I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(6)

Vacations are difficult to settle into when you’re like this. A good day for me ends with completing something, looking at that thing all nice and finished, and letting a sense of accomplishment flood my nervous system. Ahhhhh, that’s better. It soothes my mind and brings me peace—and peace is what vacation is supposed to be all about, right? But whip out a laptop at the pool, and people go nuts. Workaholic, they call you. OCD. Control freak. On my fortieth-birthday beach trip, I hid in a cabana bathroom to finish edits on an article I was working on. There was no way I could enjoy a margarita until the assignment was complete.

I hear people talk about how fun it is to “do nothing” when they’re off work, and I think, I want to do nothing, too. “Nothing” sounds wonderful. So I study how to be unstudied. I watch how laid-back people act and try to mimic it. I toss my purse on the floor and fling my arm breezily over the side of a chair, like I’m so relaxed I don’t even care where my limbs or belongings land. Sometimes I can almost convince myself I feel it.

Luckily, one of my responsibilities at the bookstore is reading manuscripts of forthcoming books. That means that on vacation I can imitate relaxing while I’m actually working. All I have to do is lean back in my beach lounger and point to my stack of books and say, “Behold this leisurely reading I’m doing while casually wearing a sarong, free of all cares and work-related thoughts,” when in fact I’m thinking, Four books in three days. Yessss.

If success came in snortable form, I’d sniff it up each nostril and rub the residue on my gums.



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People like me—people who don’t just enjoy being right, but need to be right—are often described as ballbusters, as if all we want in the world is to make everyone’s lives harder. As if we take some pleasure in grinding our gears over every little problem in the world. Let me speak for my people and say, no, it’s not that. I don’t want to make anyone’s life more difficult.

And I don’t mean to come across as impatient, but I do like to be on time. I sense the ticking of an invisible stopwatch in everything I do, because life’s to-do list never seems to get shorter, which means the only hope for feeling some sense of progress is to get through it without delay. My senior yearbook quote was, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,” by Benjamin Franklin. (So, so cool next to everyone else’s Prince lyrics.)

It’s Mr. Franklin’s philosophy I always have in mind whenever people I have plans with are running late. I used to text them:

Are you coming?

Need me to pick you up?

Reservation in five mins.

Should I call and change it?

I sent a string of texts like this to a friend once. Then I noticed that after her leaving soon response to my first message, she had stopped answering. She pulled into my driveway to pick me up (for another friend’s birthday dinner, for which we were now half an hour late), and when I opened the passenger door, she snapped, “I know.”

She backed out of my driveway, looking in the rearview mirror, refusing to make eye contact with me. We sat silently side by side for the ride, and when we arrived at the restaurant, she leapt from the car as if being freed from a broken elevator, hustling over to where our other friends stood leisurely chatting near the door. No one had told the hostess our party was late. No one had checked to see if the table was still available. Why was she so happy to see these irresponsible friends who didn’t even care about making sure our dinner plan didn’t fall apart? I was the one who’d tried to help her be on time. I was the one who’d tried to make everything right. And now she was mad at me!

I’d been freaking out because our plans had gone off the rails and I wanted to fix them. And yes, also because lateness makes me insane. But I realized as my friend gave an exasperated sigh and handed me a drink from the bar—an act I recognized in that moment as one of forgiveness—that she’d been more irritated by my prodding than she was frustrated by our scrambled plans or sorry about being late. I had made her feel rushed and belittled. When we were finally seated, another half hour later, the glow of our tabletop candlelight camouflaged how red my face had flushed with embarrassment.

I resolved, silently, to be less terrible next time.

Shortly thereafter, I started training myself not to text every hurry-up-where-are-you that popped into my head, thereby making me seem more relaxed. It’s a front, but it preserves friendships.

I don’t want people to feel I’m judging them. I don’t want to be perceived as hostile, although I know that I sometimes am. But I’m not hostile like a crazy person punching strangers on a subway platform. I’m just hostile like a crazy person who wants to gouge her eyes out when she sees grammatical errors on billboards. LOWEST PRICE’S—I can hardly stand it.

My mind seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked. That’s what harmony feels like in my brain. Wasted time and wrong answers disrupt that harmony like an off-key instrument making a dissonant clang in a musician’s ears.

I’m not a monster. I just want everything to be perfect. Is that so much to ask?



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(It’s an icicle, by the way. The perfect murder weapon. It melts—no fingerprints!)





Wonder Woman