Jackie, Lisa 4.7, and Jason came to visit us this weekend for our monthly book club meeting. It was so truly lovely to see our friends again. I’d known, of course, that I missed them, but I didn’t realize how much until we were all together again. I broke every routine I’ve established in the past month, but we had a good time (and a super brunch this morning!). My stomach might not have stood it, but I wish they could have stayed longer!
It’s funny, but it ended up being quite an East Bay weekend. We began yesterday evening by going round to several of North Berkeley’s excellent eating places, and at Chocolate Alegio Lisa got a free bunch of flowers for buying a bar of (amazing) chocolate. We teased her about looking all Berkeley-hippie, going round town with flowers in her chair. Then, today, outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, a smiling couple approached us and said they were spending the day doing “intentional acts of kindness.” They offered us chocolate and bananas and tangerines from a big basket. Later, while walking along the wharf, a young woman handed us beautiful big peach-colored roses from a bouquet she was carrying. I’m not sure what it is about this area that engenders that kind of behavior, but I’ve noticed it even in myself since we’ve returned here — an openhandedness and openheartedness I haven’t discovered elsewhere.
Or, perhaps, is it because I feel open to the world that the world feels open to me? In LA, I felt often that my true self was inadequate to my surroundings: not trendy enough, not connected enough, just not enough in any sense. Here, by contrast, I feel not only good enough, but better. I don’t just want to make eye contact with everyone I pass on the street, I want to smile at them, even to talk to them, to have some exchange of time and energy. The best way I can think to describe how it feels is that in LA I felt smaller than my body; I felt fat, and big, and lumbering. Here, I feel bigger than my body; I feel strong and expansive and generous. And it’s so ridiculous, it’s so absurd, because I know that this feeling comes at least in part from having lived somewhere other than the Bay Area. My five years in LA make me feel more confident about living in San Pablo. Another way of putting it, more concisely, is just that I feel a whole lot prettier here than I did in LA, and like a much better person. It’s both superficial and not. I haven’t really begun yet to parse out what this is all about, but I’d like to.
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I’ve also decided, after reading Norah Vincent’s thoughtful book, Self-Made Man, to try to treat Erik less as a man and more as an individual. Vincent spent a year and a half dressing and passing as a man, an experience which leads her to argue that women and men are both complicit in our society’s damaging construction of manhood/masculinity, and that women and men alike would benefit from revising that construction. Some readers have criticized her as a “male apologist,” but I think that’s reductive and unfair. In the last chapter, she concludes that men are both far worse and far better than she previously imagined — that yes, men are every bit as depraved and wicked as women think they are, but that they are also much more vulnerable and victimized than we realize (in spite of the continuing inequality of the sexes, which Vincent does not fail to acknowledge and decry).
I know I’ve certainly been guilty of seeing Erik only as a man and not as a unique person. Too often, his failings seem to me the failings of a gender; I see the deplorable behavior of all men contained in his individual problematic behaviors. When he neglects a household task, it’s not my busy partner forgetting to wash the dishes; it’s stupid men leaving all the work to the woman, as always. This tendency has blown our small domestic annoyances into major marital disputes on many an occasion. After reading Self-Made Man, it occurred to me that it would be helpful to stop thinking of Erik as such a representative of his gender, and to try to see him more within the context of just himself and his own history. Naturally, since he is my favorite man and the one who looms most prominent in my day-to-day life, it will be impossible to completely detach him from his gender, and that’s just as well. It’ll help me keep the balance between blaming him for everything and excusing him for everything!
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