Citizen of the Month

the writing and photography of Neil Kramer

Category: Life in General (Page 8 of 46)

My Week According to Me, 9/23/11

September 23, 2011 / / 22 Comments

The week started on a positive note.   I exercised for three days in a row.  I realize that isn’t a big accomplishment for those of you who compete in triathlons, but it was a goal that I gave myself over the summer that I never could quite achieve.

On Thursday, I rested, and all of the endorphins in my body crashed.  I went into a dreary funk, which in the bizarro upside-down world of creativity, pushed me into doing some interesting Instagram photos.

Why is moody and dark so cool in photography, but if I said, “I feel depressed today” on Twitter, I would be ignored, especially by those too busy promoting their book titled “Helping Those with Depression.”

By Thursday, these dark thoughts were swept away by a change in life that required my total concentration and focus — the updates to the Facebook timeline.

Sure a meteor was head for Earth and I might be dead by the end of the week, but WTF is that scrolling thing on the right side of my page?!   Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg intends to control the World in a way Ian Fleming could never have conceived when he created those over-the-top Bond villains like Goldfinger.  Timeline, A Visual Representation Of Your Entire Life?

A single female blogging friend wrote this surprising status update after watching Mark Zuckerberg presentation:

“I don’t care what you say. I find Mark Zuckerberg super sexy.  Smart, cocky, and arrogant gets me every time!”

Very telling.   So, in preparation for success in my new dating life, I am working hard on becoming smart, cocky, arrogant, and a zillionaire by the end of Yom Kippur. Wish me luck.

On Thursday night, I went to see the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical “Follies.”

It is a story about former showgirls from the 1920s-1940’s who meet at a Times Square theater before it is torn down, and some unresolved relationship stories are played out against the ghosts of the past.   I love Sondheim, and Follies has a number of Broadway showstoppers that you probably know, even if you didn’t know you knew them.  If you ever go to a cabaret, you’ll frequently hear older women singing songs from this show, because the main characters in “Follies” are all age 60+. Commercial culture is so focused on teens and women in their twenties, and blogging is so concentrated on moms in their 30s, that it is rare to women in their 70s portrayed as having an interior life filled with as much love, regret, and passion as their younger counterparts.

Here is 84 year old Elaine Stritch, who is not in the current revival,  singing Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” at the White House for the Obamas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvg7P05TqA

The revival was near perfect. The weakest link in the current production is the star, Bernadette Peters.  While I love her as a musical theater actress, her personality is too bubbly for me to buy her as the somewhat bitter character, unhappy in love for so many years.

I attended the musical with two of my friends, both men.   They have been in a relationship for years.    Over dinner, they asked for my opinion on whether they should get married as a gay couple in New York State.   It lead to an interesting, and somewhat humorous discussion.  But I’ll save it for a later blog post.

As if this week wasn’t dramatic enough, Friday capped it all with the final episode of “All My Children.”

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that this ABC soap opera played an important role in my marriage with Sophia.   It was one of our special pastimes.  Before I met Sophia, she had already been watching the show for decades.  I grew to enjoy watching the show with her. It became a daily ritual. We would argue about the writing and laugh at the bad acting.   I also grew to respect the show and creator Agnes Nixon’s creativity.  You TRY writing a TV show that has to come out every single day, for DECADES, and keep it interesting.

I called Sophia tonight and she was taking the cancellation hard. But before you laugh at this, try to remember how emotional you became when your favorite show went off the air. Seinfeld? Lost? The Cosby Show? It feels like the passing of an era.

“This has been a year of loss,” said Sophia. “My parents died. Then divorce. And now All My Children.”

I can’t say that my reaction is as extreme. The writing on the show has been lousy for a years. And even Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane was getting on my nerves.

But we should embrace life lessons from wherever I can.   We all have dreams.   And we all have doubts about achieving those dreams.    But if Tad and Dixie can finally love with each other, despite divorce, murder, mayhem, switched babies, and the fact that Dixie had DIED TWICE on the show, anything in life is possible.

