Britical

 

NYC 

 

Sometimes I fancy a nice apple. I once mentioned this, in passing, to a friend’s young son, who shot back snottily, "Why don’t you marry it, then?" Let’s ignore the fact that I took this excellent, if childish retort and have used it myself on many occasions, and say rather that he makes a good point. If I liked it so much, why wouldn’t I marry the apple? Or perhaps bring home many crates of them, or move myself and all my belongings onto an apple farm?

Most people would understand that part of the pleasure to be had in said apple depends not so much on the opportunity to have one when you feel like it, but rather in the privilege of not having one when you don’t. Why hoard the things in my apartment, only to become bored with eating them as they rot slowly in front of the television? And where’s the sport in that? This is, I think, the best way I can explain my own attitude to marriage to those curious souls who will not take a simple and tactful, "It’s just not for me." for an answer.

My grandmother was a saxophonist and trumpet player who toured the world in the 1920’s, then met and married a soldier whom she perhaps should not have. In divorce court, he complained to the judge that she gave him doughnuts for breakfast (instead of the proper cooked breakfast expected of a good wife in the 30’s). "But m’lud", she said, "they were very nice dougnuts; they had jam in them." Clearly she was clueless - and likely this was a characteristic passed down through my mother to me.

The other notable thing my Grandmother said, according to my Mother: "People who have been married ten years usually wish they weren’t." And the science backs her up …. except that the real timeline is actually 12 to 18 months. (See entry http://britical.blogsome.com/2007/05/24/sexless/) This being true, I have little appetite for dragging something jolly, romantic and even quite devoted, slowly, imperceptibly down the slippery slope to people leaving the bathroom door open, dealing with "in laws", and fights about who took out the trash. Not to mention the other things, you know, the ones that get lost in the fray of exciting domestic bliss…

I bring all this up because lately I notice I have been befriended by several different people (women people mainly) whose sole M.O. seems to be to corner me over coffee and express their consternation as to why I am not on some sort of husband-finding rampage. Since I generally get to hear for quite some time about their relationship (or lack thereof) woes - and their fruitless little adventures on match.com, I do try to be generous and diplomatic in my answer, but the "It’s just not for me" rarely cuts any ice with such people. Ditto when I offer brightly that I’d really like a dog. It all serves merely to inflame them. So I then try to explain how marriage was not part of my upbringing; that it was not something I ever had to make a Decision about one way or the other since it simply did not signify, in the same way that climbing K2 may not signify for them. I tell them that if I envisage my future, it has things like going to see the Northern Lights, and dogs and a bigger apartment and my pilots’ licence in it. (There are so many big adventures to be had and they do not involve having to factor in or "check-in" or ask permission re. someone else). But still they persist in their dogged questioning. Which brings us to, and reminds me of, the guy who said he used to have a dog who wanted to catch a car. And one day, she caught one…

 

Because inevitably, they all say exactly the same predictable thing: "But do you want to die ALONE…??" And I, amused - but also pushed, provoked and running out of patience, am then compelled ramp the conversation up a bit and state the bleeding obvious: that we all die alone. And to ask if, by the way, they think intense fear is a great reason to get themselves hitched. H’mm? "What do you think?" , I say. Also, that if they are female and choose a husband their own age, that he will die about seven years before they do. (This, I could further explain, is why we see all these little gaggles of elderly ladies gambling at Vegas, giggling together on cruises, and generally whooping it up high on the insurance money and their new found freedom. But I don’t say this. I do try to restrain myself. Somewhat.)

But sometimes their bemusement makes me feel vaguely autistic and backward for not wanting, nor quite understanding, what they want. I may feel pressured to frame my answers as vague excuses for my "condition". Later I regret this and come to resent them for it. After all, I take great pains, when friends announce they are getting married or are pregnant, to respect their choices; to master the technique of making the right face. I can now contort my mouth into a convincing rictus of joy combined with the required (if inexplicable) hint of underlying envy - but still, it feels fake, and I worry it looks fake, too, because sometimes I forget to crinkle my eyes up as I shriek, "I’m so happy for you!!" (the least untruthful thing I can say). If I have some lead time, I can prepare and pretend to myself that they have decided to, say, take a year off work, and go round the world together, or that they just inherited a chocolate factory or some place that makes fire engines - all things that to me would be great cause for celebration.

