I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(35)
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I’m not saying it isn’t worth it. What I am saying is that you can’t expect to give away your time and get pure, golden, ray-of-sunshine fulfillment out of it, no matter how glorious it may feel for a while to help a cause, to stand at the front of the room and feel seen and heard and able to make good things happen for people who deserve good things. Doing something for humanity doesn’t mean you won’t still find yourself sometimes hating humanity. You just have to know that going in. It’s part of the deal.
The good news is that when it’s all over and the last of the confetti has been swept from the floor after the party where you handed over the giant check and smiled for a photo, you get to pick up the phone one last time and call a bright-eyed mother of a kindergartner. “You’ve always thrown such good class parties,” you’ll say. “You’re a natural leader. Everybody says so.”
It’s a little wrong of you to convince her it’ll all go great; but it’s a little right, too.
Sports Radio
My friend Pauline and her husband had us over for dinner, along with two other couples—all of us longtime friends. After dinner, when the other guests retired to the den to catch the end of a football game, I went into the kitchen. After I finished sneaking the family dog a few bites of steak and loading plates into the dishwasher, I realized we’d stayed past eleven o’clock, so I walked into the den and said, “Hey, should we let these guys have their house back now?”
That’s when everyone whipped around and shot outrage-lasers from their eyes: “Are you kidding?” they yelled. “Good God!”
You’d have thought I was standing in the doorway spinning a baby on the barrel of a gun. It was as if I’d shouted, “I LIKE TO BITE THE TAILS OFF PUPPIES AND USE THEM TO CLEAN MY EARS!” or, “I JUST SWALLOWED A LIVE HERMIT CRAB!” All these people I knew and loved glared at me with disgust and horror. I blinked in confusion as everyone turned back to the television.
“What?” I said to the room.
Only John responded. He patted the ottoman next to him. “There are two minutes left,” he said. “And it’s tied.”
To say athletics are not my forte would be like saying a fried Oreo is not exactly a health food. As resolutely as I apply my mind to it, I have never been able to hitch on to the popular obsession with sports. If I think hard enough, I can almost understand why Judas betrayed Jesus at the Last Supper and how selfies became a phenomenon and why some men wear short-sleeved button-down shirts; but I cannot grasp why adult humans watch other adult humans run around grabbing at a ball, much less why our society agrees that the individuals engaging in this tussle should be paid millions of dollars. It’s the gaping hole in my understanding of humanity.
The urgency of sports confounds me, too. The importance of whatever’s happening on the field always trumps what’s going on in real life. That’s why I got yelled at for trying to leave a dinner party before the game was over. It’s why you can’t walk in front of the TV when everyone’s watching the instant replays. It’s why, if the score is tied in double overtime, you could skip naked down Main Street shooting hundred-dollar bills out of your ass, and no one would notice.
Supposedly, watching a sports game together is a social activity, but there’s so much about it that seems antisocial. If I sit through a game for too long, I get not just bored and confused, but resentful, as if I’ve been lured into punishment under the false promise of a party. It starts to feel like everyone is yelling about offsides to test me, or worse, to spite me. It’s like the universe is taunting me with nonsense just to see how much I can tolerate.
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In my late thirties, I noticed that many social interactions had started to feel like football games. Tedious. Pointless. Like a vaguely cruel act of aggression by a world that was rejecting me. At obligatory events such as parent socials and holiday parties I found myself lingering in parking lots and bathrooms, taking much longer than necessary to apply lipstick or check my phone. My fingers would curl into fists while I tried to listen to people I’d met once or twice deliver monologues on their house renovations, the weather, or—always the worst topic—traffic. Had conversation always been like this? Or were people suddenly choosing the most inane subjects to wax on about at length? Was I hiding my irritation, or could people tell I was bored to the point of hostility when they started in about how it was a bit chillier this week than last, or that February sure is a short month, or how did it get to be Friday already?
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I went to another dinner party around that time, this one just for women, a girls’ night out among friends of friends. Someone had been kind enough to invite me, and I was excited for the outing. Leaving the house at six o’clock meant handing over the kids’ dinner and bath-time duties to John, and an evening without that repetitious responsibility felt like a mini-vacation. I looked forward to a night among adults and anticipated the conversation we’d get to enjoy about books, movies, news, the secret to conquering migraines, war, secret grudges, and well, whatever. No talk about nap schedules, peanut allergies, or stroller comparisons—those were the things we talked about when children were around, when we passed each other on the sidewalk by the park or in a pediatrician’s lobby. That was kid stuff. Tonight was for grown-up stuff. World stuff. Real stuff.