And thanks to this week’s Blog Crushes of the Day: Crib Chronicles, Deutschland uber Elvis, Irish Gumbo, and Wellington Road.

My Week According to Me, 9/16/11

September 16, 2011 / / 11 Comments

As sure as a Republican candidate saying something stupid during a nationwide debate, summer changes to fall, and I just took out out a sweater stored in the back of my closet.  I am currently in New York until — I think — November 1st, when — I think — I will return to Los Angeles.  Maybe.  It depends on work.  And money.

As a quick recap, just in case you missed a few episodes of the soap opera,  Sophia and I filed for divorce.  There are still some loose ends to figure out, like moving out of the house, and joint auto and medical insurance.   Maybe California is smart to have a six month waiting period before it is all final because it takes six months just to unravel the ties that bind.  Sophia and I are on good terms, except for the times that we discuss subjects like moving out of the house, and joint auto and medical insurance.   For now, it is healthier that we are 3000 miles away from each other.

On Monday, I attended my once-yearly game of the New York Mets with my friend Rob.  The Mets lost, even though they played the Washington Nationals, a team that is worse than the Mets.

But it was fun to just sit in a half-empty stadium, drinking overpriced beer and eating hot dogs, watching a game where the only importance was to see who which team was going to be eliminated from the pennant race first.

It was Taiwanese Heritage Night at Citifield.   Fans came waving Taiwan’s flag, director Ang Lee threw out the first pitch, and a terrible Taiwanese rock band performed during the seventh inning stretch.

I was proud to see another new immigrant group disappointed by the New York team that is not the Yankees.  Bring your huddled masses to our shores, oh Miss Liberty, where the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, the Germans, the Cubans, the Taiwanese, can all have Heritage Nights at Citifield and watch a crappy baseball team lose another game.

I love this old Pepsi sign at Citifield.

When I posted it on Twitter, I was immediately followed by @pepsico.   Today, as I was walking in the Village, I noticed this:

I think I might also send this to @pepsico on Twitter, so we become buddies.  Don’t tell me that I don’t have any kickass networking skills?  If I keep up this pandering, I might be a Pepsi Blogger Ambassador any day, annoying you with Pepsi tweets all day.   Note:  please don’t tell @pepsico that I still ask for a “Coke” at ALL fast food joints, forcing the cashier to say for the 100th time that day, “We only have Pepsi,” with my inevitable reply being, “OK, fine. Pepsi. Whatever.”

On Tuesday, I met an old friend visiting from Montreal, and we ended up making out in a parked car at a Holiday Inn near JFK.   It was an eye-opening experience, since I had never made out in a car before, not owning one until I moved to Los Angeles and bought an old Toyota Corona.   Alas, things are too complicated.   Life is complicated.

One friend told me that I should wait six months before dating.  Another said to have as much sex as possible as soon as possible.  Can I compromise and go for three months waiting period with just a little sex?

On Wednesday, I met Marinka at her favorite bar/restaurant in the village.  While she insists that she loves this restaurant because the food is good, I have a feeling she is fond of it because they refill her wine glass with her having to ask.  We were joined by the delightful Margaret from Nanny Goat in Panties, who regaled us with stories of her glamorous life now that she is officially CBS Sacramento’s Most Valuable Blogger of 2011!

You also might notice that after a two and half year hiatus, I have reemployed my Blog Crush of the Day into action.  You can see it both on my sidebar and my links page.

My intention is simple:  to remind myself about all the special people in blogosphere, and how they have enhanced my life through their writing, friendship, or kindness.

My first three “Blog Crushes” are Schmutzie, V-Grrrl, and Slouchy.

The Blue Thumbtack

September 13, 2011 / / 10 Comments

A cardboard reproduction of this picture, Portrait of the Artist’s Son, Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos, by El Greco, is on the bulletin board over my desk, stuck to the brown cork background by a bright blue thumbtack.   I bought this reproduction at a museum gift shop during college.  I was intrigued by the subject’s sly expression.

Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos has travelled a lot with me, between several tiny apartments in New York and Los Angeles, far far away from the grandeur of his former home in Toledo, Spain.   Right now, he is living in Flushing, Queens.

