Patience Is A Virtue - Until It Isn't.

Good things come to those who wait.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Patience is passion tamed.

Patience is a virtue. Until it isn't.

When waiting for good things to come becomes a crutch, something you lean on as a comfortable excuse to avoid getting up, getting out, and seeking something better - that's a problem. Waiting patiently is sometimes necessary, and yes, can be good; just waiting around will cripple you.

Any virtue can become a vice when taken to the extreme. All of our best qualities are only good things "until and unless" they become too much of a good thing. Kindness is a virtue, unless it makes you let everyone walk right over you. Loyalty is priceless, until you allow it to chain you to someone unworthy of your steadfast investment in them.  Intelligence is wonderful unless it smothers emotion, and emotion is wonderful until it overwhelms all reason.

You get the idea.

This week, patience is what I'm struggling to overcome. Because I do tend to be patient, practical, reasonable, rational. And I'm beginning to fear that can lead to stagnation, stifling, lost chances, crippled creativity. I don't think I've been, erm, dangerously patient ... yet. But just like deciding to watch your diet before you have a heart attack, I need to start watching my patience and make sure it's not giving me insidious license to hunker down in a rut.

So this is a note to myself, and to anyone else who might need a similar virtue/vice check, particularly my fellow artists: don't give up your virtues, but don't let them become vices.

Becomes there comes a time when you absolutely must run out of patience, take your tamed passion and let it run wild once more. Take all those ancient axioms about the ultimate triumph of slow and steady, toss them out the window, and try some brassy tenacity instead. Because even if you love the comforting truth of well-worn cliches, there are plenty of proactive platitudes you can cling to as you move past patience: carpe diem; time waits for no (wo)man; or, in the words of the great teacher, Hillel:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?


PS I revised and updated this 8 hours after posting it. Clearly, perfectionism is another is-until-it-isn't virtue...

Happy 448th, Willie

... thou bawdy, beef-witted canker-blossom, thou!

My Compliments to the Procrastination

I really need to get some serious writing done. And I will. In just a second.

But first I had to work all day. Then I had to walk the dogs. Then I had to go grocery shopping. And then, of course, I had to put away the groceries. And then I had to make this:

Dark Chocolate Strawberry Cubes

Ingredients:

• 14 oz. dark chocolate bar (for cooking, but I did get bittersweet, not unsweetened, so I wouldn't have to add sugar) - healthy, see?
• 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1 dozen fresh strawberries

Super easy directions:

Step one: Wash strawberries, slice off the
greens/tops, and place in an ice cube tray 

Step two: In a large saucepan, melt the chocolate
cubes; as chocolate starts melting, stir in the heavy
 whipping cream. Continue stirring until velvety smooth.

Step three: Pour the melted chocolate over the
strawberries in the ice tray. Place in freezer and
wait: crazy anticipation for tomorrow's treat.

And then I had to do the dishes. And then I had to plan out the rest of this week's delicacies. Avocado fries, here we come! There will also be eggplant parmesan, steamed cod with  ratatouille, butternut squash risotto, baked whole wheat spaghetti with fresh tomato slices...

Oh, and writing. That's right. Writing.

All My Friends Are Prettier Than I Am

“Doesn’t it make you feel insecure that all of your friends are prettier than you?”

Left: me, circa age 17; right: LMW, one of my pretty
friends, sporting matching tanks & tats at Lilith Fair 

I was seventeen when my friend – let’s protect the guilty and call him Ron, so that my mother doesn't track him down and kill him – asked me that question. We were going through stacks of photos, selecting which ones I might want to take with me to college. He picked up a picture taken at a formal dance earlier that year. In the picture, I was wearing a silver dress, grinning, surrounded by several girlfriends in gaudy formalwear of their own. He looked up from the picture, and that's when he asked the question:

“Doesn’t it make you feel insecure that all of your friends are prettier than you?”

Oh God, I cried inside. All my friends are prettier than I am.

Trying to recover quickly, what I said out loud was: "Well, at least I'm funny."

He chuckled, said "Yeah, good thing," and has probably never thought about that conversation since.

I have thought about it many, many times.

