What It's Like To Be Shy

At the coffee shop:

I dress anonymously. I avoid color and fashion. Blue jeans and a dark (but not too dark) shirt.

I sit in the corner and face the window. I used to face the wall but one of my friends (all three and a half of them) told me it makes me look a bit crazy and kept me from blending in.

I scan the crowd but avoid eye contact. In front, I like to find a woman whose hair style attracts me (again, from the back) and imagine that on the dark side of the moon, she has a face with a beauty unique to my quirky aesthetic sense. Sometimes she turns and shatters the illusion, but more often than not, all I ever get is her ear lobe and the curve of her chin.

At the bookstore:

I head first for the magazine rack, but my time here is short, catching up on the latest computer news and reviews. Most of my time is spent among the Literature shelves, particularly the New Fiction section.

Some recommend meeting women in the grocery store but that seems wrong to me. How much can you learn about a person based on vegetables, meats, and starches? I find the bookstore much more telling. I mean if I see a woman smelling the rind of a cantaloupe, what does that tell me, that she likes fresh fruit? But if I see a woman flipping through Sylvia Plath, I know she's hurting something bad. If she's reading Jane Austin, I'm thinking she's probably got impossibly high standards. Jack Kerouac tells me she's probably too bohemian for me and Toni Morrison that she's too smart for me. And on and on. Much more informative.

Of course, being as shy as I am, all I ever do is watch. . .or what's the more modern word for it? I lurk, and if I see a woman reading Douglas Coupland or Michael Chabon I'll just dream about what might be if I had the bravado and the lines and the looks.

In my dreams:

I'm taller and better looking. I dress better because I know how to dress better. I'm smooth and suave. I have women at hello.

I had a phase where I dated casually and widely. I unintentionally stole a couple girlfriends from their boyfriends though I didn't know it at the time. However, I am now past all that exploration because I have found the love of my life. Warm, witty, sharp, and in possession of natural, effortless beauty.

We work at our relationship. We do our best to fight fair. We agree to never hold grudges and we do our best not to.

I enjoy spoiling my love with style and surprise. I send her random, gooey text messages while she is at work, things like, "all you ever have to be is you and I'll fall in love over and over again." I imagine her reading those messages in the middle of a meeting. I imagine her hiding her smile behind her hand, pretending to cough. After the meeting is over she shows the message to her girlfriends and they laugh while wondering why their boyfriends aren't as wildly romantic.

She finds surprising ways to return my favors. She sneaks a secret cup of pudding into my lunch bag. She draws a heart on the back side of my spoon so I don't notice it until one of my coworkers points it out. He laughs at me just as her coworkers laughed at her but he laughs for a different reason, though deep down inside where he'll never admit it, he laughs for the same reason.

In a group (say at a staff meeting):

People are often surprised at my insight and willingness to speak up. They think that because I am soft-spoken and reserved one on one that I would be more so in a formal group setting.

What they don't understand is that it's the personal part of personal interaction that I find acutely uncomfortable. Speaking in front of a crowd is easy because in a group, people become anonymous, impersonal, other. And when someone from the group responds to what I say, they are responding to the idea presented not to me, and that makes me feel safe.

I sometimes confuse people who, after a meeting where I may have been especially vocal, come up to me, ask me if I would be interested in discussing my ideas further with them, perhaps over lunch, and I decline because that's just too much.

Perhaps I miss out on promotions this way, and I'll admit that it's frustrating to watch people with an abundance of social skills but a dearth of intelligence work their way up the pay scale, finally settling in a position where their ignorance can flourish.

At the salon:

Please, please, just cut my hair. Don't ask me how my day has been. Don't ask me what I do for work or for fun. Don't ask me if I've seen any good movies. Don't ask me about the latest reality show.

Just ask me how I want my hair done (short and thinned out), ask about my sideburns if you must (just even them out), but overall, just let your scissors do the talking and I promise tip in return.

Peacemaker at War

He was tired but where does the peacemaker go when at war within himself? A peacemaker. Numerous personality tests had confirmed what he already knew about himself. He despised conflict, tension, strife and did his best to mend fences, to negotiate compromises, to build bridges when necessary - all to maintain some sense of, not necessarily order but calm. Keep things copacetic, was his motto.

Normally he was fine with his role in life - deep down, he harbored a kind of secret pride for it - but lately things had just gotten out of hand. In his mind, it was one thing to be there for the novel solution, the unseen middle way, but lately it's been the same damn conflict between the same damn coworkers and the solution was the same every time. It was just a matter of making sure the one listened to and heard what the other person was saying rather than letting them develop counter-arguments while ignoring the other. He'd spend a moment listening to both sides and when it was clear that the two were stuck circling one another with one-tracked arguments, he would step in, summarize the view of each to the other and remind them that they'd been there before.