Jorge’s eyes remain mischievous, although the cardboard stock has yellowed over the years.   A dozen thumbtack holes pepper the edges.  Jorge has been shuffled around the perimeter of the bulletin board, depending on the priorities of the day and year, and his standing in our relationship.

During grad school, he was pushed to the bottom, denigrated to the bottom right, the 8×10 of a smiling brunette music student taking the starring role.   Six months later, after the photo of the woman has been retired, Jorge would be back in his former glory, like an old buddy always ready to take you out for a beer after a heartbreak, not expecting an apology.

Jorge has travelled in planes and suitcases and buses and cars.  He has faced towards Beijing and Jerusalem, depending on the feng shui of each apartment layout.  But wherever we made our home, he was fastened to the bulletin board by the same blue thumbtack that secured him on the day we first met.   Jorge is that special to me.

But this is not a story about Jorge.  It is a story about this —

I’m staying the month with my mother in New York. She is a big fan of Antiques Roadshow, the long-running show on PBS, which is ironic, considering that we have an even longer-running inside joke that we have NOTHING of value in Queens.  Guests on Antiques Roadshow are hand-picked, so the ones who make the cut tend to have a wood desk that Paul Revere’s brother carved with his own hands, or a Van Gogh hidden behind the a framed poster of a Pepsi ad from 1969.

I was in my room, on Twitter, when my mother screamed out from the living room.

“Neil, come here!”

I ran into the living room, expecting an emergency, like a mouse climbing the walls.

It was Antiques Roadshow on the TV, coming from San Antonio, Texas.  My mother was in her favorite chair.   On the show, they were talking about a local photographer, E.O. Goldbeck (Eugene Omar Goldbeck, 1891-1986) who was known for doing panoramic photos in the 1920s and 1930s.

Goldbeck worked as a “kidnapper.”  Similar to the annoying photographer who takes photos of you as you enter a cruise ship or a hotel in Disneyland, Goldbeck took free pictures of large groups of people, then sold prints to the individuals in the photographs.  He was also the “unofficial photographer of America’s military” because he was adept at shooting large groups, which at times numbered up to 23,000 people arranged in intricate designs. Goldbeck used a Cirkut Camera that held film that was up to 10” wide by 48” long, and the camera revolved on a tripod while the film advanced at the same speed.  Imagine what he could do with an iPhone.

Goldbeck was particularly fond of taking photos each year at the Galveston Beauty Contest.  As Goldbeck’s 1922 Galveston “Bathing Girl Review” appear on the screen, I immediately knew why my mother was excited. This exact photo, framed and signed, was hanging over my bed, given to my mother years ago as a gift.  I immediately went online to search for information, and discovered that the framed photo in my room was worth, at auction, from $1200 – $3500.

My mother was happy.  Yes, we DID have something of value in the house.  Maybe she couldn’t buy an apartment in Manhattan with the money she could make, but at least she could impress the neighbors.

The funny part of the story is that I never gave this photograph much thought.  I glanced at it through the years, and liked the retro-flavor of the Texan beauty contestants, but I never took the time to read the photographer’s name.   I’m not big on panoramas.  They seem too gimmicky.

I appreciate the photo after reading more about Goldbeck and his technique, but I can’t say that I like it any more of less now than I did before I knew it had any value.

Is it ridiculous for me to veer off and connect this story with matters of the heart?

Soon, I’m going to be dating again, which brings up the issue of “Who is Right for Me?”  On paper, it is easy to plan for a woman with certain attributes, or let the views of others color my views on who would be “good for me,” as if a stint on Antiques Roadshow makes you more worthy, like a Goldbeck photo.  But love never follows a plan, and Goldbeck’s Bathing Girls, while attractive, mean little to me other than eye candy hanging over my bed.

Does it make sense to be in love with an El Greco cardboard reproduction of Portrait of the-Artist’s Son, Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos when a valued Goldbeck sits nearby, on the opposite wall?   It is all mysterious and oh so personal.   I can’t explain how love works.  Or why one attracts us more than another.   Or why I still keep Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos safely secured with a blue thumbtack.

