A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

13 December 1998 - Dubious Accomplishments

I was at my former boss's holiday party this evening, which meant I was subjected to the annual dubious accomplishments in entertainment. Most men who learn to make rude noises with their hands (or other body parts) outgrow this by an age somewhere between 16 and 25. Willie is over 40 and still considers "playing" songs on "farting hands" to be worthy of inflicting on the public. When you factor in another department member who accompanied this on banjo, it is not surprising that I transferred to work for somebody marginally saner. Though given Milo's current obsession with using pigs to detect unexploded landmines (codenamed Project BABE for "Boars Against Buried Explosives") the key word there is marginally.

And I thought that my having memorized a 400+ word tonguetwister and told it in public several times was a dubious accomplishment.

In other news, I saw Robert. He was in San Francisco for a conference and spent Friday at a nuclear waste disposal seminar. "This trip is not exactly a vacation," he said, regarding the seminar. Which raises the question of why he thought I might have thought that sitting through eight hours of geophysicists discussing nuclear waste disposal was a vacation. In typical fashion, he had more to say about the junk food at the conference and seminar than about anything else he had been doing.

But what was really interesting, was that we actually had a discussion about marriage. Of course, it was a discussion about why he won't ever get married, so it's not quite what my mother would hope for. The context was my comment that I really should call up Elliot and find out when his divorce will be final. Robert had forgotten that Elliot and Ramona were getting divorced. "But nobody our age can stay married anyway," he said, "so it's hardly surprising." He has decided that the divorce rate amongst people of our generation is something like 99% - and the only exceptions are fundamentalist Christians. I rattled off names of various couples I know who are our age and not divorced. In almost every case, he objected that they hadn't been married long enough for it to be fair to conclude that they wouldn't get divorced. (The exception was one couple who have been married 14 years.) "So," he continued, "there's no point in getting married."

Now, I don't have marriage as a particular goal and I long ago concluded that I have too much of a sense of self-preservation to marry someone as neurotic as Robert. But this struck me as the single stupidest reason I have ever heard to avoid marriage.

This was hardly the weirdest thing I heard him say, by the way. Our favorite Indian restaurant in Berkeley has closed. (It may well have closed a long time ago, as we haven't been in Berkeley in a while.) So we're walking down University Avenue, trying to find another place to eat that is reasonably nearby. And he rules out place after place on the grounds that they are "creepy." I asked him exactly what he meant by that, and he said that they seem like the sort of places where you would find out that the owner was a vampire or werewolf.

Another dubious accomplishment for the week: I have not strangled Robert.