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I spent Friday back in my hometown of Victoria, in the downtown core, revisiting the Royal BC Museum and it’s soon to be defunct BC Human History 3rd floor exhibits (The museum is going to screw this up, but I digress). While there, I noticed a catamaran in the harbour below the old Royal Steamship terminal (formerly home to the Royal London Wax Museum) and assumed it was the Victoria Clipper parked in the wrong spot.

From a better vantage point, however, I realized the catamaran in question was not the Clipper but was rather the “V2V” Victoria 2 Vancouver catamaran:

Upon further research I found out that this is a ferry owned by an Australian company who bought the catamaran as a secondhand boat from a route in Quebec and re-wrapped it with a Coast Salish design. I very much doubt that any actual Indigenous creators were paid or accredited for this work, especially since the boat itself is named the Empress. I cannot sometimes with the exploitative colonial mindset of my homeland.

I also discovered via the Times-Colonist (actual name of local newspaper still) that the V2V service had become defunct before COVID, in January 2020. The surprise of the parent company also made me suspect that the Australian owners had not checked in or spoken to any locals in Victoria prior to launching the service. Had they done so, they would have learned of the prior failed attempt to create a similar service, the Royal Sealink, in the 1990s, which met with a tragic and disastrous end in 1993, becoming a Victoria local disaster tale on a par with the Great Blizzard of 1996.

Before I get to the Royal Vancouver catamaran though, let us take a few steps back and understand why people keep trying to create new maritime links to the mainand. Victoria is a former Britiah colony on the traditional land of the Lkwungen (now known as the Esquimalt and Songhees) peoples. It was originally a Hudson’s Bay Company town at its inception in 1843. Victoria was made the capital of British Columbia in 1866, but its future was sealed as a secondary city to Vancouver after the railroad was completed. Victoria, after all, is on an island, and cannot not be connected to the mainland by physical roads or rails.

Physical connections, however, are no longer needed to connect with the outside world. Now technology and the internet make it viable to work from the Island, andmy hometown has evolved from being a quaint tourist destination and government town, to being a small, modern city that both locals and tourists alike would like to be able to travel to and from.

The isolated aspect of my hometown surprises Americans. The idea of a modern city, with a population of almost 400,000 people, being unreachable by highway, is hard to grasp. There are car ferries that are part of the highway system (or used to be, before privatization), each carrying hundreds of cars and up to two thousand people. There are commercial flights in and out of Victoria International (YYJ). There are seaplanes and helicopters for those people who want to get to the mainland quickly and can pay the premium for the experience. And this is why every few years, a businessperson with no ties to the Island or to our ferry-based culture will decide that what wealthy people really want to travel on is a luxury fast ferry that will take them from downtown Victoria to downtown Vancouver.

Let’s start by defining fast ferry. The S-class BC Ferries (aka “Spirit class vessels”) that run from the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria to the Tsawwassen peninsula south of Vancouver run at about 20 knots or 22mph. They go faster in the open Salish Sea east of the Gulf Islands than they do through Active Pass, but that is their overall speed.

Catamarans fast ferries, by contrast, run at speeds over 35 knots, or 40+MPH. These are passenger only ferries that are much smaller and lighter than the huge barge-like car ferries.

The Victoria Clipper service has run between Victoria and Vancouver since 1986. It’s a fast ferry that goes from downtown to downtown, making what would be a 5 hour car trip via ferries at Tsawwassen or Anacortes or Port Angeles into a two hours and change ferry ride. It’s always been billed as a luxury service. Not real luxury, because actual wealthy people recognize that time is money and the seaplanes between the two cities are a better investment in that time. But the Clipper is an affordable ferry upgrade that also provides some fantastic views along Puget Sound for people who either do not wish to pay for, or just do not like flying in a tiny plane.

It’s very likely the success and longevity of the Clipper service that makes non-Island business people think that a similar service to Vancouver is a good idea. However, these are people who probably cannot read maps. The route from downtown Seattle to downtown Victoria is fairly direct, up through Puget Sound and across what used to be the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Those boats enter Victoria’s harbour on the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. But because the harbour entrance is on the southwest side of Victoria, and Vancouver is to the northeast, the Vancouver route has to go around Victoria before they can get through the Gulf Islands and the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver

Because of the loop around the lower Island, it takes three and a half hours to get from Victoria to Vancouver — a full hour longer than it does to Seattle, which is further away. It also requires the boat to travel through some of the most open areas of the Salish Sea, which at high speeds, can cause seasickness.

