Cirque du Malaise

On my brother’s infallible recommendation, I watched a documentary the other night called Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. It’s about the factory in Queens where they make Steinway pianos — the Cadillacs of the piano world.

This movie was sincerely one of the most moving and riveting things I have ever seen. The filmmaker chose, at random, a grand piano whose birth and fate was tracked from the logging mill in Alaska where the wood was born to its final destination in Carnegie Hall. The process of making a Steinway takes almost a year, and is an intricate and elaborate affair. Steinway is one of the last piano companies to survive the falling-out-of-favor of pianos, and they still make every single piano entirely by hand in the exact same way they did a hundred years ago. The piano is an incredibly complex instrument with many parts, and every single part is created and attached by hand. Each person who works in the factory has exactly one job — a job they do perfectly and over and over.

There’s a guy who’s spent the last 40 years of his life hand-chiseling divets into the part that holds the pin that holds the piano wire.  Someone else hand-shapes each key. Another person strings it.There are three different people who tune the piano in different ways. The thing spends a month just being tuned. Every inch of it — even the parts you’ll never see — is perfectly handcrafted and designed.

Every person that works in that factory has reverence for their job and the artwork they are creating. The love and care and perfection and artistry that goes into each piano is breathtaking. That’s why Steinways are so expensive and why they are considered the best concert and parlor pianos in the world. Each piano, because it’s made by hand, has its own sound and its own disposition. So musicians are very particular about which one they play.

Back in the day, everyone had a piano in their parlor. But now, it seems, only the very rich and classical-inclined bother. So the piano business is sort of a dying art. However, it’s a rarified art that should not be allowed to go extinct. That would be a very sad day indeed.

I don’t play piano, although I once thought I could.

When I was little, my mom, who worked nights as a waitress, one day brought home a piano. My Great Aunt Beatrice was a one-room-schoolteacher in rural Vermont, and I think it was through these school connections that my mom got her hands on a free piano that no one wanted anymore.

It was really not a great piano. It was an upright, and it had been painted sea foam green. It was never tuned. It was ugly, and no one in my house even knew how to play piano (although my mother once did, rumor has it — she is probably going to read this and protest that she still does, in theory).

I took a mild interest in this piano for a period of time. I learned to play the requisite Chopsticks and maybe a few Christmas carols. I liked the idea of being able to play the piano. But, like many things in my life, rather than actually do the thing, I read about it instead. When I should have been practicing, I would curl up in a corner with the enormous hardcover collection of books about classical composers that my mother had also brought home one day. I became riveted by stories of Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven. I was stoked when that movie Amadeus came out, because I already knew the debaucherous story by the time I was ten.

I never really did learn to play that piano, and neither did Elia. Eventually it turned into another flat surface for us to pile books on. I think that piano is probably still in my mom’s foyer. It’s never been tuned, as far as I know, and the thing probably hasn’t been played in 20 years. But I will say this: I still love Classical music, and particularly when it's heavy on the piano.

When I watched Note By Note last night, I felt sad for the old piano languishing away in my mom's "parlor." But it made me realize how much my mom prioritized creativity in her children. Which, as far as I am concerned, is the singular most important thing a parent can do.

Oh and if you are into parlor pianos and things old people do that are super cool, please check out the new creative project I just launched with Leslie Munday: Elderchic!

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which
abides nowhere but in the present.

Michael Pollan

I read an article in Wired Magazine the other day called “The New Science of Forgetting,” about how scientists are working on a technique that will basically enable us to Eternal Sunshine bad memories from our brains. This has all sorts of applications for PTSD and people who have been subjected to horrible traumas and abuse, but of course I read it from a personal and self-absorbed standpoint. I certainly have some memories I’d like to vanquish, and I’ve been waiting for someone to invent that machine ever since I first saw the movie.

Alas, the memory erasing technique they are hard at work on doesn't actually erase your memories as much as it does render them powerless by zapping them of their emotional charge. Something about proteins compounds and neuron networks. I don’t know.

What I did find interesting about the article was the description of how our brains actually form memories in the first place. They’ve done all sorts of research to prove that most of our memories are not static, and they are actually not necessarily wholly or even mostly accurate and true. Our memories are informed by our feelings about our memories (Marshall Rosenberg would have a field day with this) and we constantly reinvent our memories every single time we remember them. Different parts of our brain collaborate to keep a memory intact, aided by the use of savvy proteins, and each time you recall something, it takes on a new shape based on the random circumstances of your remembering moment.

