It’s 4am. Tuesday. I woke up about half an hour ago and couldn’t fall back asleep. The apartment is chilly. The outside temperature is in the mid-fifties. I’ve had the windows open for several weeks – maybe months.
Ten minutes later, I’ve already had my waffles. I’ve moved from my square, dark wood bistro table where I eat over to the corner of the sofa where I read and sometimes write. As a little bonus, I’m having a breakfast cookie with my coffee. In this case, a breakfast cookie is just a regular cookie that I’m eating at breakfast.
Yesterday, I was in a mood. Actually, I was in several moods. I swung from being optimistic and motivated in the morning to feeling anxious to feeling a little down to thinking people suck and aren’t there some flowers I could punch? Reading the news and doom-scrolling was very much a part of the shift. Not being able to focus as I tried to write was a part of the shift. The anxiety was triggered by the political news – all of it (I genuinely fear for our democracy) coupled with the fact that I had a series of second round interviews for a CEO position and I haven’t heard back. I’m getting tired of being a capable, qualified candidate and still losing out / being rejected.
Wanting to punch flowers was triggered by the number of obliviots (a term my friends from State College and I came up with to describe oblivious idiots) I crossed on my evening walk. In almost every case, the person was walking towards me staring at their phone, and I either had to stop to let them pass because they couldn’t walk straight and encroached on my side of the sidewalk (made narrow by outside dining), or I had to twist to avoid bumping into them. Though in at least one instance – they were just walking crooked and almost ran into me (wide open street, oblivious to the world). I knew this mood was a holdover from the earlier mood. I was hoping the walk would snap me out of it. Nope, confirmation bias had rooted itself in my brain. I was going to see and hear every self-absorbed obliviot who crossed my path.
Baking cookies when I got home snapped me out of it.
Being socially isolated this past week (COVID) has probably made me more attuned to the strangers I see and pass on the streets. Outside of the people I’ve gotten to know at my bar, and a few of the old-school neighborhood regulars, I’m not sure I care for the people who live in my part of town. Here, I have to be careful not to generalize about the city as a whole. I knew this when I chose this part of town. It’s overwhelmingly white and young and shallow (which I define as overly focused on money and career and oblivious, almost callous, to the world around them).
My part of town has been described as bro-ey – meaning full of bros. It’s a fair description. Dictionary dot com defines a bro as: “a young, usually white male variously and often negatively characterized as being preppy, party-loving, egotistical, sexist, etc.” Or as one person put in in an article in The Globe and Mail, “Bro culture is sort of this very regressive culture where young men can still celebrate their sexism, their homophobia, transphobia, openly with one another.” Yep, that describes a significant portion of my neighborhood: man-children frat boys who have some money and think they know how the world works.
Usually I’m better at tuning them out. But for whatever reason (I suspect a combination of being isolated coupled with too much news about the tech bro billionaires influencing our politics), I’ve been having a harder time keeping my blinders on.
Last week, A bro who I know and have hung out with stumbled into the bar. We’ll call him Chaz. Chaz had been drinking and golfing all day. He insisted he was toasted (referring to his sunburn as opposed to his state of inebriation). Chaz sat next to me and tried to make small talk with the women at the end of the bar. He might have been flirting. He kept telling me he thought the one was hot (Chaz has a girlfriend). I’ve never had a great feeling about Chaz, but aside from him bragging about his sound system and other material possessions, I’ve never seen him do anything overtly dick-ish. Then he showed me and my other friend at the bar a topless picture of his girlfriend. I’ve met his girlfriend. She seemed nice. She seemed like the type of person who wouldn’t want everyone in the bar to have seen her half-naked. My other friend told Chaz that he should probably delete that photo before he gets in trouble. I said, I think she sent him the photo (trying to suss out the level of her consent) – to which Chaz said, nope, I took it – she didn’t know.
Have I mentioned that I’m not a fan of Bro culture?
After a while, the human mind does what the human mind does. It makes connections that aren’t there, it draws improper conclusions, it conflates disparate ideas and thoughts. This added to, or perhaps was the culmination of, yesterday’s funk.
This is when the self-pity kicks (or kicked) in. In a few key areas, I’m struggling to find my footing. Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by people who, by society’s definition, are successful. They have well-paying jobs, they have partners, they travel far and wide, they have a sense of purpose. But when you look under the hood, they’re not necessarily any more competent or informed or skilled (except for in some very narrow fields) and, in some cases, they’re pretty shitty people – I’m looking at you Chaz – that was a disrespectful and dickish thing to do. They walk through the world not paying attention to anything other than their immediate circle of need and desire. In the worst cases, they have the audacity to think that their success has been entirely self-made and now qualifies them as an expert on everything else (government, foreign policy, housing, city planning).
None of this new. Our entire system of capitalism is based on the protestant/puritanical belief that financial success or success in business means that god has shown his favor on you (and conversely that lack of success is a character flaw, or bad decisions, or bad genes, or not being in god’s favor). The idea of might is right has been around for as long as society has been around. I see it play out in small and big ways all the time – more so here than I have in other places.
I, by choice, have rejected this worldview. I, by choice, want to level the playing field and want to elevate the people who have little to no power. Yesterday, I was feeling the anxiety of knowing, or at least sensing, that that’s not the direction we’re headed in. In some respects, it made me want, in a very real and significant way, the normal trappings and distractions that everyone else has (job that keeps them busy, relationships that direct their attention elsewhere, minor dramas that cause myopic vision). It made me long for a more intimate community of smart and caring people (not unlike the friends I made in State College). I know they exist out here. I suspect there are more of them (artistic, hippie, soft-spoken, thoughtful) out here than in other places of the country. Yesterday was the type of day when I fell into the trap of looking at the things I don’t have as opposed to seeing the things I do have. I can forgive myself for that. As a reminder to not stay in that place very long, I’ll close with the poem “Wellness Check” by Andrea Gibson.
Wellness Check
In any moment,
on any given day,
I can measure
my wellness
by this question:
Is my attention on loving,
or is my attention on
who isn’t loving me?