This week, I can't stop thinking about that small exchange. There are several reasons it's been on my mind. I saw the movie The Elephant Man for the first time, and that film certainly forces one to think about how we treat people based on their appearance. I also read this essay by a British woman about how other women allegedly hate her for being beautiful. Then, I read Ashley Judd's indictment of the media and how we all participate in the objectification of women - and after reading Judd's piece, I went on to read several friends' responses to it.

All of which was thought-provoking, and all of which led to me replaying that conversation. It's incredible how the tiny cuts we receive in adolescence can wound, fester, and scar - without ever really healing. Because I've never quite shaken the idea that all my friends are prettier than I am. It's not that I think I'm ugly. It's something much more subtle: the feeling that in some fundamental way, I just don't stand out the way that other people do. That in one way or another, physically or whatever, it must be true: all my friends are prettier than I am.

Why did I let some idiot seventeen year old boy do that to me? Well, the obvious answer is because it wasn't just him. It was me. It was society. It was blah, blah, blah.

But now, I finally know what to say to him. I have a smartass answer to his dumbass question.

“Doesn’t it make you feel insecure that all of your friends are prettier than you?”

No. It doesn't. In fact, it makes me feel pretty damn secure. I mean, hey, if I were too pretty, they'd probably hate me; that's Samantha Brick's thesis, anyway.* And on the flip side, I must not be too ugly, because otherwise they'd shun and torture me, a la The Elephant Man. Let me sic Ashley Judd on you next as I turn the question around on you: doesn't it make you feel insecure that you're stupid enough to call the sweet seventeen year old girl sitting across from you unattractive, to her face? Before you posed this imbecilic question, I didn't think that I was at the bottom of the pile. I knew I had pretty friends. And because I was a teen, too, and we're a visual society, of course I thought some were prettier than others - some more classically beautiful, others cuter, others more exotic, others more awkward. We make comparisons. We're only human. But some of us are better at being humane than others, and since they were all my friends, I really did see something pretty in all of them. If I didn't, I wouldn't have bought your judgment for a split second. Unfortunately, I assumed that you were right.

Oh, and by the way, "Ron"? Thank you.

Left: me, circa now.
Right:  my pretty friend JQ.
This is what we think of "Rons" everywhere.

That's right. Thanks. Thank you for punching me in the gut in such a way that I subsequently made a real effort to NOT do that to other people. Have I failed sometimes, had my catty moments? Absolutely - and then promptly felt horrible. So thanks for that, and for instilling in me a real sense that pretty is as pretty does. That snap judgments based on appearance usually make us the ugly ones. (I kind of thought you were cute before that conversation. I kind of didn't after that conversation.) 

And so now, instead of secretly fearing that all my friends are prettier than I am, I'm embracing it. Because, in one way or another, all my friends are prettier than I am - and that's kind of awesome. Seriously. Like all art, beauty is subjective. People like Ron are still going to be stupid, society is still going to tell us to judge and compare each other, women will be catty, men will be superficial, and we will all be our own worst enemies.

But society be damned, we can and do see just what makes our friends gorgeous in our eyes. You can't tell me otherwise. We get to stop being seventeen, and if we're lucky, we get to be surrounded by at least a handful of people who really look at us, and see whatever it is that "makes us pretty." Do we stop feeling insecure? Do societal issues go away? No. But we have pretty friends to drink red wine with us while we give society the middle finger, to assure us that "Ron" probably died old, sad and alone** ... and all in all, help us feel more secure - about our place in our friends' hearts, if nothing else.

And that's a beautiful thing.

* I do have to say that the one thing that made me laugh out loud in the Samantha Brick article was her lament that none of her girlfriends had ever asked her to be a bridesmaid, "perhaps from fear that they would be overshadowed" by her beauty. Not only is that one of the most egotistical things I've ever heard, it's also financially ignorant. Lady! Being a bridesmaid is fun and all, but find the silver lining: you've probably saved yourself thousands in one-wear-only-dresses! Unless you're a nut job like me who spends a week in one, post-bridesmaid-gig... BTW, if any of your poor less-gorgeous friends musters the self-esteem to ask you to be in her wedding party, I highly recommend wearing the dress into the ground. Might even inspire your next blog post.


**Okay, "Ron" would only be in his early 30s now, so he has probably not died old, sad and alone. Yet.

This is Passover.