So for instance, if you are reminiscing about your first kiss, and as you are taking a mental stroll down memory lane, you get crashed into by a truck, guess what? Next time you think about your first kiss, you’re not gonna have such fond feelings about it. No; there will be an ominous sense in the back of your mind that there is something not-quite-right associated with your first kiss. And before long, your memory factory has segued that good dream into a bad dream. This is an extreme and extremely novice translation (probably you should just read the actual article and not take my word for it), but I had long suspected that a lot of my memories were not, in fact, memories, but stories my mind had constructed based on memory seeds. And in fact, that’s exactly how “memories” are formed. They aren’t really about what actually happened, but how your mind translated it and which elements it decided were important to store.

Once again, science proves to me that creativity is really what makes the world go round.

I was talking to a friend who needed help editing a paper. She said she was having a hard time getting the wordcount down to fit the requirements of her assignment. I said, hand it over, because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s throwing away words.

Other things I am good at:

1. Cleaning out closets (my own or yours)
2. Giving things away that I actually really like just because someone else said “hey that’s nice”
3. Washing glasses before you were done drinking that thing
4. Not finishing my food
5. Breaking up with boyfriends

Hmm. I am sensing a pattern here. One might say that I have a fear of commitment, but actually, that’s not it. I have a fear of garbage (see #5). I’ve always had a thing about not wanting to accumulate too much stuff. I like to know that the amount of stuff I have is manageable. I live in a very small cottage with hardly any storage. My closet (my one single closet) holds less clothes than most of my friends have in the trunk of their car. When I buy a new pair of shoes, I have to get rid of an old pair.

It’s not that I’m not materialistic. I am. I love things.

It’s more that I’m fickle. I like to think of it as “Buddhist.” I try not to get too attached.

Along those lines, I have an ambivalent relationship with the concept of owning books. On the one hand, I am a writer who gets paid for writing, so it would seem reasonable that I would believe in supporting other writers by buying their books. On the other hand, my extreme aversion to accumulating things (and to excess in general) has led me to a philosophy of sharing books.

I used to collect books as a testament to my readerly accomplishments. For many years I lugged boxes and boxes of books around every time I moved. After about my 4^th cross-country move, I finally took a cold hard look at my collection of books and what it stood for. Did it stand for my convictions about reading and supporting writers? Did it stand for my adoration of storytelling? Or was it simply an ego-based testament to my reading accomplishments?

The truth is, I rarely read a book twice, and if I do, it’s decades later. There are too many books to read and this life is too short. (There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to every rule.) Also, I really like to support the library system.

In the end, I got rid of all my books. Except, you know, my Chronicles of Narnia and my Little Prince and my Maggie B and my Julia Cameron books and a few others. I ran into an old friend yesterday, and we had this very same conversation about books. He said that he always keeps his books, and has shelves and shelves of them. He said: “Books are treasures.”

That they are, my friends. That they are. But for me, they are treasures whose energy I love to pass along.

I have never been a morning person and getting up early has always been a struggle for me. In fact, getting up, period, has always been a struggle for me. I like to clock about 9 hours of sleep a night and if I don’t, I generally feel like murder all day. Except between 9pm and midnight, when I always feel completely alert and pretty much fantastic, no matter what.

It’s not uncommon for me to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning reading or writing or watching mindless sitcoms, but luckily for me I work for myself and don’t have to set an alarm. Not setting an alarm is a way of life I am quite devoted to, in fact. You might say it’s a personal philosophy. I think the world would be a better place and we would all be better people if we were abiding by our own natural sleep rhythms. For me, that means I don’t generally wake up before 9 in the morning, and sometimes later, depending on the time of year and how enthralling the book is that I am currently reading until the wee hours. (Which, right now, is the new Steve Jobs bio and yeah, it’s a good one.)

Occasionally I will make the mistake of having a soda at the movies — like I did when I saw the incredible Steampunk (thanks, Maynard) masterpiece Hugo the other night — and then I’ll have an even harder time getting up because of the sugar hangover.

