I’ve been reading Amy Poehler’s book, Yes Please, this week and I’m nearing the end. I’m sad about if for
lots of reasons. First because I am sad when anything ends – except for my
period and Presidential elections. Second, I am sad when any book that I enjoy
ends. I should note that I only reach the end of books that I enjoy because I
don’t bother to finish books that I am not enjoying. This summer marks the end
of me spending leisure time doing $#!+ that I don’t enjoy – especially books
that suck. I used to finish all books because I felt like a quitter if I didn’t.
But no more. Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) no longer applies to books for me
except in the sense that continuing to read something crappy may result in me
missing out on reading something extraordinary.
Time is short, people – too short to read bad books and
drink bad coffee. So I don’t do either anymore and to prove it, I read to page
303 of a 513-page book a couple of weeks ago and promptly quit when I became
fed up with the insipid characters and began secretly wishing they would hurl
themselves off their Seattle houseboat in to a swarm of hungry piranhas. This
is a dramatic change from my experience many years ago when I read a thriller that
was SO VERY BAD it almost turned me off to ALL BOOKS and ALL WORDS. Only I didn’t
realize it until the last 50 pages when the author pulled some deus ex machina
crap for which I couldn’t even suspend my disbelief. I still read those last 50
pages, angry all the while. Fortunately, I came around on books again and
decided it would be sufficient to just never read that author again. I am quite
certain he would lose seconds of
sleep if he knew this fact.
I’m also sad to be near the end of Yes Please because I feel like Amy Poehler and I are now friends
and finishing the book is like having the friendship end. It’s like she’s
moving far away to a remote island where there is no electronic communication
and she can only receive snail mail when it is dropped from a prop plane as it
flies overhead. I use this analogy to explain why she would not be able to
respond to my letters just like she probably wouldn’t respond to my actual letters
if I mailed them to whatever city she now lives in. Because she shouldn’t
respond to them…that would be weird.
One of the many reasons I know we would be friends is that
she is frightened of technology in the same way I am…in the way that I know it’s
trying to destroy us. I know it’s done its part with me. I’m ruined in lots of
way thanks to my “smart” phone. I can’t describe the love-hate relationship I
have with that thing. It feeds all of the only-child FOMO anxiety which I have
about everything except books. But
the worst way that my smartphone – and technology in general – has ruined me is
that it has completely stifled my willingness to dance.
Back to my BFF Amy for a moment…Do you know about Smart Girls
at the Party? You should. It’s a website and series that she started with her actual friends in which they interview
girls who are changing their communities (and the world) with their
thoughtfulness and creativity. After the interview is over they all break into
a spontaneous dance party. It is both wonderful and horrifying to me. Why it’s
wonderful shouldn’t be a mystery to you (if it is, we can maybe talk about it
later) but let me explain the horrifying part.
IT’S PEOPLE DANCING ON THE INTERNET.
It causes me great anxiety. It doesn’t have anything to do
with their dancing, but the existence of video in which people are dancing introduces the possibility
that one day my dancing might be
caught on video and loaded onto the internet. Do you remember that I don’t
dance well? Even to Prince’s music?
My bad dancing didn’t used to bother me. In the 80s and 90s,
I went to dances and crowded onto the floor thrashing about with my friends to
The Beastie Boys and Def Leppard. Even as an adult, by actual BFF and I would
spend hours in her apartment choreographing dance moves to ABBA songs and then
we would DO THOSE DANCES at a club in our hometown when we went home to visit. Back
then, I knew how ridiculous I looked, I just didn’t care. There was no one capturing
it on film and the people who were snickering had such unbelievably short
attention spans that I knew they’d never remember me dealing imaginary cards or
pushing an invisible grocery cart on the dance floor at the Jube in the Clarion
Inn.
All of this is inconceivable to me today. I can trace the
death of my public dancing days to the advent of YouTube, Vine, and all social
media platforms. The mere possibility that anything like that would be captured
and shared in perpetuity singlehandedly halted my dancing days. The last time I
danced in front of other people was 12 years ago at my best friend’s wedding.
It was that SAME choreography to that SAME ABBA music (with occasional pauses
to hike up my strapless bridesmaid dress so as to avoid a Janet Jackson
Superbowl moment. Camera or no camera, a sight like that remains with people
for eternity.)
Of course, I do dance
in front of my children to embarrass them – that doesn’t count. Every so often,
usually provoked by some behavior that I wish them to stop – I will break into
the Cabbage Patch, follow it up with a clumsy Running Man, and cap it all off
with my very own Happy Dance. For those of you who care, my happy dance
consists of me mimicking a desk pendulum with my arms and legs while smiling
and making crazy eyes and my kids hate it. They hate it so much that they run
out of the room screaming. It’s epic but you’ll have to take my word for it
because YOU WILL NEVER SEE IT. My kids would never record it and even if they did they would never show it to anyone. All I have to
do to embarrass them these days is stand near them and their friends and
breathe. My Happy Dance jacks that embarrassment up by a factor of 100 and there’s
no way they would be able to survive any of their friends seeing it.
But I know they love when I do it, because after they run
from the room screaming, I hear them collapse onto their bed laughing. And I
always end up laughing too. Because dancing exercises my soul and how sad is it
that I let technology kill it? I’ve substituted it with running which is fine,
but it’s not the same. I could do both.
I just don’t.
Maybe I will start implementing a daily dance party – for one
– into my daily routine. It will be freestyle and atrocious and there will be
no choreography. But before you starting plotting to secretly come to my house,
scale the security fence, and record this spectacle through a window, you
should know that I plan on dancing naked. So if you were able to record it, I’m pretty sure it would be illegal. And
even if you managed to record it through a powerful zoom lens from a window 300
yards away, you would have to interact with some pretty unsavory characters to
get it posted online. Naked dance videos violate Facebook’s community standards
– as it should. But I’m really not worried
about anyone doing that. I would imagine by now, you are more concerned with recovering
from the visual image of me doing the Running Man in the nude which I have now
gifted you.
And your therapist.