Happy Birthday, Jenn

June 21, 2011 / / 4 Comments

There is nothing as magical in the world as the moment when a person you once pictured as a confusing blur, suddenly becomes clearly visible, as if  viewed through a freshly polished piece of glass.  Will this glass always remain so clean and the subject so understandable?  Of course not.  As time goes on, the glass will gather dust, and the pitter and patter of the summer rain will strike at it, the spherical drops distorting the clarity of the view.

She is still a mystery, someone you hardly know in real life.

But there is no turning back from that special moment when she made SENSE to you, and there would be no more “Huh?  WTF?” every time she wrote a artsy poem with unfamiliar references.   Now you are at least an Instagram Whisperer, knowing the meaning of each of her photos of her slightly off-centered chairs, always filtered in Brannan.

Happy Birthday, Jenn, writer of Breed ‘Em and Weep.  You are the original Hipstamatic.

Fighting Procrastination with “The 100 Method”

April 29, 2011 / / 10 Comments

There are chores that give me anxiety.   Some that give me the most trouble are quite simple on the surface, like making a phone call or renewing a gym membership.   But indecision creeps in and I end up procrastinating, finding actions that help me avoid doing my To Do list.  I probably should go into therapy for help with this, but this week I needed a quick fix to help me get over a few hurdles.   After giving the matter some thought, I pieced together a technique of my own creation that worked fairly well.  The technique combines a bit of meditation and the old method of “counting to ten,” except in my idea, I count to 100.

In order to explain it better, let me use an real example of a stressful situation —

I need to write an email to a producer in LA. It is freaking me out. I am insecure. My internal “selves” are fighting with each other over the content of the email.  One self says the email is too wimpy; another that it reads too arrogant. The nasty self, a perennial bully, calls me a loser and announces the situation as hopeless. My head is spinning and I am hyperventilating from thinking too much about all of the options available to me.  There are too many voices and too many choices.

What do I do in this situation?   Well, I might go onto Twitter, for one.   I can chat with friendly women with smiling avatars.  This will help me relax.    Soon, I will forget all about the email until it is too late to send it, and I will make the executive decision of putting it off until tomorrow.

Now, let’s see an example of  Neilochka’s “100 Method” in action, helping me to stay on task:

First, I need to acknowledge to myself that I’m a cool guy with the minor problem of having a screwed up mind.  That is why I want to procrastinate.  My brain is fighting with me because I am neurotic, and this is painful, which causes me to avoid whatever task is at hand.

Since I have accepted myself as a cool, but screwed up, I choose to be nice to myself. Rather than berating myself, I will give myself the gift of procrastination.

But I will control it with a time limit of 100 counts.

So, I give myself permission to lie down on the bed or sit at my chair with my eyes closed and start counting to 100 in my head.   The numbers are my internal mantra, so by the count of “25,” I have forgotten everything about my inner turmoil concerning the task.   The voices have been silenced.  My only focus is on the counting, like Zen meditation.

By number “50” I start thinking about my task again.  Clearly, I’m not very good at meditation.  But I know that already.  And I accept that.   But I feel the anxiety already returning.  What should I do?

“Relax,” I tell myself.  “You’re only at number “50.” There is plenty of time left to relax and procrastinate. Why worry when you are only half way there?”

This works surprisingly well,  until I hit number “75.”   Now, at 3/4 in, I am smart enough to know that my procrastination window is quickly getting closed shut.   My brain reverts to that of an eight year old bratty child.  I start crying, yelling and pounding the table, all in my head of course.  I will do anything to keep my procrastination from ending.

But throughout this all, I continue counting.  “76.”  “77.”

I become Machivellian in my methods, dragging each syllable out, so the word “Seventy-seven” takes up to fives seconds in my head. I realize that I am cheating myself, but who’s going to know, other than myself?