This is not just laziness or petulance on my part. It’s my genetic legacy. The other day I called my dad at 9:30pm East Coast time and asked him what he was up to. He sounded groggy and out of it. I thought I might have woken him up. And I had. “I’m napping,” he said grumpily. That’s right, napping. When pressed, he elaborated that he generally naps in the late evening and then gets up and starts painting. “Jos,” he said, “You know I get my best painting done between midnight and 3am."

My dad is retired and recently managed to finally shake his horrible evil coldhearted wife of the last 25 years, so he can afford not to set an alarm or bother to care what society at large thinks about what time it is appropriate to get up in the morning. In this way, he is my hero.

Roughly 15-17 times a week, someone tries to convince me that I should really get up earlier so that I can better accommodate their schedule. My exception-less refusal is just one of the many reasons I'm starting to suspect that I will always be alone. But as long as I can sleep in, I'm fine with that. Oh, and before you start to suspect that I'm a nihilist, here's my Christmas tree:

I was recently dismayed to find out that I weigh 20 pounds more than I did 2 years ago and 30 more than my ideal, target weight (which is: the weight I have to be at for my awesome collection of size 6 hand-me-down jeans to actually fit). I had a mild nervous breakdown for a few days. Okay, not mild.

Then, because at this point in my life I’ve learned the hard way that no secret angel is ever going to come fix all my problems for me, it became sadly obvious that I only had one choice: DIET.

I have never been a dieter, ever, although I have tried every smart and wholesome eating system this side of the Sierras. I’ve done all manner of juice/wheatgrass/colonic cleanses/protocols, and they have never worked for me. All they ever do is whack out my blood sugar and send my entire system into the sort of distress that inevitably leads to horrific rebound binge eating and emotional trauma. (And if you are thinking of recommending that ONE AMAZING CLEANSE I have never tried, save your breath.)

I’ve also gone the route of more gentle and holistic eating protocols, such as the 3-month elimination plan that my acupuncturist Caylie See put me on last winter. That actually made me feel fantastic and helped me with a lot of things, but, unfortunately, it did not make me lose weight, even though I stopped drinking, eating sugar, eating dairy, gluten, stopped enjoying everything, basically, for three months. (And I have to note here that the goal of the program was NOT to lose weight, so it’s no fault of Caylie’s. She’s truly incredible at what she does.)

Here’s the thing — the women in my family get fat.

I’m from a long lineage of matronly women. The Westcott/Bangs/Hamilton women, they start out reeeaaaallly skinny and then swing to the opposite side of the pendulum over a long lifetime of having babies and being enduring, stoic New England sorts. I thought I might evade this pattern, since I am woefully childless and moved to California, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter. It’s hardwired.

As a kid, I was emaciated and actually anorexic for a while, and my mom and grandmother were also wispy little waifs when they were young. It’s when we get older that things predictably slide. Now, my mom is in pretty fine form these days, mostly because she owns a restaurant and so (ironically) doesn’t eat because she’s too busy running around being mad at her employees all the time. She also doesn't have blood sugar issues. She’s one of those annoying people who “forgets” to eat food and maybe eats one meal a day, maybe. And she is a jogger. Me, not so much. I wake up starving and get hungrier, crankier, and fainter from there. If I go too long without eating, I become palpably murderous. And as for jogging, no.

I know that technically it’s unhealthy to starve yourself, but here’s a dirty little secret that all women know and most holistic consultants don’t want you to find out: it’s the only real way to lose weight.

So I have come up with my own eating plan that is my shining salvation and only hope. Fingers crossed.

The Small Bowl Diet^TM is basically an artistic expression-meets-portion control eating plan.

Here’s how it works. First, you make a really cute, small bowl in pottery class. This is your one and only Small Bowl^TM. Now, you can eat whatever you want (except evil sugar, of course) as long as it fits in Small Bowl^TM. When you eat out of the bowl, you always take a moment first to admire how good you are at pottery. This is essentially a distraction from the fact that you are eating a concentration camp amount of food.

You wait until the point that you are absolutely starving, and then you wait just a little longer, for good measure, and then you eat ONE Small Bowl^TM of food. You eat it slowly, as if torturing and punishing yourself for being fat, and when that’s gone, that’s it. You should still be hungry when you’re done with the one Small Bowl^TM. If you’re not, you overfilled it or you need a smaller Small Bowl^TM. The key is to always be at least slightly hungry.