It was the added time and the nausea inducing nature of the journey that spelled out DOOM for the Royal Sealink thirty years ago. Well that, and the fact that the Royal Vancouver smashed head-on into a Queen-class BC Ferry in Active Pass in 1993, injuring two dozen people and smashing in the snout of the catamaran so it looked like a Volvo in a crash test commercial. (The BC Ferry, for the record, was slightly dinged up)

This led me down an entire Google hole yesterday of reviewing what exactly happened to this first failed fast ferry fiasco, and I actually found the original incident report which I have now read with glee. Let me tell you, if it is possible for a maritime incident report to throw shade, this report does so. It is both factual and judgmental in all the best ways, thoroughly blaming the Royal Vancouver fast ferry crew for serving drinks when they should have been on the bridge, and calling out the ship master and first mate for being out of practice on the high seas. As my sister put it, “you done f**ked up, Royal Vancouver!”

I suppose V2V, had they even recognized that a prior similar service had failed, would have rationalized their atSo tempt regardless. The new Empress ferry was supposed to have stabilizers that would enable people to carry drinks to their seats without spilling. I also sincerely hope they had crew who had gone through Active Pass more than ten times before attempting to do so in the fog. But no amount of correction for the past’s most egregious mistakes could make up for the fact that there are not enough tourists to cover the costs of a fast ferry service year round — and while 80% of locals say they would take a fast ferry that went directly to Vancouver’s harbor, very few will do so at 15x the cost of a BC Ferry walk-on foot passenger ticket.

So there you have it: my commentary on why memory is important. Had the new Riverside Maritime Group surveyed Victorians my age and older, they would have known, there is no demand for a fast luxury ferry to Vancouver. It is not something that was asked for or needed, and only served to add one more very loud ship into the aural mix around the endangered Southern orca population. Victoria is a unique place with a long memory. I am surprised when lessons from those memories are forgotten so quickly

I struggle with getting older. Part of this is that, as a woman in modern Western society, I become more invisible the older I get. (A friend of a friend addresses this phenomenon in her comedy series, in which a woman’s age cannot even be heard). The rest of it is the fear of irrelevance. My sister in law remarks that she looks forward to being the kind of crone that yells at kids to get off her lawn. I have no problem with being an old cranky biddy telling people to remove themselves from her lawn (provided that it’s just a mild annoyance and not a climate change driven fight for precious garden related resources), but I do have a problem with the several decades that lies in between here and then.

Granted, irrelevance is not exactly a threat to me I’m GenX. Right now, GenXers have the most disposable income by household of any age group. Everything is reboots and nostalgia for our youth. It’s Nirvana shirts and 90s nights, brown lipstick and clunky boots, and constant, constant reboots of Ghostbusters. Most recently, it’s the show that taught an entire generation and a half of women the narratives through which to filter our relationships, for better or worse, the Sex & The City Reboot, aka The Great HBOMax Cash Grab. And I was here for it, even though I expected the show to make me feel even older than I already do, as I confronted the ages of the actors I last saw when they were the age I am now, a decade ago in the horror show that was the second movie.

And then I actually watched the show and came out of it feeling younger (note, not Younger, although I do love that show too). The central characters of SaTC have calcified into relics of the late 20th century. This is no doubt a key plot point, because they’re going to now evolve over the next ten episodes in Very Special Life Lessons where they will hopefully stop dumping their emotional garbage, guilt and microaggressions over every LGBTQ+ and BIPOC person available. (Miranda, I am so disappointed in you for constantly expecting your professor to validate your newfound wokeness!) Still, the central theme of the first two episodes seemed to be the women all saying “look at this crazy modern world where people listen to podcasts and also expect us to be all woke!”

What irritates me about this depiction of women in my generation and societal situation, is that there is a level of privilege and entitlement to not move past the era you came of age in. One has to be a person of means to be able to insulate yourself against a changing world. It annoyed me how the show was written in a way that kept the characters from having experienced discomfort or challenge. I realize we are all coming out of COVID, and we have all reached for comforting materials, whether that is a blanket, or our favorite album from the late aughts, but what about the fifteen years prior to COVID-19? There’s a level of discomfort to change that is to no one’s advantage to miss out on, and yet, these women seemed to have avoided any and all growth since 2004.

