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Memoir (New York City)

Things I Learned in New York:

(1) Don't trust a writer without a sense of humor. Life is short, so why spend it in the company of someone who can't make you laugh? (There's an exception: Ruth Rendell. She isn't very funny, but her use of murder and suspense is entertaining in its own way. If the writer is sort of humorless, she can at least supply you with blood, guts, and mounting dread, in my opinion.) Also, when you read, you're meant to take on the roles of each character you encounter. You're actually meant to play these characters, in your mind. If you're doing this, and the book still isn't grabbing you, then abandon it and move on. People are so weirdly reluctant to do this, as if it were a moral failing.

(2) Dan Savage is your ally. Savage is a seriously undervalued writer. My education in gay sex was laughable. It wasn't mentioned--at all--in my public school years, and then, when I arrived at Catholic school, it was described as a sin. One teacher encouraged the latent homosexuals in the class to consider chaste same-sex friendships. (It's not venal if you don't stick your dick in his butt!) Another teacher suggested that sex outside marriage would cause your penis to turn purple or green, and to "have growths." (Marriage wasn't available to gay folks at that time, so: go ahead and read between the lines.) Savage is a gift to the world, because he explains, in candid detail, how you go about having anal sex. (It's more complex than the younger readers out there might imagine!) But--really--Savage uses sex as metonymy. He's really talking about moral seriousness and having a good, meaningful life. He says, "Try it if your partner wants to try it. Being uninterested is not an adequate excuse. Being *repelled* is an adequate excuse--but that's a different scenario." This applies to sex--but doesn't it also apply to just about everything else? Savage's advice for bedtime habits--"Be good, giving, and game"--seems, to me, to be advice for all areas of social life (etiquette tips in disguise). Savage also writes fearlessly about major transitions--the death of his Catholic mother, the strange road he took toward marriage, the process of raising a kid--and he routinely strikes gold. I'm also awed by his discussion of monogamy and its challenges. This is a writer who ought to win major prizes; he doesn't, because his genre and his voice do not fit within our limited (and tedious) understanding of "what is literary."

(3) A job is just a job. Set clear boundaries, and stick to them. Leave work at the precise time you have indicated you will leave. (I came from a hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating tradition, where you had to martyr yourself to win others' respect. But I've noticed that something different operates in many workplaces. It's the people who value and take care of themselves--and who have lives outside of their offices--who are afforded the most respect.) If you do not set boundaries for yourself, others will be all too happy to set those boundaries for you. (And you won't like what they choose, and then you'll be silently bitter, and that's exhausting.)

(4) Do not use the FedEx on Court St. in downtown Brooklyn. Just go to the FedEx on Smith Street, next to the NuHotel. Even if it's more of a walk. Don't be a fool. And arrive before 8 AM--always.

(5) It's not cute to say, "I'm hopeless with math!" You wouldn't giggle and say, "Don't ask me to read that book! I'm functionally illiterate!" So, corollary: Do not wander around the Earth believing that you are inherently deficient with arithmetic. (And if you do have this silly belief, don't advertise it.) Pick up the treatises of Marilyn Burns; I promise she will get you to think about facts and figures in a new way. And if you have to estimate quantities? I thought, for the longest time, that this was just some God-given skill, and if you didn't have it, you didn't have it. So, if someone asked me to make an estimate, my blood-pressure would skyrocket. I would grab a number at random, from thin air. And the person would look at me frankly, in the ensuing silence, and I would know that she was making inferences about me--inferences that extended beyond questions w/r/t my making-an-estimate abilities. But Marilyn Burns says: Divide the vessel into fractions, estimate how many beans there are in each fraction, then add up the beans-per-fraction. Even if your number is still wildly off, you will at least have done some reasoning to arrive where you have arrived, and so you can give your answer with dignity. This process changed my life.

(6) If you want your child to read books, you yourself should read books. This was something that seemed to skip right over the heads of many harried Manhattan parents I worked with.

(7) It is really obnoxious to say: "I just don't have time to read." Good God. People have time to masturbate, to drink, to watch "American Idol." "I just don't HTTR" is a foolish and passive-aggressive sentence. It's tempting to use, but don't use it. I have much more fondness for people who say: "I really don't like books." It's refreshing!

(8) Go over, under, and around. When Tina Fey wrote her Charlottesville skit, she made a serious omission. People (irritating, humorless people) thought she was suggesting that we shouldn't do anything to combat neo-Nazis. But she wasn't saying this. She was saying: "Fight them in every way but the one way they're hoping for." Be subtle and tricky in your fighting. This insight is helpful for me, when I am at work.

(9) There are people in the world who do not blindly agree with every single thing Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, and some of these people are decent and intelligent. Just an observation.

(10) There are three main kinds of science. The sexiest is life science, by far. Just get your kid experimenting with light/darkness and pill bugs, and you're in fine shape. Earth science is the second-most-sexy. Keeping a weather chart can be reasonably fun. I'm also a fan of sorting and describing minerals. (And: you can have a child separate parts of a mixture without touching the parts. Use magnets to get the paper clips out. Pour water--do a little-sink/float magic--to pluck out the floating wax bits. Then use a sifter to pull the thin grains of sand from out of the thick grains. Delightful--and it counts as science!) The least sexy area of inquiry is physical science. My best suggestion: Make a K'nex car, and power it by means of a dropping weight. Then power it by means of a taut rubber band. (See YouTube.) That's physics! Also: dissolving varying quantities of gelatin in water can be entertaining. Food coloring makes it a party.

I'll keep going later. New Jersey--and a new life--here I come...

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