it's a small town after all

Contest: Check out this photo and write your own caption.

***
This guy, part of the Times' series of CEO interviews, so speaks to me:

Well, I get up very early and I get to work early. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It’s a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I’m already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I’ll do that in the morning, too, when I’m exercising and watching the news.

And not only because my quiet time came under threat recently. It's gotten a little bit better: he gives up more easily, stops talking sooner, but I'm still doing too much work. I need him to start picking up cues faster, and also to stop pouting when I ignore him. So we're going to have another intervention this evening. I think I was too tactful (I know, I bet you didn't think that was possible) in emphasizing the whole it's-not-you-it's-me angle and talking about how I was often tired, because tired isn't always the issue: even when I'm not tired, I just need me time. So it's better that he's slightly less persistent, but I need a paradigm shift on his part, where the default isn't turning to me for conversation. And I need to stop being nice/doing the socially acceptable thing. It's a liability in these situations. Take last night:

RM: I was just thinking, as I typed this last paragraph, it would be great if I could have this conversation with A., this conversation that I just had with the computer.

Pause

RM: I was just thinking that. That it would be great to have this conversation with A.

Awkward silence.

A., resolved: [Sigh.] What conversation is that?

RM: Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah about some philosophical BS.

Five minutes or so into the 'blah, blah, blah' (more of a monologue than I conversation, I'd say):

RM: I'm talking too much.
A.: Yes.
RM: You're not really interested in this.
A.: No.

I'm interested in the intense and fascinating article by Philip Gourevitch about Rwanda after the Genocide. If you want me to care about what you're saying, meet me halfway and don't interrupt me in the middle of something to say it. Is that social rocket science?

I am, again, planning on doing this intervention right. I am not going to say, tempting as it is, "clearly, you didn't hear me last week when I said I cherished my personal time and wasn't much of a conversation partner in my downtime," etc. I'll let you know what happens.

***
You've heard me cite Elisabeth's apt turn of phrase about where one lives; it came about five years ago when I was about to start my first job out of grad school, which would be a non-negligible distance from DC, and mom and friends advised me to move closer to it. 'If you like DC so much,' they said, 'go there on weekends.' I relayed these words of non-wisdom to Elisabeth, who articulated my sentiments brilliantly: 'where you live isn't about where you go on weekends; it's about who you run into when you pick up your dry cleaning.' Now, I did not convey this directly to mom, who would have said something like, 'how often do you take things to be dry cleaned' and probably would have asked how much it cost.

Five years later, mom still hasn't come to recognize that I have a better idea of where I want to live than she does (see March visit, during which she questioned me about why I didn't buy in Huntley Meadows or Reston). Sometimes I lose sight of the issue, too, wondering why I pay so much to live where I do. Last night, I was feeling stir crazy and it had stopped raining, and it occured to me that I could go for a walk. It was like an epiphany: dumbass, you live in Old Town so you can get up and go for a walk without driving anywhere. You even have a choice of nature trail or city. So I walked down to the river, and the hazy sunset was beautiful. Even that eyesore of an Air Force Base across the river didn't mar the view. I could see the Capitol building glowing in the distance, too.

I walked by the river and turned to return home, when I thought I'd go to Trader Joe's for bananas. I need some to be soft by Friday, when I'll make banana cake with coconut frosting. As I approached the store, I ran into Kevin, my former roommate. It was great to see him, in the plainest sense, and also because it reminded me that I live in a small town, in a way, where I run into people as I proverbially drop off my dry cleaning.