I am, however, the most smug about the contrast between how I spend time listening to my husband and how Carrie and Big spent their time listening to music. They spent their time listening to his record collection of music from the 1970s – which was depicted as a pretty serious wall of vinyl. My husband and I do much of the same thing, where we spend time listening to music together. In fact, we had been doing that on Wednesday night. The difference is that we had been listening to new bands, because we were debating whether we wanted to go out to either Mercury Lounge for WINGTIPS at Red Party or whether we wanted to go out to St Vitus to see Nuovo Testamento and Blu Anxxiety, all of which are new bands to us, even though they have nostalgic sounds.

I reflect a lot in my blog on the line between appropriate and overly consuming nostalgia, on how to differentiate between healthy reminiscing and an overdependence on the comfort inherent in the past. Avoiding the present and future is sometimes necessary for survival, and there’s times when the comfort in nostalgia is what it takes to get through the day. As proof of this, Spotify tells me that my favorite artists in 2021 are almost exactly the same as they were in 2006 (The Birthday Massacre, VNV Nation, Apoptygma Bezerk, BT and Hybrid. So perhaps it is a bit hypocritical of me to disagree with the way that a roomful of writers somewhere chose to depict women in their fifties as clinging to the comfort of the narrow views of their past, instead of moving out into the world.

Still, women in my generation have always expected these characters to represent us, to be our avatars on television. We expected them to speak for us in a way, to give us a narrative voice. I feel disappointed that their worlds, even their experiences of New York City, seemed to grow smaller, shrink wrapping them into views and relationships and experiences that seem reduced in scope. We are curious when we’re young, when we look for experiences that challenge us and grow our perspective. We agree to become irrelevant when we stop participating in the world around us so we can remain ensconced in the comfort of a fixed worldview.

Therefore, it makes me feel younger to not be represented anymore by the SaTC characters. They speak for women in a different place than where I am, and what I hope is a different place from where I will be in twelve years when I am in my mid-fifties. I hope my experiences between now and then will continue to make me think about all the perspectives I took for granted. I hope I’ll be able to keep up with technology. I hope I’ll still listen to new music and read new books. I hope I’ll go out into New York City able to take in and hear from the millions of narratives that make up this city, not just the stories of the people most like me.

A few days ago, I was running around a campsite, desperately grabbing electronics and non-waterproof items to throw into the car as a storm bore down on the Poconos. I threw in chargers, sleeping bags and tent bags; towels and shoes and all the detritus of a car campsite.

And all the while I was doing this, I was trying to listen and engage with a recruiter on the phone who was patiently explaining to me what it would mean to stay at Omnicom. The conversation ended abruptly when the world shook from thunder, and I dove into the front seat of Doomie, our Honda Civic, and had to say “just a moment please BEN GET IN THE CAR”

“There’s no room for me Mom!” Ben wailed back as he started to cry from fear of the storm.

That was the point where either the executive recruiter realized I wasn’t paying full attention or the phone cut out as I desperately tried to clear space in an overstuffed hatchback for my teenager to smush himself in, while rain pelted down and tree branches began to fall around us. Grateful to have only one thing to focus on, I pulled the camp pillows and sleeping bags out of the way, effectively burying myself in the front seat so Ben could get in.

My phone began to ring again just as soon as Paul jumped in next to me, shaking the water out of his newly short hair and chiding Ben for panicking instead of moving the camping gear items himself. I resumed the conversation with the recruiters, apologizing for being distracted while rain hammered down on our car and I watched the tent we had just set up shake and shudder in the storm, hoping that I could be clearly heard and that the tent didn’t blow away.

The next day, I sat in a damp two-piece swimsuit in a hallway outside the HR department of Camelbeach Waterslide Park, the quietest place with wi-fi I could find within the park, while I discussed with my own department lead what it would mean to stay at Omnicom. I was still thunderstruck that OMD was so invested in having me stay.

And yet, despite having spent two and a half years at Omnicom this time – more than twice as long as I spent there the first time in 2004/2005 – I still managed to quit.

It was hard. It was really hard to redefine success for myself. There was something so satisfying about the idea that I would become successful as a thought leader at the company that I started my career with back in 2004. I always thought success looked like being good at my job at the biggest media agency, proving once and for all that I could polish myself into the sort of person who could be successful there.