Before the Storm

It was Thursday night, date night. Married for seven years, they credited these Thursday nights as their saving grace when asked by friends how she and Simon were able to keep their marriage together. Tonight they had reservations for sushi, a party of four. They were meeting up with Joan and Harry, a couple they had set up, the only one of their pairings that amounted to anything. Joan and Harry had been seeing one another for a year now and this dinner was a kind of celebration and a kind of thank you. The sushi was on them.
Dinner was at seven thirty and it was already six fifty - still enough time to get there on time, but just enough. She checked her makeup again, the third time in the last ten minutes, and as she had done before, she took a step back and smiled as she admired the dress she had found not two days ago at her favorite vintage clothing store - a classic silhouette, probably from the fifties, whose style had become in vogue once again. It was a step up from her normally more reserved, unassuming style and while she was modest to a fault around others, she held a kind of private pride and joy at her find. A simple string of pearls around her neck would have been perfect, but even if she had owned such a luxury, she would not have worn them - that would just be too much, a toe beyond the line of what was called for tonight.
At ten after seven she called ahead to her friends, explaining that Steven was running late and that there was no way they could make the seven thirty reservation. Joan thanked her for the call, said they would see if the time could be moved and that they'd see them as soon as they could get there. Normally not one for anger, she nevertheless could feel the tension torqued in opposite directions by anxiety and anticipation, compounded by her preference for promptness, by his habitual tardiness. She didn't want a fight to spoil the night so she did her best to contain herself.

Arguments for Love

Is it true? Does love - true, pure, divine - really exist? Is it really possible that two people would be so vested in the well being of another that they would place this other person's happiness before their own? Does that really happen or have we been taken in by fairy tales. Or is it worse than that? Have we, like countless losers at the lottery, purchased our token in hopes of winning that grand, shining prize? For perhaps it is true that love exists but it is sought after over insurmountable, otherwise impossible odds. But we play because we must, because we were made to play. It is inextricably intertwined in our DNA.

If suffering is the most profound argument against the existence of a good and loving deity, then love is the most sublime argument against atheism.

Bill met Sarah at a small, independently owned coffee shop near his home. She was at the condiment bar sprinkling hazelnut on her latte and he was waiting to grab a cover for his grande drip coffee (black). Perhaps the grains had lodged themselves in the pores, perhaps humidity had caused them to clump in the container but for whatever reason Sarah was unable to get the hazelnut shaker to produce. Bill, not one for waiting, said excuse me while reaching in front of Sarah towards the lids.

Family Cancer

There are many ideas circulating about what causes cancer. Some of the consensus seems to indicate that cancer cells are regular cells that have gone wrong somehow. Some of the latest research in this regard seems to indicate that these wayward cells originate as repair cells, going in to mend a broken part of the body but the fix goes awry and the cell that was meant to heal changes somehow into something sinister and slow and lethal.




Daniel not only meant to apologize to his wife for forgetting their anniversary when he brought that bouquet of flowers home with him that Friday afternoon, he also bought them as a way to soften the blow of the bad news he had to deliver.

Theirs had become a life of consistency, of predictable patterns. It was a peaceful, harmonious sort of rhythm - a pattern honed through years of fitful trial and error. In her mind, what kept their life from devolving into a drone-like repetition were the yearly milestones, birthdays, holidays, and company parties, that punctuated the everyday routine. She looked forward to these interruptions. She anticipated the wrestling over little details like what gift to buy, what food to make, what dress to wear.

Her favorite of these yearly celebrations was their anniversary. Though she never spoke of it, she saw it as the high point of the year not because the date in June neatly bisected the year in two but because of all that it represented. Though it wasn't always harmonious or easy, she truly cherished the life they had built together. To her, their anniversary was a time to remember, to savor, to memorialize again their commitment to one another.

For all that it meant to her, their anniversaries were usually a simple affair. Dinner, a walk in the park or a scenic drive, long conversations, remembrances, a chance to laugh over charged arguments that they now saw as being about nothing, a chance to forgive. These nights would end in passionate consummation, sometimes slow and tender, sometimes ravenous and hungry, always satisfying.

Then for the first time, he had forgotten. He dropped the ball and life for her felt out of balance. That year their anniversary fell on a Tuesday. She gave him until Thursday night to realize his mistake and this gave her two days to plan on how to remind him.