 

Ironically, and on a side note, it is the couples who try to break the mold and be "different" whose weddings are often the most annoying - and this seems to be most of them. Stuck on some stupid sand dune in East Hampton, or watching the ceremony from the ground as the happy pair are oh-so-amusingly married atop a bi-plane, you can’t help pondering that it is called The Happiest Day of Your Life. It’s all downhill from there. (I will say though that the unintended advantage to the bi-plane scenario, is that you may be spared the cringing torment that is listening to people who insist on making up and saying their "own vows"…) It all screams: weddings are historically and by their very nature contrived and institutionalized and thus inherently unromantic. Indeed they are deeply cheesy. We are thus making desperate efforts to be creative and quirky that will change neither this bitter fact nor our relationship. Later, and sooner than we could ever imagine, but definitely before the baby’s first birthday, we will realise they were probably a pitiful last hurrah amidst the death throws of dying freedom.

At some point my new best friend will give up; they will sit back, their skim latte forgotten and gone cold, and I will know by the funny and familiar look on their face that they have had the happy moment of realization: Finally - finally! - here is someone whom they’ll never have to repay in kind for the exquisite pleasure of going on and on and on and on about their travails in trying to Find a Man.

This moment never fails to make my heart sink. Because afterwards, I become invisible. Because since finding a man or not finding a man is apparently all there is in this wide world, then that is all there is and all there is to discuss. And so they do. A lot.

So in conclusion, and statistics, science and rotting apples aside, I can only offer these folks, in a very caring way, this one thing that I have noticed over and over again: it is usually not the married people who express their shock and disbelief, or who desire to convert me to reside, as some have put it, in "the tit-lined coffin" of marriage. There could be many explanations for these married peoples’ silence, couldn’t there? But I am usually left with the one glaring one - that my Grandmother was right: they Know…

Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

NYC

 

How very useful it is, I thought, as I failed repeatedly to balance my chequebook, to actually know that you’re a fucking dimwit. I also thought about my bank, whose involvement in the mortgage crisis caused its stock to drop yet again yesterday. Which is not to forget (as some are apt to of late) the legion of other dimwits in denial who could not balance their own chequebooks nor read the not-so-small print, and so chose to sign up for loans they clearly could not afford. Thank goodness we live in America, where personal responsibility is but a nebulous concept and the biggest lenders, along with the borrowers, are now to be bailed out.

"Neither a borrower, not a lender be", warns Shakespeare, "for loan oft loses both itself and friends." Quite so. Most of my friends rent, and while we might yearn to own our very own apartment, we are painfully aware of our financial limits. One friend called me the other night to tell me to "pull all my money" out of my bank as she’d heard it was about to collapse. I explained that this would involve my actually entering my local branch (rather than hitting the ATM) and trying to make myself understood to whoever was the only employee on duty that day - arguably a more daunting prospect than the loss of my $228.43 (or whatever it actually was).

On several levels my bank is a distinctive experience. One comes from the fact that it is self-evidently inappropriate and unbecoming to give yourself your own nickname. It’s a bit like telling people that you’re "charismatic" or "sexy". But this happens to be a fact of no consequence to the bank, who has plastered a very silly nickname all over its walls….and on billboards, buses and television. Starring you, the would-be customer (say, a cheery, suited black man) in various scenarios of sticking it to The Man (for instance, a bewildered, half-naked elderly white banker man and his naked white man partners), the TV ads are deeply patronizing. You, yes, YOU!! the customer! is calling the shots! Telling those fancy schmancy, stuck-up bankers where to stick it!! (I would offer this up as an ad idea for the Obama campaign but sadly the bank’s style is not quite polished enough on the condescending front.)

I thought nostalgically back to when I had first opened an account at the bank in 2006. My Casual Friday dressed "associate" stood fearlessly all out in the open at a little plywood podium topped by a computer screen. To a bank with a nickname that rhymes roughly with "FUCK-U", and to people reassured by such things in a place that has all your money, it all looks ever so unconventional and urban folksy - just like that hip and kewl new store, Blockbuster Video. That and the 90’s trance house music they pump into the room at 9am. But I digress, because how very absorbing it was, as I stood at the podium practically in the guy’s armpit, to see the names, addresses and social security numbers of all the people with even slightly similar names as me scroll slowly up the screen. It might have crossed my mind there are those who would appreciate this even more than I did, but I was too impressed with how way cool it was they wouldn’t charge me to write cheques while they used my money to, say, deal in dodgy mortgage loans. Whatever. I realized it wasn’t even worth closing my meagre account. I would ask the bank to help me balance my chequebook instead.