Then I realized that I was about to turn down a more potentially lucrative opportunity, with a SVP Media title, at a nerd shop where I would be reporting into a Canadian. I realized that, while I had a tremendous opportunity to drive change at OMD, the best path for me would be the path that paid the most while offering the best work/life balance for the remaining fifteen years I plan to work. And that path leads through the smaller agency that I start with next month.

I’m still kind of thunderstruck that this even happened, that I have left Omnicom a second time. But I’m on a track where I just want to retire early and go chase all the passions I have that don’t make money. I’d like to be able to finish writing a novel or two. I’d like to go back to school for urban planning or social justice. I’d like to be able to travel the world with my husband, in the time we have together. Life is too short to spend it waiting to retire, so I chose the path that would reduce the wait time.

Also, I have to face the fact that I was burning out so fast and so hard at OMD that I was becoming a sloppy mess. Numbers in media plans weren’t matching. Work was slipping through the cracks. I had two separate colleagues this week become disappointed with me because work wasn’t done or delivered as promised, and at my level, it’s expected that I can manage to get deliverables out with the time and quality promised. Staying at OMD would have not only burned me out from the volume of work I was trying to manage, but burned me out emotionally from constantly fearing people would resent me for letting them down or causing them more work. It would have been an ugly, vicious circle that would have continued to corrode my self-confidence.

So I’m a little more hopeful today. Hopeful that I’ll get my brain back from where it’s been in a constant state of overwhelm the last six months at OMD. Hopeful that I’ll remember to write a bit more, or remember that I am still a creative person somewhere underneath all this corporate facade. Hopeful that I’ll be able to connect more with my husband and my son, especially as Ben goes back to school and we lose the days together we’ve had for the past seventeen months. And finally, hopeful that I’ll get a summer vacation this year, even if I had to pay for that guaranteed time off by quitting my job entirely.

Oh, and that thunderstorm on Tuesday? It ended a few minutes after I finished my call, and tapered to rain. And while I am capable of camping in the rain (hello, BC childhood!) I don’t see why I would choose to do that on my break. I especially didn’t see the point of staying at an RV park where the rationale for staying there at all was for Ben to be able to find other teens to hang out with at the pool or tennis court or other on-site activities. Obviously, with the rain, all the teens had retreated to their parents RVs to play video games. So we decided to just pack up and move to the last room available at the local Holiday Inn, where we ordered in shwarma and watched Back To The Future Part II for the second time as a family. Ben declared it the best money I could have spent that day. All’s well that ends well.

At some point in the last couple weeks, it occurred to me that I have now been home with Ben for fifteen weeks: almost the same amount of time that I spent with him when I was on maternity leave in California. Paul was here with us for a couple weeks at the height of the pandemic in April, but for the most part, it has been me and the kiddo, every day, since March 16th. It is the longest I have spent with him since that leave. It is the longest stretch of time I will spend with him for the foreseeable future.

This second leave, home with Ben, feels like a bookend to his childhood. It feels like I spent fourteen weeks with him at the beginning of his life, and then fourteen weeks again as he transitions from being a child into being a teenager. Ben is growing up: his language and attitude and emotions mature in leaps and bounds, similar to how he grows in fits and starts. He has finally crossed the invisible lines from being what we called the “biggest little kid” into being almost a teenager. It feels like a stretched out milestone, and it’s a milestone that sits on my chest to crush my heart.

This pandemic has gifted me with extra time with my son. Even though it has been challenging to manage him while working full time, it has still been extraordinary to be home with him every day. We have had the full time together, not just a few hours at the end of the day. We have been able to travel together to Georgia to visit our family at the beach. We have watched the entire run of Anne with an E, which Ben actually loved (#canadiancontent!). We had so very many days where we had lunch together, and even a handful of days where we sneaked out to a park or went for a walk.

So today, I’m reflecting on how this is my last day of this time with my son, the last day of the bookend of time we have. Tomorrow, Paul will pack Ben up and take him to Pittsburgh, where Ben will spend two weeks with his grandparents and their backyard ravine. He will then come home and go to YMCA camp in NJ for two weeks, after which he will go to Camp Jupiter (the tween-to-teen aged version of the Percy Jackson themed Camp Half-Blood) in Prospect Park. We’ll be together again after that for two weeks of quarantine in Toronto, plus a week with my family once we are released, as a sort of coda to our time together. But I still feel like today is an occasion, a time for reflection, a time for me to look at my son and reflect on how he is the piece of my heart that has been walking around outside of me for twelve years…and now he is his own person.