Daniel had other things on his mind. He too loved celebrating their anniversary but this week his mind had been elsewhere, wrapped up in weightier matters. His problems began the week before. He had been in for his yearly physical last Monday. His doctor's office called on Wednesday morning asking him to come in for a few more tests. Probably nothing, they said. Thursday afternoon the office called again. This time his doctor was on the phone. He asked him if he was sitting down, to take a seat if he was standing.



On weeknights, she always arrived home first so, domestic as it sounds, she made dinner. He, in return, would cook through the weekend. That Thursday night as part of her plan, she prepared a simple salad. She placed chopped, rinsed lettuce in a large glass bowl in the center of the table. Beside the bowl she placed Italian dressing (his) and Ranch (hers). It was a very simple salad, no croutons, no onions, no olives. Not even a sprinkling of cheese or of fresh ground pepper. Just the lettuce.

He came in wet from the rain. She could tell it had been a hard day for him at the office by the way he dropped his bag, the way he let his shoes drop as he took them off instead of neatly laying them down. "Good," she thought.

Mourning

After her husband died, she hoped to die of a broken heart but death was not so accommodating. They had been married for forty three years. They had no children by choice.

For twenty-two years of their marriage he had been a pastor of a church whose congregation grew from twelve to about a hundred within its first year. Before their five year anniversary it swelled to an average attendance hovering around the eight hundred mark and they had a membership roster of over six hundred. By the time he left a weekly average of five or six thousand was not uncommon. On Christmas and Easter they often surpassed the ten thousand mark.

Alone in the kitchen of their modest, two floor, two bedroom house she holds a cup of coffee with both hands. The heat from the freshly poured serving approaches but never quite reaches the threshold of pain. She feels the warmth radiate through her fingers and palms. She looks out the window and sees morning light up the suburb. It's the heart of summer and she thinks, "this is a season for life, not death, for joy, not mourning. But we have no say in these matters."

She raises the cup to her lips, blows over the surface then takes a sip. She can't taste the coffee through the burn. She lowers it back down onto the saucer and waits for the coffee to cool.

Ingrate

There are lots of stories about people who had brushes with death who, because of that brush, went on to dramatically change their lives - reordering priorities, usually putting people in front of product rather than the other way around.

Donald wasn't one of them. Oh, he had that dance with death all right. One day on the production line he just keeled over. He worked in a more isolated section so if Phil hadn't been taking a shortcut back to his office and if Phil hadn't radioed Andy who knew CPR and who just happened to be in the building whereas he was normally out on the road, Donald would have died there in front of his assembly machine.

The paramedics arrived in minutes. CPR isn't exactly hard labor but ten minutes takes its toll. Andy was starting to cramp up just as the EMTs took over. They asked quick-fire questions and went straight for their defibrillator paddles. After the fourth shock through the chest they found a pulse and whisked Donald to the nearest trauma center where, after angioplasty, counseling, and physical therapy (less than four days total), he was back home for a week then back on the job albeit at a slower, light duty pace. The wonders of modern medical science.

While he was still recovering in the hospital, Donald was visited by friends from work and from the bar. Phil and Andy came by and told him about the string of coincides that, all the medical personnel involved agreed, saved his life. Donald smiled and laughed and thanked them all around.

Stories abound involving deep friendships made through such lifesaving partnerships. This isn't one of them. Donald and Phil and Andy never spoke much before the incident and once back at work the most they did was to wave at one another in passing.

Back at work, they put him at a desk arranging invoices by dates and then alphabetically. His doctor had him on light duty for three months which kept him from his seat at the assembly line.

Tea

"Tell me about tea," he says.

She smiles a coy, close lipped smile then says, "tea is at least a couple thousand years older than coffee. No one knows exactly when or where the drink was invented but most agree it was somewhere in Asia, probably China. Legend has it that an emperor was drinking from a bowl of boiling water. He set it aside and the wind blew tea leaves into it. When the emperor took his next drink, he enjoyed the taste as well as the refreshed, energized feeling it gave him."

"Do you think that's how it happened?"

More serious now, she looks up from the cup of tea in front of her, looks him directly in the eyes as if testing him somehow. "Do you want to know what I think?"

Caught off guard by this sudden turn in demeanor, he draws back a bit, eyebrows raised but he shrugs and asks her to go on.

"Most histories relating to tea have to do with people discovering or creating the drink. The legend about the emperor is a very popular one but I think that story has it backwards. I think that tea trees always knew about the latent potential of their leaves. I think they stood for millennia just waiting for the opportunity to share their secret treasure. But trees are nothing, if not patient."