I decided to go to the branch on Park Avenue where the bank strays confusingly from its grating just-folks mandate. It’s more bearable there, even if I find the fact of the contrast annoying. The lighting is less unflattering, and there is clearly an effort to cater to a more…upscale (i.e. needy and difficult) customer. There are actual tellers behind proper bank robber grilles. And though they are full of mute resentment, they do not act like the employee(s) at my local branch - that is, with the shockingly passive-aggressive bovine slowness found more at the Post Office where employees find their calling making it crystal clear they simply DO NOT CARE about your stupid package and practicing moving in slow motion. Even so, the teller looked miffed at my request to have someone check the bank’s records against mine. Where, I wanted to demand, was my posse of naked elderly banker dudes? She said, "If there’s someone back there you’d have to make an appointment…" I asked if maybe she could help me, then? Thus she scurried off and returned in short order with the happy news that "He (?) isn’t doing anything so you can go back there."

So I went back there. My "financial advisor", Carlos, looked simultaneously bored, overwhelmed and two years out of community college. To give him some credit, he tapped about quite earnestly on his calculator for 15 minutes or more, the numbers balancing perfectly each side…. and yet… not. (Ha!) He looked a bit tearful. This was consoling to me because it meant I was after all not the only fucking dimwit - and I wasn’t even a "financial advisor"!! Funnily enough, it was just then that I saw very clearly, amongst the jumble of numbers upside down across the desk, exactly where the mistake was. I didn’t have the heart to tell Carlos about this and set about generously trying to save his professional dignity, such as it might have been, or at least was before I walked in. "It’s fine, actually…", I said, "Hey, perhaps it’s a weird Twilight Zone, X Files thing, ha ha ha!" He looked at me vacantly. This aggravated me. I get profoundly cross when people fail to get really obvious pop culture references; when they fail, as someone once put it, to leap aboard the reference train. Fine, I thought, ignore my graciously proffered hand. "So what do we do now…?", I said. He looked uncomfortable and tried to shuffle, in some business-y way, the two pieces of paper that sat on his desk. It was futile. Why was I even surprised? I stood up, feeling a bit sorry for him but apparently not sorry enough to stop myself saying, "OK, well I’m sure I’ll figure it out…..oh, and by the way, are you guys going bust tonight like they say on CNN, or, like, more towards the end of the week?"

Oh sure, you might say, "If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?", like some grizzled old toothless geezer in a flannel shirt right before he spits tobacco on the barroom floor. Well, that’s why I live in this here hoity-toity New Yawk City and not Kentucky, Florida, East Texas or some other picturesque place where more people bought more houses. I may not be rich, but at least I ain’t stupid - and if I really can’t balance a cheque book I will say so. But still we have to watch the endless parade of these cretins victims on the news: the mewling children, the rusting SUV, the large empty rooms in which the ubiquitous and carefully placed teddy bear tugging at the heart strings is framed wistfully in the very last shot. And while there is much vitriol directed at, and some half-hearted mea culpas emanating from the lending institutions, I have yet to see any of the borrowers confess that, yeah, maybe they should have read the loan agreement properly. Even the reporters seem loath to declare the Emperor naked.

In one way, I appreciate (sort of) the elegant irony of how these same borrowers, armed with just their plucky willful ignorance, really have managed to stick it to The Man - just like my bank promises. But the joke is on us, the ones who have tried hard to neither a lender nor a borrower be, lest we lose friends, or homes. But no one is losing anything, least of all friends. In fact, guiltily entwined in flagrante delicto, the banks and the borrowers are all making new friends! Meaning us, the real dimwits evidently, who will foot the hefty bill. As we struggle to pay the rent, fearing for our jobs in the mortgage crisis recession, can we be blamed for wondering if we weren’t just too dimwitted to sign up for the fabulous bailout opportunity too?

I thought today about poor Carlos the financial advisor who, in answer to my reasonable if pissily put question, assured me that he himself had been "assured by the executives" (presumably the naked, elderly white banker and his cohorts now truly sweating through their Turnbull & Asser shirts) that the bank "…has enough capital to…."… but you’ve heard that line on CNN. Clearly, Carlos wasn’t going to be sticking it to The Man anytime soon. And neither was I. And neither, I am wagering my $238.64, will you.
 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All Rights Reserved.