By number “85” in the count, there is an all-out war raging in my brain, with tanks and hand grenades and atomic bombs.  This is very different than the genteel neurotic indecision from earlier, where multiple selves debated in a civilized court.  This is a knock-em, sock-em primal battle between two opposing forces.   The choices are clear as good and evil —

1)   Do I keep my promise of doing the task now that my procrastination time is over, like an honorable man —

2) — or do I blow it off like a lazy sloth?

By number “90,” this tough question stares at me, waiting for a reply.  I can see nothing else but black and white, no shades of gray, no typical insecurities; the choices are “keep your own promise” or “be an asshole.”

By number “95” I realize that I have set myself up in a trap of my own making.  I know that even if I was so devious to extend the count from 100 to 200 or even 1000,  at a certain point, the bell will ring.

The Bell Always Rings.  It is the fate of humanity.

By number “98” I am a man who has seen his own mortality.  I live in a finite world and I must conquer it, despite my fears.

At number “99” I say goodbye to all of my procrastinating on this particular task, and as number “100” forms on my tongue and my eyes open, I can hear a marching band in my playing a personal fight song in my brain, inspiring me to act… and to act now.

“Now Get Up And Do That Task, You Motherf*cker!” the band plays hard, the trumpets blaring, the drums a-knocking, as I sit down to do the task.

Until the next task.

Dinner in D.C.

April 24, 2011 / / 20 Comments

“I’m visiting Maryland next week” I emailed Laurie eight days before my trip. “You want to get together on Friday?”

“Sure. You want me to round up everyone who lives in the area?”

“Nah.”

I said “nah,” not because I didn’t want to see other people, but because I didn’t want to put Laurie out or appear rude to her, as if I was contacting her to be my social director.

But Laurie was insistent on inviting Sarah.

“She’d like to see you.”

“Sure!  I love Sarah!”

Later that afternoon, it was Sarah who contacted me, this time on Facebook.

“I just want to make sure that it is OK that I come see you too. I don’t want to be a party crasher.”

“Of course. I always like to see you.”

“I just heard that you didn’t want to tell other people that you were in town.”

“That’s not true.  “Please come!”

My message to Laurie was getting lost in translation.   I was being perceived as a snooty anti-social scrooge who hates humanity.

“And can I bring my husband too?” asked Sarah.

“Yes!”

“I won’t tell anyone else about it.”

“No, go ahead. Tell anyone you want!”

My trip was already beginning to freak me out.

I emailed Kris and told her that I was coming to town.   While on the bus to Maryland, I noticed Heather was on Gtalk.

“Where do you live now? Do you live in Washington?”

“Yeah. Why?”

I told her about our get-together.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” Heather wrote. I could sense her steaming on the other side.

“I forgot that you lived in Washington!”

“And why didn’t Laurie tell me?”

“I think I gave her the impression that I didn’t want her to tell anyone else.”

“So, are you saying that you DON’T want me there?”

“No. No. That’s not it at all.”

I quickly resolved the matter with Heather. I clicked onto Facebook to count how many other people I knew in the Washington D.C./Maryland area who I didn’t tell about my arrival in town, as if it was the second coming of Christ. I certainly couldn’t contact them NOW, only a few hours before the meet-up, because it would look like a last minute invitation, as if someone more important has cancelled and I was pulling out my “B-list.”

But this wasn’t a public meet-up!  I was just hoping to have a cup of coffee with Laurie after I arrived in town. Now I was in the middle of an event that would be TWEETED for all to see. Devra and Amie and John and Amy and twenty other online people from Twitter and Facebook who lived in the immediate area were going to wonder why I didn’t invite them to this amazing shindig.

“But no one cares, right?” I asked myself.  “How many times had there been blogger dinners in LA or NY where I haven’t been invited? Did I sit home and cry? (Don’t answer that)”

Anyway, the final group was small: Neil, Laurie, Kris, Sarah, her husband, Gabe, and Heather. The plan was to meet at Jaleo, a popular tapas bar in D.C. The restaurant didn’t take reservations, so whoever got there first, would make reservations for six.

I was the first to arrive, at 7PM.   The restaurant was already jammed. The bar area was overflowing with young single Washingtonians.

“I’d like to make a reservation,” I said.