"It wasn't always this way with them, the trees and their eagerness to share themselves. Do you know about the Arbor Council?"

Eyebrows still raised, he shakes his head.

"It spans the globe. Messages are carried on the wind. Minutes are recorded in tree rings and the archives are infused into the soil. Territorial rights are settled in this way. Notes on climate changes are shared. Reports on how they are being treated by man also play a big role."

"There was a long stretch of time where trees were on the defensive. Man learned harvesting, the agricultural age had begun and as civilizations grew, their exploitation of trees reached unprecedented levels. The news on the wind was abuzz with talk of hardening themselves against their axes, of toppling themselves on the tree cutters. At the worst of it the idea was floated to turn their sap, seeds, and fruit to poison - a slow acting poison that would take the humans gradually. It would be too late for them far before they found the source of their demise."

"It was this idea that turned the tide. One family of trees in Eastern Asia, Theaceae, was repulsed by this turn in the discussion. One subset in particular, genus Camellia, took the lead in proposing an entirely new paradigm."

Noir Angel

Being an angel.

Forget any romantic notions you may harbor, this is a grimy, thankless, often futile gig. We have far more in common with beat down, noirish detectives than with the idealized creatures of light with rippling muscles and a fifteen foot wingspan. What do we need wings for, we're spiritual beings.

City angels. We got it worst of all. Angels in third world countries, nations under oppressive regimes, nations at war - those angels have real jobs to do, real pain to comfort, real suffering to console. Me, in the city? I got people late for work praying about traffic. I got cheating husbands praying their wives don't find out. I got vanity cases praying their nose job (their third and last one, they promise) turns out okay.

And there ain't no gratitude, none whatsoever. I help someone find their car keys or their cell phone - big deal. My friend down in Darfur, he saves a family from rebel or government soldiers and prayers of thanks abound.

But I wouldn't trade places with them even if I could. See, the trick is to find the meaning and the joy in the place where you are, not where you want to be. And how do I do that?

Couple weeks ago there was this kid, Andy. He starts praying all this stuff about Playstation this, X-Box that. I mean this kid is already spoiled dirty rotten stink. He throws away more toys in a month than most kids (even other middle class ones like him) get to own their whole lives. There are only three toys that Andy has kept for more than a year:

Going Postal

Jim goes to work everyday at seven. He works in the shipping department of a metal fabrication shop. His main job is boxing up orders before they're released onto the world. At this shop, there are two lines. One line is made up of relatively standardized parts - housings, couplings, nicks and nacks. This is the company's bread and butter. The other line is made up of one-off specialty items, custom made pieces for customers with deep pockets, tight tolerances, and a lust for the impossible. These orders come in all shapes and sizes from granule sized gears to garbage truck sized monoliths.

The packing department for the second line never knows what they're going to get from week to week. It's a challenging job and they often have to work closely with the engineers to make sure that weak points are addressed and that nothing gets stressed in a way it's not designed for. The shippers in this department even give suggestions to the engineers to make for less damage prone pieces and the engineers really do take their ideas into account.

Jim works for the first line where there are standardized boxes for the standardized parts. There's a standardized workflow and from year to year, even the level of orders seems to have its own standardized pattern.

Letter From Burma

Back in Seattle after a week and a half trip to Myanmar, Arnold and his wife Ruth are glad to be home in their apartment overlooking the Puget Sound. They're eager to return to the comfortable familiarity of their bed but they want to throw the first load into the washer before sleeping off the jet lag and so they're hastily unpacking.

As Ruth is unfurling a long shawl, purchased at a local flea market, a small piece of paper falls out and flutters to the floor. At first she thinks it's merely a receipt or some random piece of trash. She bends over to pick it up, intending to toss it into the nearest trash can but what, from a distance, appeared to be a random black pattern upon closer inspection turns out to be very fine, very small handwriting.

"Take a look at this," she says, holding the sheet close to her face, examining the writing.

Arnold throws another pair of shorts and a soiled shirt into the laundry basket then walks over to see what his wife is holding in her hands.

"It's some kind of writing, it's in Burmese, I have no idea what it is," she says, handing the sheet over to him.

"Maybe it's from the hotel, like a token of thanks."

"But why would it be in Burmese? And look closer. It's hand written. See, you can see the indentations, you can tell this someone wrote this."

"Well, honey, I can't read Burmese either. It's probably a mistake. Come on, I want to get to bed, I'm so tired and my back. . ."