One more thing: I love symmetry. And to give today a full sense of symmetry, for my last day of a second maternity leave, we are spending it with Ben’s beloved aunties. Z and Wendy showed up at the hospital the day Ben was born, part of a crew of a half-dozen friends who came in that day to see the first baby born to any of us. So today, we are going to the beach with Ben’s beloved Aunt Z and her sister, and then will have a picnic (weather permitting) with Aunt Wendy as well. They were also there on the first day of Ben’s childhood, and they will be there on the official “last” day of it as well, next year, when he is bar mitzvah’d. But if we can get through the day without the predicted thunderstorms interrupting our plans, they will also be with my son, the creature they have known since he was an angry meatloaf, on this last day of this time I’ve had with Ben, before he resumes his (mostly) normally scheduled summer.

So begins one of my favorite tweets about the disastrous (for Peloton) commercial from Xmas 2019:

It’s that commercial people reference when I admit that I got a Peloton for the holiday. Of course, my husband did not buy it for me. Rather, I convinced him that we needed not only to spend the cash on the bike, but also to subsequently create space for it in our small Brooklyn apartment:

Still, I feel like unjustifiably self-indulgent for just having this thing. Part of that is that the bike is the only luxury product I’ve ever bought. My clothes are bought on sale. We drive a Honda Civic. I fly coach and use miles like they’re the new green stamps. I meal plan so we don’t have to spend money on takeout or waste food. Even my road bike is a Craiglist purchase. The Peleton bike is an insanely expensive toy when juxtaposed with our generally non-luxury lifestyle. It’s also a lot of money that isn’t going to better works: money that I am not donating to charities or even saving for my own retirement. It’s money I could have donated to actually help people.

This is, of course, part of my own hangup over making a good salary when millions of Americans do not. Paul reminded me that I earned the money for this bike. I don’t disagree, but I also feel it’s unfair that I was able to earn this money when thousands of people work just as hard as I do, at equally challenging jobs, and do not receive the same compensation. If I am fortunate enough to be making money that I do not need to survive as part of my job at a media agency, should I not be contributing more of that money to help people and sharing my good fortune with the world?

Despite this line of thought, my altruism was short lived. I realized that I loved the bike as soon as I got it. The instructors are cheerful and encouraging. My favorite is the woman who is now a professional cyclist because she was told her thighs were too thick for ballet or modeling, who talks about her professional cycling career, emphasizes results over body size, and shares enough of my GenXer taste in music to make all my workouts joyful. Even with other instructors though, the workouts are always a dance party on a bike, because I can preview the playlists to make sure I will have fun. Some people may be riding the Power Zone Endurance Rides; I am riding the “90s Pop Ride”. When “I Love Rock And Roll” played in the last few minutes of today’s 80’s ride, I breathlessly tried to yell along while pushing up a hill at a high cadence, watching my heart rate spike up to 92% of max, joyful to be pushing myself up that freaking hill.

There’s also a gaming element to the Peloton software that isn’t unlike the SoulCycle model in the leaderboard competitive model. I generally ride in the top 40% of riders; the top 30% of women my age. I am also constantly trying to beat my own PRs, to output more energy than I did the time before. The rides also have suggested resistance and cadence added in the on-demand versions, so I can clock whether I’m where I need to be for metrics. The whole thing appeals to the data nerd part of me and the competitive instincts in me. It’s hard to resist that design.

Finally, I just like biking. Biking is what I apparently built my body for as a teenager, and now that’s just literally how I roll. I am a better athlete on a bike than I am without wheels: as a runner, I run very slowly, as a cyclist, I’m actually average. It’s joyful, to me, to feel my body, the body I have always been told isn’t fit, isn’t capable, roll up an imaginary hill faster than I did the day before. My body is fit and is perfectly capable of cranking out these rides, and I love being able doing so without leaving the house or worrying about being late to a spin studio. I still feel somewhat guilty for even having this bike, but for the joy it brings me, it’s worth every penny I paid for it.

The last few years have been a time for me to reconsider some of the myths and false truths about myself, a time to look at some of the narratives I’ve either been told, or have told myself, or both.  It’s been a time for me to consider whether or not I actually am the person I told myself I was, and what my actual priorities should be. In some of these cases, this has led to me reclaiming parts of myself that I let go along the way.  In others, it’s led to me challenging statements that I heard in childhood, and realizing the resulting narratives I created were false all along. It’s been an uncomfortable process in many ways, but one I’m grateful I had the catharsis to begin.

