Venting, complaining, bitching – I fell like I do too much of this. By nature, I tend to joke around and be pretty easy going – I like to think I’m laid back…. but then I remember that whiny little bitch inside me. My sense of humor is dry and self-effacing – usually to mask something that makes me a little uncomfortable about myself. I have lots of moments when I feel like all I do is complain about things. Mini-rants about tiny injustices or things that get under my skin (even if only a little bit).
I joke that I’m a young Andy Rooney waiting for my eyebrows to go all bushy and white. To be kind to myself, some of my bitching is really just observational commentary on the negative – an occupational hazard of trying to be an empathetic person, trying to understand my own thought processes, and trying to be a writer. I explore petty moments because I think it’s so easy for most of us to go there as part of our default setting. That’s unfair, that’s annoying, what a jerk, she’s so rude, could this take any longer, WTF?
We’ve all been there – probably several times a day. Many of us have also been in those moments post vent – when we realize we might approach the world with a little more grace and gratitude. It’s not all about us. It’s not some grand conspiracy to beat us down – even if it feels like it.
In the Shop Again
Last week I recommitted to my aging Toyota. I probably should have had a ceremony – maybe we could have gone to a mountain retreat, I could have gotten dressed up, we could have exchanged new vows…. My car is ten years old. In car years, that’s like… ten years old. It needed some work and typical of a man in his mid-forties, I was checking out the newer models.
While I joke about the stereotypical mid-life crisis male ego, it’s a nervous type of joke because there’s an uncomfortable kernel of truth behind the extended metaphor – I’m not a typical guy and I almost never check out the newer models. If anything, I tend to hold on to relationships a little too long. I always believe things can be worked out or salvaged. I am an optimist at heart – sometimes I get burned.
As part of my decision to hold on to the car, I sank some money into it. New tires, new brakes, alignment, a new front boot that was starting to leak, new filters, oil change, coolant flush. I still need to get the car inspected and I was told I’ll need a new head gasket, but they didn’t have the part. I know more repairs are coming. On balance, the repairs would still be cheaper than a car payment – though it would never work quite as well or run as smooth as a new car. It’s a bumpier ride with a lot more road noise than when it was new. Aren’t we all?
On Monday, driving in to work, my tire light came on. I knew what this meant. A sensor had malfunctioned and would need to be replaced. I know this because it happened in Memphis not too long ago. I took the car back to the shop – they said a sensor needed to be replaced and recommended replacing all of them (they have a shelf life of about six years and I’ve gotten ten out of them).
I began to question the whole commitment thing. Humans make terrible relationship and economic decisions because they feel like they’re already too far invested. I’m hoping this isn’t the case…. Having just had the car in the shop, there seemed to be a cosmic conspiracy afoot in needing to take it back for additional repairs four days later. Maybe it was reminder that all relationships need maintenance and work – you can’t just fix one thing and think you’re done.
Shopping and Returns
I dropped the car off and came back to the house to work. The shop is a block away – which is really convenient. Sometime around mid-morning a package arrived from Amazon. I’ve spent the past half-year avoiding “shopping.” I’ve never been much of a shopper – it’s the compliment to my utilitarian lifestyle of holding on until things break (and then for a little while longer). I learn to muddle through. I’m a muddler. I’ve been avoiding Amazon, because, well… I just can’t support a company that is known to steal ideas from start-ups, and has basically earned a gazillion dollars while refusing to provide adequate pay and safety measures for their employees.
That said, I needed a few things (replacement part for my razor) and time has been at a premium for me. The package that arrived was a new pair of shoes. Sadly, they didn’t fit. This is why I almost never buy things like shoes online. I went on to Amazon to start the return process. It’ll cost me a couple of bucks to ship them back – that sucks. I’d have tried to exchange them, but that wasn’t an option. After going through the return process… Amazon sends me an email with instructions to print the return label and drop off my return at a UPS store. That’s all fine and good, except I don’t have a printer. I search and search, and there doesn’t seem to be a digital solution for this. I was really hoping I’d be able to just have the UPS store scan a code or something. Something in the instructions also seemed to indicate that I’d need to include a return slip in the box.
When the car was done, I took my open box with me, picked up the car, and went to the UPS store. I’d like to pause briefly to say it’s in one of the dumbest (by which I mean poorly designed) shopping centers I’ve ever been in – one of those multi-acre centers with little clusters of shops, each with their own parking lot and access point fenced off from the lot next to it. Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway), I missed the turn in to the UPS store and had to drive around through several other parking lots to get back to it. I parked, opened up the email from Amazon, masked up and went in. I’m gonna get this shit done with expediency.