Then, you once again wait until you are out of your mind, chew-your-own-arm-off starving, and you wait the requisite little-bit-longer, and then you maybe accidentally murder someone, and then you eat another Small Bowl^TM.  Don’t go overboard.

Again. The key is to be basically starving all the time.

Oh — and a fucklot of exercise. You can’t forget that part. Basically, if you want to lose weight, you have to get on board with your genetic legacy and mimic the amount of physical activity your forbearers used to get. So in my case, the same amount of exercise as if I was chopping firewood and lugging water uphill from the river on black ice, 15 hours a day. That’s how much exercise my aging metabolism demands for me to stay at my “peak weight,” and even then, it’s a losing battle, since my genes think that a faux pregnant belly is a good thing — gets us through the long, cold, sedentary New England pilgrim winters, after all.

Unfortunately, my genes and my jeans are at odds, and if me and Small Bowl^TM have anything to do with it, the jeans are gonna win.

I'm on the first leg of my flight home from Thailand, via Tokyo on All Nipon Air, where I just made my way through an 8:30a.m. Japanese 3-course dinner served in cute little lacquer boxes full of delicious but mostly unidentifiable processed cubes of things. I ate the ones I was sure were not mushrooms or flaccid boiled egg. The highlight was the banana poppyseed ice-cream ball. Those kooky Japanese chefs.

The Japanese elevate everything to an art form, including cooking, eating, and being a flight attendant. The Chinese, on the other hand, plan their menus as if Hannibal Lecter’s cousin is coming to dinner.

Disclaimer here: I am a very picky eater. I’m not adventurous in the culinary terrain, unlike my mom, who ordered a Peruvian delicacy — baked guinea pig— when we traveled together to the Sacred Valley a few years ago. Judith is a chef and a restaurant owner, so I think she’d want me to point out here that I did not inherent my food pickiness from her. I get it from my father, who, at the age of 62, I introduced to burritos just last year. “Can’t I just stick with tacos?”

On my last night in Bangkok, on the 36th floor of the Chatrium, I ate alone at the hotel's fancy Chinese restaurant overlooking the gray river that winds through the endless city. The menu was an exquisite read — an ornothologist's dream, really — until I realized that it was actually a list of FOOD OPTIONS. I laughed/gagged at the "roasted whole pigeon," but I stopped laughing when I gamely perused the dessert selections and contemplated ordering something with the sublime name "Bird's Nest." I thought, I bet it's some sort of an elaborate drizzled sugar confection, maybe with an egg in it just to be maudlin. Just to be sure, I googled it, and THANK GOD I did because it turns out that "Bird’s Nest" is exactly what it sounds like: a bird's nest.

A swallow's nest, to be precise. A certain kind of swallow that is rare and special, and so it's a luxury of the upper class to get their hands on one of these nests, soak it in water for a bit, and then bathe it in coconut milk. I can only imagine that it tastes sort of like shredded wheat, but with a more fibrous quality that makes it an excellent intestinal stimulant. I might have been intrigued and brave enough to try it, until I read the fine print, which informed me that swallow's nests are comprised primarily of swallow's spit. Yes, their saliva.

I have to point out here that I think my cat Budapest might be Chinese, as once she came home with an entire birds nest (and a few little tiny just-born baby birds, whoopsie) hanging out of her mouth like, no big thang.

I shared the Bird's Nest menu item with my friends. Tom, who is Taiwanese and grew up eating Chinese Food, said, "It sounds gross, but it’s super tasty!  It was once of my faves! Like sharkfin soup, it is a Chinese delicacy.  Unfortunately, the birds are not happy, and they face extinction, so I stopped eating it recently.”

Then Vanessa told me that she actually tried Bird’s Nest, in Singapore. I have a vague recollection of Vanessa going to Singapore but I have to admit that I didn't retain this tidbit about her culinary courage. Although I love hearing about Vanessa's life — which is much more globally glamorous than my own — flying to Singapore for a few days and eating local delicacies is something I just expect from her. Vanessa is a jet setter and she’s cool.

I'm not like that. I'm like this: just before I wrote this blog post, I spent an hour here on the plane meticulously planning my exercise schedule for the remainder of 2011 in my iPad calendar. Knowing exactly what to expect is how I relax.

