Alexis Rankin Popik's Blog, page 3

ONLY A FEW FRIENDS

From the archive:

Friends in Antarctica*

All anyone needs is a few friends–between and two and five. This surprising (to me) information comes via Kate Murphy’s New York Times piece, Do Your Friends Actually Like You? That title caught my attention because it hadn’t occurred to me that people I consider to be friends don’t like me all that much, but according to recent research, only approximately 50% of so-called “friendships” are mutual.

This is a dilemma. How can one know who’s a true friend and who isn’t. It’s too humiliating to go around asking friends, “Do you like me as much as I like you?” And what makes someone a friend? In my twenties, I considered my friends were almost everyone I knew. These days, Facebook Friends may be that equivalent.  However,  I suggest you not compare others’ Facebook Friend numbers to your own. I tried this and learned that my son Ben has ten times the number of friends I have.

So what makes someone “one of my best friends?” Vassar English Professor Ronald Sharp, who co-edited “The Norton Book of Friendship,” defines friends as people you take the time to understand and allow to understand you. That means revealing things about yourself that you don’t let most people know. Under that definition, it’s easier to understand why we don’t have many “true friends.”

British evolutionary psychologist Robin I. M. Dunbar takes a brisker approach. He says, “There is a limited amount of time and emotional capital we can distribute, so we only have five slots for the most intense type of relationship.” He doesn’t sound like much of a people person—emotional capital? relationships as “slots?” And he uses bad grammar besides (“we only have” instead of the correct “we have only”).

Every week, Facebook reminds me to add a “Call to Action” at the end of this blog—something I seldom do because it seems silly and embarrassing. This particular blog is no exception.  If you don’t consider me one of your on-line or off-line friends, keep it to yourself.  I’d rather assume you are.

HAVE A GOOD WEEK!

*Photo of sea lions by moi.

E. B. WHITE AND WEEDING

Japanese Knotweed

I have been taking time off weeding each day to read The Essays of E.B. White.  I have read that book many times but White can still make me laugh harder than any other writer, even David Sedaris. Consider this excerpt from the chapter, “Coon Tree,” about a mother raccoon and her kittens, who live in a hole in a tree just outside his second floor bedroom window:

If the kittens are young and quiet,…she finishes her bath without delay and begins her downward journey.  If the kittens are restless, she may return and give them another feeding. If they are well grown and anxious to escape, she hangs around the opening in an agony of indecision.  When a small head appears in the opening, she seizes it in her jaws and rams it back inside.  Finally, like a mother with no baby-sitter and a firm date at the theater, she takes her leave, regretfully, hesitantly.

Last week, while stabbing and yanking weeds, I thought that maybe I could write this blog about weeding in the manner of E. B. White–why not aim high?  Perhaps I could make the plucking and digging hundreds of weeds out of our driveway amusing somehow.  Maybe if I could get past the heat, humidity and biting insects, I could write something clever.  But weeding a long driveway in a New England summer is a thoroughly unpleasant task.  It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge– a process that never ends.  By the time I get to the end of the driveway, the beginning is weedy again.

Maybe weeding is better described through poetry:

Ragweed, Knotweed, Purslane, Plantain–
Don’t forget the Poison Ivy.
Prostrate Spurge and Hairy Crabgrass
Silly names but kind of jivey
Don’t forget the sexist labels:
Creeping Veronica—is she really?
Chickweed patches—don’t be silly.
Wipe that smile right off your face
‘cause you admire Queen Anne’s Lace.

This is the best I could do, given the sunstroke and all that….

Have a good week!

5 APPROACHES TO FRIENDSHIP

Photo by Briana Tozour via Unsplash

At some age, making new friends becomes more difficult.  It’s not so hard to make casual friends (neighbors, the local grocer) but close friends—the ones you can let in on your ugliest thoughts or shameful wishes, the people you think of when something funny happens and you can’t wait to tell them about it—are hard to come by.  I have been wondering why.  Julie Beck’s 100th and final installment about friendship in The Atlantic has her answer to that question.