Mathematics

He was taking a break from his formulas. He was working on a new branch of combutronic mathematics, a specialization of a specialized field of obscure number theory. Tonight was not his night. He wasn't making any progress whatsoever. His room was a mess of crumpled sheets of paper, stacks of books many of them propped open to pages he hoped would give him a lead, some way into a crack in the brick wall he had painted himself into.

Out of his dorm, in the cool of the night air, in the middle of the campus courtyard, he went for a walk.

Love For Granted

They were married for eight years and had dated for two years before. Eric didn't know if Janet felt the same but he realized recently that their relationship had dissolved into routine.

The realization hit him a few days ago. It was a Thursday morning. He was driving to work and he caught himself daydreaming about Karen, the new temp who was helping to move data into the new HR database. Much of the process had been automated but due to a glitch in the transfer, parts of the records for all four hundred or so employees of the Branch Foundation had to be keyed in by hand.

It wasn't the first time he had thought about a woman at work. It was always innocent enough, the thoughts never went beyond imaginary conversations, they were never of an intimate nature. Perhaps that difficult for some to believe but despite the stereotype, there are some in the male gender whose libido is more subdued. Eric was one with this trait and in addition, he took the vows of marriage as binding and un-negotiable. While he felt it wise to never say "one would never," he believed that he would never go so far as to cheat on his wife.

Now it must be stated here that Eric was not one who had ever been good at meeting women, even back before he was married. He was not a particularly good looking man though he made a point to dress well enough so that his wardrobe, while not compensating through excessive flair, made it clear to the world that he cared about appearances. He communicated well enough with members of both genders but if he happened to find a certain woman especially attractive, he found himself stammering, at a loss for words, graceless and clumsy.

He was all too well aware of these traits. In his single years before he met Janet, it was these very characteristics that frustrated him to no end for they made it nearly impossible for him to ask women out on dates. In fact, it was Janet who, he found out years into the relationship, went out of her way to make herself available to him, for him to ask her out and even with all this help, it was a mutual friend who finally arranged for them to meet for dinner.

Once past the first few dates, he found conversation easy enough. It was clear to them both that they shared something unique, a kind of ease with one another that made the sometimes awkward transition from casual acquaintance to lovers a seamless and effortless one.

The Companionship of Cigarettes

In lieu of companionship, of friendship, of a lover, he smokes clove cigarettes. He smoked them the way a troubadour plays his guitar, the way the barfly drinks a bottle of whisky, the way an accountant arranges sums on a spreadsheet.

It was hardly an addiction unless one counts one or two cigarettes three or four times a week as an addiction. He certainly wasn't a chain smoker. He was lucky (so to speak) if he smoked a whole pack in the course of a month.

It was for companionship - a way to be alone but not just standing by himself. In an odd sort of way, standing around smoking a cigarette made him more invisible, anonymous than if he were to stand in the same place without a cigarette. That was part of his reasoning, but it was also because of the warmth, the sweet, tight taste of smoke. The tiny buzz that made him feel illuminated, as if he were radiating a faint blue aura.

It was an odd sort of love affair, he knew, but in his shyness, his cowardice around women he was attracted to, these cigarettes were a guilty comfort.

Most of his friends didn't know. He didn't want to be bothered with the questions and the practical, all to obvious health warnings. The few friends who did know thought he had stopped a long time ago.

It was also a kind of rebellion. He wasn't one to impose himself on others and beyond that, it wasn't uncommon for him to feel taken advantage of or taken for granted. These cigarettes were a quiet, secret way for him to tell all of his free loading friends to fuck off and leave him alone.

He loved his cigarettes but he knew well enough to keep them at a distance, to not love them too much. He didn't know where the line between casual smoking and can't quit smoking was drawn but he wanted to stay well away from that line. To this end, it's not that he limited himself to a certain number of cigarettes a day. A limit implies restraint and one only needs to restrain ones self from something one would otherwise indulge in. Smoking wasn't that for him.

So there was no per-day limit. Unrestrained on his worst days the most he ever indulged in was four in one day but that was rare. To keep himself far away from that line, he just made sure to resist the want of a cigarette at least as often as he gave into it and since he had never gotten to the point where he NEEDED to smoke, this blurry rule of thumb kept him safe enough.

Love in Seasons

It was Spring when we met and fell quickly in love. The blooms were beginning to bud on the naked trees and as they burst into bloom it appeared as if there were fireworks tethered to the ground by branches, echoing and celebrating the love that I felt exploding in my heart, filling me with a radiant kind of energy that made me feel that nothing in this world was impossible for the two of us. I told her this and she smiled that pursed, close-lipped smile that first attracted me to her.

Discontent

One day, he thinks, one day. And then he heads out the door to work.