Life is Friends! Or something.

I've never been much for self-help books, but I picked one up on a whim at the library the other day anyway. It's called "Life is Friends" and was written by Jeanne Martinet, author of other instructional tracts on areas of personal deficiency like "The Art of Mingling." (BAH MINGLING.)

"Life is Friends" is basically one giant exhortation to socialize, with subheadings like "How to Create Friendship Flow Energy," "The Five Fatal Guesting Sins," and the somewhat disquieting "Playmates for Life." In no uncertain terms, Martinet orders us talk to strangers, chat up new friends, host dinner parties, and host house guests. I can't think of anything I dread more.

Like many of you, I am finding it harder and harder to make friends as I go through life. What used to be simple ("Hi. I'm Anne. Do you like sand?") has become dishearteningly complex ("You live all the way up there? And you have three dogs, two small children, and a parakeet? And you're only free Tuesdays at 9:00 PM?"). I do have a wealth of lovely, already extant friends, but an unfortunate majority of them live in other time zones.

Martinet's book reassured me that I've got the basic techniques down (test lines, laughter, low-stakes platonic dating), but illuminated my rather profound shortcomings in the area of effort. The effort required to make new friends outside of a university setting is just so...EFFORTFUL. Never turn down a party invitation, Martinet orders. Invite people into your home. But socializing is so draining! Hosting house guests sucks, and you have to clean twice!

Nevertheless, Martinet (her last name is hilariously suitable) has bullied me into resolving to do better. I will do better! I predict this resolution will last at least 45 minutes, until I have to decide whether or not to attend tonight's retirement party.

I hope the following sticks with me longer, because for all that I'm attuned to the differing positives of differing friendships, I can be obtuse about the negatives:

"One of the areas that gives us trouble is our expectations when it comes to the people in our lives. Often we are disappointed by a friend who [sic] we feel has not behaved the way we believe a friend should, and that disappointment hinders our continuing a relationship with him.

"It is very helpful to realize that you cannot expect all friends to be the same. Some friends will give more to you than you feel you are giving to them; some friends you will give more to them. Some people are better listeners than others; some are more entertaining. Some friends can offer sympathy; others can only provide practical help. Some friends can help you solve a problem; others are wonderful at showing appreciation when you help them..."

and so on. This I found less useful:

"So there you are, floating down the river of life in your canoe. What can you do, if anything, to cause friends to flow toward you more than they flow away from you? ...let me put it this way: You have to make your canoeing look good. People trying to navigate in their own canoes aren't going to want to get too close to you if you are flailing around, causing dangerous waves and splashes, and yelling, "Help me, I don't know how to steer this thing!"

I like the cranky splashers. Makes canoeing more interesting.

Bargain Basement

Haggle: even the word is ugly. It rhymes with nothing lovely or wholesome, only gaggle (a word that conjures up avenging geese), waggle (canine posteriors), and Fraggle (strung out, hermetic Muppets). What's there to love, or even to enjoy?

Plus, the martial reality of haggling -the feints and stabs, the desire to make a killing- sends me scurrying for cover. Haggling is like laser tag played in the daytime by slow people without laser guns, and as anyone who had the misfortune to witness my sole arcade outing can attest, I suck at laser tag. (Though to be completely accurate I ended up in the middle of the rankings thanks to my devilishly clever strategy of crouching in a corner for the duration of the game. Good stuff, crouching.)

Needless to say, I avoid haggling whenever and wherever possible, which has led to overpayment for a shocking array of goods and services. Rather than haggle, I seek out like-minded anti-hagglers, usually identifiable by their midwestern accents and advanced age. When I went to buy a car, I bought not from the dealership that dropped their price $5 below my lowest bid, but from the single dealership that didn't highball me in the first place. I want straightforward pricing and straightforward interaction, not half-veiled jockeying for cash.

Recently, though, I haggled. It was an accident, pure chance: after a year and a half in Indy, bored with running and running and running again, I was exploring joining a gym. My friend recommended hers, a fairly comprehensive outpost of a major national chain. It had pilates, step, a whole bunch of other classes, plus a pool. And she was paying $25 a month.

I went in on a guest pass and asked about pricing. The manager took me on a tour, gave me a slick, canned sales pitch. Then quoted me $60 a month. I gasped: my friend had never mentioned bargaining. I suspected I was seeing discrimination in action: my friend is tall, blond, and gorgeous -a definite asset for a gym looking to attract new members- whereas the only time I stop traffic is when I fail to merge before the lane ends. Was she getting the pretty girl rate? Was I handed the rate for schlumpy t-shirt wearers?

My eyes must have bugged out, because the manager quickly dropped me down to $50, then $40. I emitted some kind of dissatisfied squeal, and he cracked $35. "But," I said, still not bargaining, "my friend is paying $25."

His eyes darted from side to side. He looked her up on the computer. "That was...a special deal," he said.

"Can I get that special deal?"

"Well..." (long, confounding monologue on the rare and time-delimited nature of the deal).

I told him thanks and, sick of the deception, the misinformation, and the ickiness of it all, headed for the door.

Six hours later, my cell phone rang: $25. Unknowingly, I'd played the trump card of haggling: I'd walked away. I went back and signed a contract. I still feel dirty.

Why do I loathe this kind of interaction so much? I recognize that haggling is integral to the fabric of many cultures, that it's a profoundly human activity. I recognize that I would get eaten alive in the Middle East. I recognize, too, that deception is important to civilization, that it greases the wheels, that speaking truth to power is one thing but speaking truth to your mother is another. Maybe, too, it's not haggling that is most dishonest: we all have agendas, and perhaps it's disingenuous to pretend we don't.

Fortunately, I'm comfortable with fiction. Name your reasonable price.