There, a pleasant enough woman asked how she could help me. I explained that I’m trying to return something to Amazon, but they require me to print a label and I don’t have a printer. She said, “no problem, just have the email sent to the UPS store email address,” and she pulled out a laminated sheet that had the email address on it. It would only be $3.65 to print the label, but she’ll waive the charge to tape the box. That was generous of her (had I known they charged to tape, I might have brought my own). Gone are the days of free returns and online shopping trying to compete with brick and mortar stores. Buying and returning a pair of shoes that didn’t fit has now cost me almost $10 in fees and some of my time.
I don’t really care about the money, but something about the whole experience ticked me off. Driving back home, more aggravated then when I had left, I thought to myself – man, all I fucking do is complain about this little shit. I need to practice me some gratitude. It’s almost Thanksgiving, I should be more thankful… but then I stopped thinking that. I told myself, if life wasn’t full of these stupid little frustrations, we might all be a little more grateful – it really does feel like there’s a thousand little daily assaults on our sense of fairness. It’s no wonder so many people seem to walk around angry or drive aggressively or yell out at a clerk or their kids or their spouses or else just resort to passive-aggressive behaviors.
A New Phone
I returned home to find a small package at the door. It was my new phone. It’s nice. It’s sleek. It’s a little smaller than my last phone. I knew my night was shot.
With a new phone and a new carrier, comes a host of micro-anxieties. Will the transfer of my phone number go smoothly? I anticipate that I’ll probably do something irreversibly wrong that will lock me into a new phone number and somehow also lock me into my old number. Will my data transfer? How will I look up all of those old texts when I need to pine about the past? More importantly, what about my music library? I listen to a lot of music – I think I have just under 4,000 songs in my library – how do I ensure that those don’t get lost (even that song that I kinda hate and never listen to)? There’s also the issue of making sure it downloads emails and saves photos. I can be a bit of a belt AND suspenders guy when it comes to backups and redundancies – a digital hoarder of sorts.
I unboxed the phone and followed the instructions. It was kinda cool that all I had to do was put the old phone next to the new phone and the transfer started…. but, me being me, I began to think that if this is all taking place over my cellular (because the new phone wouldn’t connect to the wi-fi), I’m gonna get hit with hefty fees for going way over my old 5gb data plan… (I think I get charged $15 for every extra gig, and I’m transferring somewhere between 40 and 60 gig…)
Thankfully, I don’t think that was the case. But that posed an entirely new problem. Why wasn’t the phone connecting to my wi-fi? Outdated technology. We’re at a point in which we are so reliant on tech for our daily lives that we are also beholden to whatever changes the tech industry makes to “improve” service and sell more products. One such change is that Apple no longer ships power cords with their products. More accurately, they ship a cord, just not the plug part of it. They have a new charging technology that uses USB-C (wtf is that?) which you can buy separately… Briefly, I panicked and thought I can’t even charge my phone. It turns out the old plugs still work, but are slower. Apple did something like this a few years ago when they got rid of the headphone jack and forced everyone to buy an adapter, or new headphones that were either bluetooth or had the lightening port plug. I suspect some of these advances are actual improvements, but I don’t doubt for a second that the move away from “standard” parts is part of their sales strategy to increase revenue from accessories. Sorry for the long aside on planned obsolescence and had nothing to do with the wi-fi…
After some research and a whole bunch of trial and error, I learned that the modem/router here at the house was probably too outdated to support the new phone. Back out I went to get a new modem/router. Wow – those things have “come a long way” since the $45 model. Standard ones now run $150 and fancy ones are upwards of $400. These are the hidden costs of getting a new phone. I spent my entire night downloading apps, turning things on and off, unplugging and plugging things in, and connecting devices to get back to the basic level of service I had started the day with.
This Is Water
Which brings me back to bitching, venting, complaining, and gratitude…. choosing what to think about, what to dive in to, and what to bitch about as a way of understanding the world in which all of us live. My entire day (and evening) was spent working and then taking care of things that allow me to function (car and connectivity and errands). The day was full of petty frustrations none of which result in joy but simply help me maintain the status quo. Granted, many of those frustrations are about the gap between my expectations of how the world should function and my experience of how the world functions. This is precisely what David Foster Wallace talks about in his famous commencement speech that is sometimes called “This is Water” (you can listen and read a transcript here).
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course, it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
Yesterday, more than once, I paused and thought I’d like to complain less. In the grand scheme of things, that money, those fees, these annoyances don’t count for much. Yesterday I walked the tightrope between wanting to vent and being gracious. For a lot of people, it’s a hard, challenging, and unfair world. I write about petty experiences, I explore, with intention. For one, I’m hoping it keeps me from being that guy in person. I write to understand the gap between expectation and experience. I write because I think it can build a quiet kind of solidarity. Someone can read this and feel less alone in their daily tedium, or be reminded of their desire to practice gratitude, or maybe just come across a clever turn of phrase.