen hoses and Mrs. Dash and strangers pumping your exposed, flabby chest with their hard palms, trying to reboot the heart, and I don't want that; I want to die with dignity, in an automobile accident or a plane crash where I fit perfectly within the child-sized seats.

So here's the deal: I work patiently and diligently. I get through my TODO and meet my obligations. But I say no to things that I don't want to do, and I allow myself to be fully in charge of how I spend my time going forward. And if I feel guilty, and like I can't be replaced, well, they need to be paying me more anyway.