An Affair to Reflect on

Everyone is having an affair. This is what I get for reading beach books, even if they were recommended by Janet Maslin in her New York Times feature on junky books for summer. (It turns out that reading NYT-recommended beach books is a little like saying preemptive Hail Marys before sinning all over the place.)

The dust jackets of the beach books feature bare feet or raffia hats or cool, frosted daiquiri glasses someone -or multiple someones- just put down. Full body appearances are reserved for inside (and under) the covers, wherein a host of folks -old and young, pretty and more pretty- are unapologetically or cravenly or delightedly or wretchedly unfaithful.

So what is it about the affair that inspires such voluminous treatment in print? Affairs seem like a lot of work to me, both emotionally and logistically, like taking on a second mortgage when you haven't paid off the first. Americans don't like to expend energy: we're a couch-sitting, mile-driving, moving-walkway-taking nation. Does anyone bother to have affairs in real life?

The answer, of course, is yes, occasionally. Sometimes I even hear about them. My mother's first husband stepped out on her with a sweet-tempered Quaker who eventually became his wife of 35 years. A friend's father waffled for two years between his younger mistress and his older wife. A middle-aged mother of two cavorted with a middle-aged father of two in a small town in the Midwest until two marriages cracked; everyone stayed civil.

Love can be simple, but affairs are always complicated. There's an inherent double narrative, not just the unfolding of passion but a concurrent unfolding of betrayal. Affairs encompass not one relationship but two or even three, and those relationships play off of one another. A strong marriage is rocked by something stronger, or a weak relationship bows to tepid desire.

If courtship is a narrative thread, then an affair is a knot, a nexus of multiple strands of plot and character and place. I understand why it's catnip to authors. And I wonder if real life affair-havers -old and young, pretty and bulbous and gnarled and stooped- aren't just looking for a little story in their lives.

Likely, though, it's more complicated. It's an affair, after all.

In Praise of Want

It is difficult to articulate adequately the joys of mild privation. After all, no one wants to want: we spend our lives scurrying around, hunting for fingers and toes and words and danishes and lawnmowers and puzzles to stop up the holes in ourselves. We build contentment carefully, bird by bird (if we are Annie Dillard) or tot by tot (if we are unrepentat tater tot whores. Mmmm....tater tots). Contentment is a permeable bulwark, an inconsistently effective dike; it's the way we try to reclaim ourselves from the vast grey sea of desire.

And yet.

I've just returned from two weeks living alone in an old stone house in a tiny town. I had two mattresses piled on the floor, one chest of drawers, a stove that smelled of gas. In the mornings I rose with the sun, padded across the wooden floor through the gold and the must to light the flame under the kettle. I brewed tea in the single mug, stirred it with the single spoon, added milk from a glass bottle. The tea was black and smoky. I downed it, then brewed another mug before cramming my feet into my sneakers and running until the town ran out and the borders of the roads were overgrown with corn.

There was a lot of corn, but there were more stars. At night they were everywhere, yellow and sweet and insistent. I drew the dusty curtains across the windows and brewed more tea. I made what dinner I could with the two old pots and the saucepan, then ate it on the single glass plate shaped like a star. I did the dishes and read and went to sleep and dreamed of waking up alone in an old stone house wanting tea.

Fanfare for the Common Man

#7: My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead

More than what I read, it was the way I read it. One story a lunch break, give or take, sometimes a fraction of a story or sometimes two. For that brief half-hour, sandwiched between lunch duty and my 12:30 paperwork prep, I would shut the door, hide behind my filing cabinet if anyone knocked, and read about love.

If you're going to read about love, the time to do it is in the middle of a work day at an inner city school. You keep love in perspective if you do it that way; you understand its limitations and its boundaries, the things it can't do. Love can't feed a child or clothe it or make it happy; it can't help you pound knowledge into a kid's skull or make the school day go any faster. Love isn't an agent at all -it doesn't act, but sits there shimmering soundlessly between the cafeteria tables and the old computer.

It goes without saying that love, despite its lack of agency, is dangerous. Our language reflects this: you're sick in love, you fall. So what could be more dangerous, for the seventh installment in My Year of Reading Dangerously, than an entire book of love stories? Even if it was edited by the spectacularly gifted Jeffrey Eugenides (see Middlesex; The Virgin Suicides)?

I must confess that, in the face of this book, I quailed. My Mistress's Sparrow spent some quality time under the bed, followed by some additional months on the bookshelf, where, day after day, its maroon heart heaved reproachfully against the edges of my sight.

Finally, slowly, I broke. I sickened; I fell. And it was good, really good. A few of the stories I loathed; most of them were OK; some were so lovely they hurt. But such is love: a hit or miss, twisting, flickering nothing of a feeling. Eugenides's singular wisdom was to understand this: instead of presenting stories that orbit around love as if around blazing sun, he chose stories that are prisms, refracting love into a hundred scattered colors.

I read Robert Musil's thankless Tonka over two or three thankless, luckless days. William Trevor's Lovers of their Time, a wistful meditation on ephemerality, I read on a day when two kids threw up in the lunch room and had to be hustled out like surrendering bank robbers. The day I finished Deborah Eisenberg's Some Other, Better Otto, perhaps my favorite story in the book, there was a hot, wet rain of the kind that coops you up but doesn't relieve the pressure in the air.

And through it all: love. Love limp, love tired, love wizened and sad. Love worth closing the door for, perhaps worth propping it open again.

Business Time

As I believe I've mentioned previously somewhere in this morass of blog, You Tube rubs me the wrong way. I know everybody loves it. Even my mother loves You Tube: she's always forwarding me this or that video I don't watch, together with this or that forward I don't read, and this or that chain letter I don't send. Love you, Mom.

I may have to reconsider, though, as this made me laugh until I cried.