I was told that we couldn’t get a table until 10:30PM, three and a half hours away!

I texted the others and said that we would have to make other plans.

The others arrived. There was much hugging.  I was ecstatic to meet the amazing Kris, who I have never met in person.   As I talked with her, Sarah went into the restaurant. When she returned, she told us that it would only be fifteen minutes until we would get seated.

I was dumbfounded. Why did we get such a drastically different answer? Was it because I looked a little ragged and unshaven from my long day?  Or was it because Sarah looked polished and upscale, someone who fit in with the restaurant’s demographic?

My thoughts quickly faded as I sat down with the others for an enjoyable meal, filled with great conversation and too much sangria. It was the perfect way to start my week long Maryland vacation, amongst friends (even thought I felt bad for Gabe, Sarah’s husband who was stuck there listening to bloggers gossip for several hours.  Luckily there was a lot of sangria for him to drink and ease his pain.)

Later in the week, I would recall that experience making the restaurant reservation.   While there is a good chance that Sarah got the table simply because one opened up, I also imagined the reason involving other issues such as class, gender, identity, pigeonholing, profiling, and our need to categorize each other (branding!), something that would be discussed over and over at the Theory of the Web conference at the University of Maryland. I would talk about this would Bon after the conference. I would also confront it — head on — particularly my own racial biases — as I switched buses several days later in Baltimore, home of some of the worst burnt-out, crime-ridden areas that I have ever seen.

More later.

The Planning of Maryland

April 20, 2011 / / 14 Comments

Is there any cliche more annoying than “Life happens when you are making other plans?  I hate this expression for the obvious reason –  because it speaks the truth.

My father planned family vacations three years ahead of time.  No joke.  I have tried desperately to rid myself of this ignoble inheritance.  But it is stuck in my brain like the writing on my father’s calendars hanging over his desk.

I recently took a trip to Maryland to visit some friends.  I spent a week planning it out beforehand, like my father might have done, mapping it out as precisely as the storming of Normandy, or more accurately, a housewife on that Extreme Couponing show looking to buy $2000 worth of pasta and Ivory Soap for $1.59.  I wanted to go as inexpensively as possible, another trait I inherited from my father; I splurge on others more than myself.

Using my advanced Google research skills, honed from years of looking up my own name on search engines, I accumulated the data that I needed and created the ultimate cheapskate’s road trip from New York to Maryland.

I would take the Bolt Bus from NYC, a bus line familiar more to college students than myself.  I could go round-trip to the Washington D.C. area for a mere $30 round trip.  While not the most glamorous methods of travel, seeing that it picked up passengers in New York a block away from Penn Station, in between a Sbarro pizza restaurant and a XXX Peep Store, it was only $30!

Next, I needed a nice hotel for two nights in the D.C./College Park, Maryland area.  I found it in Greenbelt, Maryland, via Priceline bidding, for $50 a night.   After those two nights, I would head east towards the coast and stay with my friend Jennifer, which would cost me nothing.

My best deal connected with my trip was for the rental car.  I discovered a weekend deal with a Maryland Enterprise Rental Car for only $9.99 a night!  Woo-hoo.  My father would have been proud.

The Bolt bus was surprising comfortable.  I leaned back in my chair, proud of my perfect planning.  I thought about applying for a job with Arthur Frommer Travel Guides as a consultant.  I am a traveling God.

“Smooth sailing,” I said to the college dude sitting next to me in his Columbia University hoodie.  “I went to Columbia, too, you know!” I added.

He didn’t seem to care.  He was listening to music on his iPhone.  But I didn’t mind his rudeness.  I was in a good mood because of my perfect travel plans.  I just wouldn’t donate to the alumni fund this year.

After two hours of traveling, we stopped in Wilmington, Delaware at a food court.  I knew about this, as any seasoned travel expert would, from reading the Bolt Bus Forum online ahead of time.

The bus driver bellowed into his microphone, “If you need to use the restroom, go fast, because I’m leaving in ten minutes, with you or without you.”

On the Bolt bus forum, there were several stories of passengers left behind in the food court in Wilmington, Delaware.