According to Beck, “I have come to believe that there are six forces that help form friendships and maintain them through the years:  accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace.  By Accumulation, she means time together:  at work, in school, church or extracurricular activities.  Attention means being open to chance encounters.  Intention is a hard one. If you see an opportunity to make a friend, you have to put yourself out there and risk rejection.  Ritual involves something continuous, like a walk together once a week—something part of your normal schedule.  I once made friends with a wonderful but very introverted woman who used considerable Imagination to get past her discomfort—she taught me to knit.  I think of her every time I pick up my knitting.  I’m not sure what Beck means by Grace, but I think of it as tolerance of a friend’s foibles and flexibility to bend to what she or he might need sometimes.  I think of my husband as I write this.  After all, a successful marriage is a solid friendship.

What about you?  I am interested to know what experiences you have had that have led to lasting friendships.  And meanwhile…

HAVE A GOOD WEEK!

WHAT’S A HACK?

Photo by Ilya Pavlov via Unsplash

Once a week I get an email with a title like, “Six Great Hacks to Organize Your Kitchen!”  I’m embarrassed to say that I get drawn in nearly every time by the word “hack” and open the email.  But what on earth does a word usually defined as breaking into a computer have to do with how to store frying pans?  The answer, I believe, is nothing.  

My original understanding was that a hack was person who was mediocre at her/his job but somehow managed to hold on to it anyway.  Ex:  “Ignore him.  He’s just a political hack.”  I nosed around the internet to see what has changed and discovered that Merriam Webster lists dozens of meanings for HACK, including nouns, verbs and adjectives.  

I realize that most people don’t brood about stuff like this.  As a writer, I do. I get so worked up about words that my spouse says that if there is ever an emergency announcement like, “Tornado!  People should go to their basement,” I would stick around upstairs until I’d clarified that the proper word is “basements” because the subject is more than one neighbor’s  basement.  It’s kind of like a grammatical OCD.

What I have learned from researching “hack” is that the ones that inevitably draw me in are called “life hacks.”  Just for fun, I’ll close with an inane example (eye roll, please):

We bet at least once in your life you have struggled to find the end of the tape.  This hack will stop this agony.  Take a hairpin or a paper clip and fix it on the end of the tape.  Now your life has become a little bit easier.

HAVE A GOOD WEEK!

What’s So Funny?

From the archive:

“Talk Dirty to Me,” the funny sign read. I burst out laughing, alone in my car as I drove past the new town business—a cleaning service. Later that afternoon, I came across a letter in the local paper complaining about the sign. A second entry noted that others had also complained that the message was inappropriate and not in keeping with town signage.  The author didn’t think it was funny at all.

This little controversy got me thinking about how what one person considers funny can be viewed as offensive by another. On an entirely different level is Roz Chast’s recent cartoon memoir, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” A chronicle of the decline and death of her parents, Chast’s story manages to be both moving and funny—or, at least, funny to some of us. I shared the cartoons with my sisters and friend Heidi and we laughed so hard we literally (and I do mean literally) cried. To me, that summed up our mutual bittersweet experience of being with our mothers in the long month before they died.

Many people are put off by talk of death (note the name of Roz Chast’s piece), especially in the context of humor, but when a very old person has lived a long, fulfilling life, death may be sad but not tragic and even, at times, funny. An example: Chast’s mother’s health was declining rapidly and she visited her at the nursing home, expecting the worst. Instead, one day she found her mother dressed and sitting on a couch, eating a tuna sandwich.

“I knew her retreat from the abyss should have filled me with joy, or at least relief. However, what I felt when I saw her was closer to: ‘Where, in the five stages of death, is EAT A TUNA SANDWICH?!?!?’”