The most difficult parts of this process have been when I’ve challenged an assumption about myself, and taken a series of actions accordingly, only to find out what I believed about myself was actually the truth the whole time.  This has been most evident in the case of my career. I challenged the assumption that I was a career driven person back in early 2017, when my career started floundering and going off course as I was assigned to role after role that was just not a fit for me or my skillset.  I questioned whether or not the mis-matches mattered, because the disconnect resulted in a lot of free time for me. I was, after all, working from home, on clients where I wasn’t the right fit and wasn’t actually needed.  This lack of work engagement gave me more time to do things like cook dinners for my men, or start entirely new Scout groups in Brooklyn.  It was a shift in work/life balance that I would have thought I would actually welcome, until it made me miserable.

As that balance continued to shift in 2018, and I grew more miserable with my job,  I questioned whether I even wanted a high pressure career. After all, I thought, maybe I only believed I was a career person because I had always believed it was the option with the most security for my adult life as an independent, single woman.  Throughout my teens and twenties, I assumed I would not be capable of attracting a partner who could be relied on to support me financially, making a career a necessity. Therefore, was I career driven because I always thought I would be, or was I career driven because that’s actually who I am? 

In a turn that will be surprising to absolutely no one, it’s the latter.  I am career driven because I like being challenged. I am career driven because I need a place to put all my energy.  I need that kind of week in, week out, year after year, life-long challenge. There are days when I question whether I am in the right career, but there is no question that I need a career.  

So when my career started foundering, and I no longer had a direction to go in, it wasn’t an assumed identity that was hard-hit, it was actually part of my real personality that was suddenly aimless and drifting.  And while I have thrived for years on a sense of being useful and necessary on any given team, realizing my sheer uselessness on client after client made me feel like a failure.  My challenges in 2017 and 2018 weren’t about doing positive, valuable work, but were instead about proving any value for my paycheck, in a context where that was almost impossible.  If I was less career driven, perhaps I would have been able to ignore those negatives and focus on the positive of my changing work/life balance. Instead, I became despondent and hopeless until finally, I realized I had to change jobs.

Now, a year later, I am back on a productive career track, an asset to the agency I work for, a valued part of the client-facing team.  I am back on the life-long quest for more knowledge, more expertise, to be better at what I do.  There will always be days when I question whether this is the right path for me, but sometimes, just being on a path is more than enough.  And so, the assumption I challenged, and regained, is that I like to work, and I love that my work takes the form of a career in which I can continue to grow and evolve.  

And so, when I look back at 2019, the theme that stands out the most is that I proved, to myself, that I am a career person.  I am ambitious, although, as I said once, I am more ambitious for knowledge than power. Power is nice in that it represents security, as does money, but what I really want is learning, and given that my brain felt somewhat stretched out for most of 2019, I am getting plenty to learn.  I took on this new job and met its challenges. I adapted to a new role, and in some ways, adapted the role to me and my skills.  I leveraged all my expertise in new situations and was successful in many cases as a result.  I can be proud of myself for not only the work I do, but also the context of the self-discovery that came with it.

So last year I had a milestone birthday. It was therefore somewhat anticlimactic to have a non-milestone birthday on Monday, that I celebrated with zero fanfare or expectations. (Also, we were fantastically jetlagged on Monday, so there was minimal celebration other than ordering Bareburger for pickup and passing out)

It is usually at my birthday that I take stock of my life and where I am in it, and I think this photo sums it all up:

This is me with my goofball son, in BC last weekend. I am tired but joyful because I am with my baby – and my family. I don’t look pulled together , and I don’t particularly care. I do not need to look pulled together, I just need to be pulled together enough to engage with the people I love.

Tonight, I went to a BAM “Eat, Drink and be Literary” event to see author Sloane Crosley speak on humor and insight in her writing.  Sometimes, I just want to hear another slightly sarcastic forty year old white woman speak to experiences I can sort of relate to. Crosley is of the school of humor where she ties personal anecdotes and observations back to universal conditions, a synecdoche that I feel is representative of Generation Xennial.  We tend to speak in metaphors, in pop culture references and personal essays, in stories that represent the feelings we cannot allow ourselves to be insecure enough to voice.  We are the last generation before social media, the last to have come of age in a time before oversharing was common, and our personal essays therefore depend on circumstance as metaphor for emotion.

