'This moment is so rare'

This moment is so rare, though that’s true for all moments, really, if you think about it. This morning as I started writing I had technology issues and was instead greeted by the spinning pinwheel of death. That’s what we used to call the Apple symbol when our new computer system malfunctioned at the Torrance paper. One of my co-workers would slam his hands on the shared desk whenever it came up when he was trying to save a story. I would say, “Relax, bring up the Internet, surf around.” You know, multitask. Why was it so hard for some people.

I learned a couple of years ago that that particular co-worker had passed away. He was only in his 50s. I don’t know if he was drinking at the time of his death but he had had a problem. That’s why he rode his bike to work and rode back home when our shifts ended at midnight. I thought maybe he just liked riding his bike. No one questioned it except another colleague’s teenager. “Dad, don’t people with DUIs have to ride bikes?” “No, son. That’s just John. He’s different.” He also hated onions. Hated them.

Last night I presented an Evening of Editorial Enlightenment to a group of self-published (and hoping to be self-published) writers. I teamed up with my friend Beth for the Meetup event. Beth and I are also opera singers. We performed a couple of excerpts after our talk. I didn’t know Beth was a soprano, but she belted out “Mio Babbino Caro.” I felt a little jealous, as I do of all sopranos. I stood up and sang part of Samson & Delilah. The mezzos always get the “bitches, witches, and britches” parts. At least Delilah was female.

This moment is so rare that I wish I could extend it. But then it wouldn’t be rare. What if we all wore diamonds in our eyes instead of our teeth. Gold on our fingernails, ruby-encrusted aprons while cooking, Wiping my hands on the precious, smooth gems. Covering them in flour and dough. Tossing the apron in the platinum washing machine.

When Platinum bought the U-T we all laughed because that was the name of a strip club. Although maybe we were just paragraph prostitutes. Will edit for tips. When my sister stopped being a copy editor and started working in the real world she wrote to me about how she was presented a bouquet of flowers for her good work. The only time I ever got flowers at the  newspaper was for my birthday, and that was a remnant of days past when the leering editor would be sure to bring in the female employees on the birthdays so he could personally hand them their bouquet of flowers (the men got chocolate; I’m not sure who delivered that). Eventually the practice was dropped and we got nothing. Eventually  most of us were dropped too.

Someone asked me last night whether I thought being a therapist helped me when editing stories about families, “You know, so you can say whether families really act like that or not.” Yes, I am an expert on all families. That’s kind of awesome. “Hey, you, family member! Knock that off; that is not what families do. Don’t you know that I am an MFT? I am an expert on families and marriages. Please, do comply.”

I decided to add the Pulitzer thing to my bio for the writers last night, though it wasn’t in the official intro the presenter read at the beginning. I was OK with that. Yesterday I was in the parking lot of a Starbucks near my house and a woman pulled up and said she liked my laptop bag and where did I get it. We got to chatting. She told me she was a literary agent (she had asked what I do and I said I was a therapist; it seemed like the best option to say because it carries the most caché, right?). Somehow I told her I was also a creativity coach. She got excited. You need to write a book! Yeah, I hear that a lot. Here’s my card, we’ll get your book written in 6 weeks, we’ll call you America’s No. 1 creativity coach (that title’s already taken, I tell her). Well, we’ll call you something else then. It doesn’t matter what you think about yourself, it matters what they think. It only matters what the other people think.