And on that note, so happy to be home!

As usual this morning I slept until 930, spent a half hour staring off into space while sipping tea, and then started to think about actually maybe working around mid-morning, with a slow and gentle easing-in to actually checking my email, for starters. This is my daily ritual and the whole process typically takes at least a few hours. This is why I don't ever calendar in anything productive before noon. (Note to my two friends who are constantly and relentlessly trying to get me to go on morning hikes with them; you know who you are.)

This particular morning, just as I was about to dive in to maybe kind of doing something soon, I got a Skype-chat message from my friend Don. (FYI there is no end to the myriad and creative ways you can get in touch with me in writing. The phone? Not so much.)

The Bunny Photo © andyfreeberg.com

Don had a cold (possibly the same TB-like bug I suffered from last week) and wanted to know if I would take his symphony tickets for tonight off his hands. Oh yes! I am not one to not jump on free symphony tickets. I love classical music and love an excuse to wear The Bunny even more. The Bunny is a white rabbit-fur vest I was given by someone, at some point, that is incredibly NOT P.C. but super soft and yummy and kind of awesome. In a terrible way. Note: I do not condone wearing fur. But I do wear The Bunny on occasion. Just one of the many ways I contain multitudes, y’all.

The one catch? I had to drive up and over the hill to Muir Beach to pick up the symphony tickets at Don’s house.

A normal person could probably zip out and take care of this tiny little errand and be back at work shortly and then pat themselves on the back for having such an awesome laidback freelancing lifestyle that they can do spontaneous things in the middle of the day. Not me.

Muir beach is about a 10-minute scenic drive up Highway One that proceeded to take me about 2 1/2 hours. I went by way of The Whole so that I could grab some soup for Don, and I happened to run into my good friend Michelle who I hadn’t seen in ages. We sat on a bench and filled each other in for a while. It was great to see her.

When I left The Whole I started to drive up the mountain, but soon enough I nearly hit two dogs running around maniacally in the road. I pulled over, got honked at a bunch (California drivers are unerringly righteous), and finally succeeded in steering these two clueless, spastic, and super smelly terriers back to their rightful owners, who were all, “What? We didn’t even notice they got out!” (Sidenote, not a dog person, and always think it’s weird when people “don't notice” that their huge, pungent, loud, obnoxious dogs are not in the yard. It makes me vaguely suspicious that they are secretly “forgetting” to secure the gate so the dogs will “accidentally” run away.)

After that, I followed a tourist up and over the hill at an excruciatingly slow crawl until I finally got to Don’s. Tickets in hand, I decided to take the more direct route back to my house, forgetting that there is construction going on in a feeble and ongoing attempt prevent the entire highway from sliding down into Green Gulch Zen Center. I stared at this for about 20 minutes:

I got back to my house around 12:30. Still plenty of time to salvage my workday.

I didn’t need to leave for the symphony until 5:30. Five hours.

Problem is, I had to start my whole “settling in” routine all over again. As the minutes ticked by and I found myself once again starting into space, dicking around on email, making myself another pot of tea, making myself lunch, letting my neurotic cat Luka in and out every 3.5 seconds, and responding like Pavlov’s dog to every single text message (and oh yes, writing this blog post), I began to get increasingly panicky about getting anything done today.

1:30. Blood pressure starting to really rise. Still not working.

2:30. Getting highly panicky. Have at least 4 hours of mandatory client work to finish today. Start obsessing over reorganizing my calendar to fit it into my weekend instead.

3:00. So completely panicky at this point that I’m nibbling on a xanax to calm down.

3:30. Tired. Really tired. Maybe a little too much nibbling.

4:00. Angry nap.

5:00. I have to leave in a half hour.

5:30. Let’s just write that one off as a “personal day”?

This, kids, is why I work evenings and weekends.

Vanessa and Leslie and I are having a Recovering Yogi creative summit this weekend. I was looking for an envelope and found my old diary from when I was 8 years old. It's deeply enthralling. This is really embarrassing, but it speaks volumes about my lifelong ability to settle for less when it comes to boyfriends.

What I care about in a man, in order of importance:

1. Good handwriting
2. That he cares

Also, I don't remember who Gabe was. Seriously, no clue.