I know exactly what Roz Chast means. After months or weeks, when death is imminent, when you’re prepared to lose your mom and you’ve had the most intimate, heartbreaking conversations of your life, when she wakes up, as our mother did, and asks for a cup of coffee and some scrambled eggs, you are at once delighted, dismayed and even (shamefully) let down because all that painful emotional preparation for death seems wasted. But when it happened, when she asked for the eggs, we all burst out laughing, our dying Mom included, because it was just so darn funny.

MY MICRO/MACRO LIFE

Red-eyed tree frog–My previous version of a MACRO shot

I am turning a MICROscope, using a MACRO photography lens, on the natural world today in order to avoid the horrible and nearly daily news of mass shootings in my country.  You don’t need me to add to the chorus of “Why does this happen only in the US?””  Senator Chris Murphy asked the best question:  “What are we doing?”

When I first learned about photographic lenses, I was confused about why a photo of something tiny, even microscopic, required a macro lens.  I still don’t like the definition, but here it is:  “Macro photography produces photos of small items that are larger than life size.” Before my photographer son, Ben and his wife Jo gave me a macro camera last week, the photo of the Red-Eyed Tree Frog (above) was my attempt at a macro photo…

…as was this Mandrill Monkey Face.

I thought if the photo was close up and the details were distinct, that was MACRO photography. I was wrong. This week, my son Ben walked me through some of the possibilities with my new camera, and here is the kind of macro results a fine photographer like he is can get:

Pederson’s Cleaner Shrimp photo by Ben Popik

I HOPE WE ALL HAVE A HAPPIER WEEK!

Meanwhile, it’s clear that I’m not the only sufferer from FOMO (see last week’s blog). Dick has “a deep FOMO” that he cures by “exhausting [himself] with something else and Janet A. hears “versions of this from many friends and experience it myself on a regular basis.”

FOMO:WHAT DID I MISS?

FOMO is the acronym for Fear Of Missing Out, a “disease” that has plagued me my whole life.  I blame my FOMO on the fact that I am the firstborn in my original family, the reigning queen of the world until my parents, over the years following my birth, added three more pretenders to the throne.  Imagine—all that time on the sidelines watching them ooh and ah over the latest newborn as if I no longer mattered. FOMO times three. (No one in my family accepts this explanation.)”3

This week we are on vacation with our three adult “kids,” their spouses and their children.  One would think FOMO would not be an issue and it isn’t when it comes to the babies.  But with their parents, the FOMO is acute:  what are the “girls” talking about?  What did Ben say that they thought was so funny?  It’s a state of feeling left out by the cool kids.  

I don’t have a solution to this problem other than to tell myself to “get a grip.”  If you have FOMO, what do you do?

BAD MOTHER’S DAY

Mother’s Day has never been a big deal for me. Until we moved from California to New England, it never occurred to me that how a family celebrated Mother’s Day—or didn’t—was considered by some women to indicate just how good (or bad) a mother they were. Imagine my surprise on the first Monday-After-Mother’s-Day in Connecticut when most of the women in my gym exchanged stories about the elaborate celebrations their children had organized for Mom’s Very Special Day. There were brunches at the local hotel, flowers, chocolates, tributes of all sorts.

Early on I told my three kids that I considered Mothers Day a “Hallmark Holiday,” and they needn’t buy me presents, though they could make me cards if they liked. Uncharacteristically, they took me at my word. Case in point—the “card” at the top of this page. Sara was in elementary school and Ben was so young he wrote the “B” in his name backwards, but neither one was too young to make (unfair and undeserved) fun of me on my Very Special Day.

The prize, however, goes to my youngest, Nathaniel, who responded to a nursery school prompt of “Is your mother pretty?” with, “Well, she’s pretty, but she’s pretty ugly in the morning.” This would have been funny and not as unfair as the “cocktail card,” had it not been that this page was one of twenty in a collated booklet for all the moms in his nursery school, right alongside a little girl’s description of her “beautiful Mommy” who “exercises every day.”