But I was relaxed, even as I strolled into the food court to stretch my legs.  Our affable bus driver, a middle-aged African-American with a deep voice like Isaac Hayes, would never leave anyone at the food court.  He was just too nice of a guy.   I had read on the Bolt Bus Forum that the company had improved their hiring process ever since one of their passengers had videotaped a driver nodding off at the wheel, and promptly posted it on YouTube.   Yay, social media!   Our bus driver rocked!

Here is a photo I took in the food court and posted on Twitter,  providing proof to the world, that yes, I have now peed in Delaware!  Add it to my list.

After arriving in Maryland, exactly on schedule, as I expected, I called Enterprise Rental Car to pick me up at the station, just like I had pre-arranged with the office.  Within ten minutes, an SUV appeared in the terminal pick-up area, driven by a young Enterprise employee wearing a snazzy green tie.

The rental office was a few minutes away.  As he drove, we discussed Washington politics.  He knew way more insider gossip than I did.  I wondered if everyone in the DC area followed the latest federal government news, much like every supermarket checkout girl in Los Angeles knew the latest Hollywood box-office numbers.

“Let’s get you in and out,” he said as we stepped into the office, which was located behind a Cadillac dealership.  “By the way, we have a few extra Cadillacs available to rent.  If you want, I’ll give you one for the same price that you have now.”

$9.99 a day for a Cadillac?

“No, thank you,” I said.  “It will be easier for me to park a smaller car.”

He seemed surprised by my refusal, even a little disappointed, but he shrugged it off.

My reason for not wanting the car was a white lie.  I didn’t want the Cadillac because I had already ordered a compact car, not a Cadillac.  The compact car was pre-ordained, like the visions of Nostradamus.   Everything was proceeding on schedule, and I worried that one slight change in the stacking of the dominos could cause them all to collapse.  Since I ordered a compact car online, it would BE a compact car.  There would be no dreaming big when I have a plan.

“Whatever you want,” he said, stepping behind his computer system.  “I’m here to make your experience with Enterprise a superior one.”

I made a note to myself to commend this employee, even filling out one of those “How Did We Do?” cards before I left, giving him a “helpful” score of “10.”

I handed him my California Driver’s License and my Mastercard, even before he had the chance to ask me for them.  I knew the rules.  And I was on a schedule.   Soon, I would be relaxing in my non-smoking with a King bed and free wi-fi hotel room, taking a breather before I headed out to a tapas bar in D.C. to meet some friends.

“There’s a little problem,” said the Enterprise guy, as he handed me back my driver’s license.

My California driver’s license had expired on my birthday, a month ago.  My new card was apparently 3000 miles away, on Sophia’s kitchen table in Los Angeles.  I called her and she wasn’t home.   Enterprise wouldn’t allow me to rent me a car.

I didn’t know how to get to my hotel from the rental car office.  Or into Washington D.C. for dinner that night.  Or to the University of Maryland for a web conference the next day.  I also knew that Jennifer was busy cleaning her house on the Maryland shore, awaiting my arrival in two days.   My perfect plan was crumbling like stale coffee cake.

Is there any cliche more annoying than “Life happens when you are making other plans?  Yes! It is annoying.

But we have no choice but to accept this as reality.

After all, when we later sit down and tell our stories, it is never the planning that holds any interest to the listener.  It is the life that seeps into the cracks.  That is the story.   My Maryland trip ultimately became more interesting and fulfilling without a car as I scrambled from one location to the next, like a contestant on “The Amazing Race,” jumping from buses to taxis to shuttles to trains to subways to boats.  It was only when I was rushing to catch a connection, frantically reaching it within seconds, that my heart would race and my mind would spin like a top, and I would understand, finally, in some metaphysical way, what absolutely unbridled passion must feel like when making love to a woman with complete abandon, not knowing where or why or when.

The whole week in Maryland was a gift to me.  It became a lesson that I had never received from my dear father, as wonderful a man as he was, because he was so rooted in the planning the journey rather than the embracing it.

Life has very little to do with the plans.

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