That said, I enjoyed all of Crosley’s books, and while reading them, I saw her as being a voice of my generation, using humor as a lens to examine what it means to live in New York City in the twenty-first century.  Yet I have trouble connecting to Crosley’s essays in the visceral way that I connect to, say, Lindy West.  Crosley’s work, and her voice, somehow comes across as too polished, too East Coast, almost academic.  Her wit is polished and slightly self-deprecating, but not in the passive-aggressive snarky way that I relate to as a Canadian.  Her essays are exceptionally well crafted, and exemplify, to me, what it means to be a New Yorker here and now: a sense of being polished and well spoken, of being quick witted and literary, of the inheritance of the legacy of hundreds of years of writers in this particular city.  I am not, however, polished and well spoken, at least not consistently, so my disconnect is entirely a personal one.

And yet, there was a period at the end where everyone was asking questions, and I did not.  I wanted to ask about how being a woman, and a woman of our age, impacted Crosley in her writing.  I thought about asking, do you feel you approach your work differently than you would have had you been born a few years later?  Were you better able to perfect your craft because you were first published in 2002, not 2012, and personal essays were not yet tarnished by a culture of oversharing?  I wanted to ask, how do you feel your voice is affected by being a woman?  Do you feel you write differently or approach humor differently than your male counterparts?  However, I felt like it would have been putting that author on the spot to ask about the differences in how women experience humor, especially since she has never written about the challenges of being funny as a female.  I felt like she was somehow disconnected from the challenge of being a woman in comedy because of her medium as an essayist, as opposed to being a woman comedian in a performance role.  I feel like we’re just not making progress in allowing women to be funny in America, and yet this was not the funny woman to ask about that particular topic (unlike again, say, Lindy West).

Still, I was riveted by Sloane Crosley, by how quick her wit is in conversation.  I appreciated hearing about the writer’s craft, about the intensity of fiction versus non-fiction, about the way creating a story out of memory impacts the original experience.  It’s so true, how crafting an anecdote impacts our perception of an event, as we select only the details that are most relevant to the concept we’re trying to convey, or that are most interesting to our audience.  The memories I’ve written about over the years are now one-dimensional, almost shellacked and preserved for posterity.  Some may have been lost otherwise, but others have been polished into representative tales.  It was interesting, to hear that perspective from an essayist who has given her own memories to her craft.

I even actually enjoyed the most awkward part of the evening, which was where I sat down at a table of total strangers.  The series format is a buffet dinner, at tables of 8 people, each table stocked with wine, thankfully, to help it along.  I took a seat at a table with two welcoming older people, who kindly told me where the empty seat was and then said the nicest thing possible, which was that they guessed my age at twenty-five.  They were lovely people who lived in Brooklyn Heights, and had been in Brooklyn for decades.

The rest of the table, once they returned from the buffet, also all turned out to all be closer to my parents’ age, retirees with time and means to engage in the arts.  They weren’t all familiar with the author, but they all came to every event in the series, whether or not they had read the books.  I quickly discovered that most of them were also long term residents of Brooklyn, going back to the seventies, a time unimaginable in Brooklyn to those of us who consider a pre-2008 home purchase to make one a pillar of the community.  Fortunately, I am fascinated by anecdotes of Brooklyn and New York City from the 70s, and they seemed interested enough in my anecdotes of being a Canadian.  We all got along just fine, and despite my initial nervousness, I found myself chatting away.  (Did I mention these tables also had wine?)

I found the whole experience immensely worthwhile: a chance to support literature, to support the National Book Foundation, to support BAM – but most of all, it was important to support myself.  I do not write essays, exactly, but I do write thousand word blog entries.  I would like to write those kind of essays, to be able to tell a story that encapsulates so much of the world around me, to be able to use non-fiction as a narrative that still manages to contain metaphor.  That, to me, is a high art.  This was also something I chose as my first “artists date“, part of the Artists Way project I’ve committed to doing this quarter as a way to reconnect with my own writing and creativity.  It was something that inspired me, that challenged me a bit, that gave me some concepts to mentally chew on – an idea right in line with the dinner party.  Maybe I’ll go back in a month for Min Jin Lee.