I am writing this on Mothers Day and wishing all you mothers out there–good, bad, or a little lacking–Happy Mothers Day!

AND HAVE A GOOD WEEK!

THE GROUCH NEXT DOOR

When we moved back to the Bay Area, I joined NextDoor, an online app “neighborhood” to find out what was going on in my former home. This was important because Oakland no longer has a local newspaper and the San Francisco Chronicle is a shadow of its former self. I was assured via its website that “We [at NextDoor] believe that by bringing neighbors together, we can cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.” Whoever wrote that can’t have known how many grouches would sign up.

The hype didn’t match the reality–especially the “kinder world” part. NextDoor is, in my opinion, a five-days- per-week grouch fest. People post comments that are sometimes rude and occasionally vicious. A few days back one man “commented” with a raised middle finger emoji. (I didn’t know such an even emoji existed. It isn’t in my stash of hearts or thumbs-up emojis, anyway.) A friend once posted a concern about two vicious dogs in her neighborhood not adequately contained by a fence. The responses of her “neighborhood she could rely on” were so mean and unrelenting that she quit the app. A volunteer who agreed to monitor that neighborhood app resigned because it was so discouraging to try to temper neighbors’ comments.

Most of NextDoor is bland: people posting pairs of used skis for sale (or free), and questions like, “Does anyone know why there are police helicopters circling over the freeway?” This is what I expected and sometimes appreciate. What I wasn’t prepared for were the unintentionally funny and sometimes rude remarks. Here are two examples.

1. “There’s a wild turkey on our high-traffic street [supplies the location] and I’m afraid it will be hit by a car. Any advice? Can anyone help rescue it?” This neighbor seems to assume that (1) nearby neighbors are glued to the app and will rush out to help the turkey or (2) the turkey will be standing in the busy street for an indefinite length of time.

and my personal favorite…

2. “With so many neighbors ‘knowing’ this kitty – who seems to be looking for attention and affection elsewhere but at home – I wonder if there is a mis-match with its owner, who doesn’t bother with ID information on the cat’s collar.  I feel sad for this kitty.” This entry gives Passive Aggression a bad name.

HAVE A GROUCH-FREE WEEK!

Photo by Alex. K via Unsplash

 

GOOFINESS AS WELCOME COMFORT

“Let’s Get Goofy” got such a big response, including notes along the line of “I really needed this” that I am posting a few more crazy-ish pictures from pre-pandemic photo trips around the house and around the world.

My goofy cat is annoyed that I am writing this blog instead of feeding him.

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My favorite place from everywhere we’ve been is East Africa (though Costa Rica is a close runner-up). The people are lovely and the animal life “in the Bush” is awe-inspiring (and often dangerous). The knowledgeable local guides make it very clear that safari-goers must stay on the vehicle unless and until she/he says it’s okay.

Why safari guides check the bushes before travelers leave the jeep for a “pit stop.”

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I know how he feels–and it’s not goofy.*

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This goofy bus can be described in many ways, but “Express” isn’t one of them.

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Wild animals will always turn their butts toward the camera.

And sometimes don’t you feel like the universe is turning its butt towards us, too?

HAVE A GOOD WEEK!

*The furious Capuchin Monkey is in Costa Rica, not Africa.

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Last week’s blog about QingMing and other cemetery customs celebrating and honoring ancestors garnered many responses, among them:

From Stacy Y.: Thank you for telling us about QingMing! What a lovely tradition!

and Connie B.: “Lovely, and that’s a great “look” for Bella–the photo that captures a flower between her eyes, almost!”

Chris B. added: “I’ve been observing this ritual for the past few weeks at my nearby cemetery. Besides the usual fruits and flowers, I saw a Chinese food b ag with at least three containers of someone’s favorite foods.”

And from Joan: “Was Monday moping till I read your blog….QingMing–how lovely!! Keep ’em coming!!”

AND WHAT ABOUT YOU? JOIN THE CONVERSATION at alexis.popik@gmail.com