I am going to now misinterpret David Sedaris.  I went to see him after his reading at his book signing and he gave me three pieces of advice, one I can't remember.  One of these pieces of advice was to "make something out of nothing."  His very kind replies to my questions scared me.  Implicit in them was that successful writing requires you to get your shit together yourself.  I remember my reaction to the two books of his I read.  He has a style of writing, conversational, concise like an essay, but with a light touch of the building up to a punchline of jokes.  He is a writer who most closely resembles a comedian, or someone who lightly sprinkles his narrative with the principles of comedy.  This makes him so effervescent and entertaining on the radio or as a tv guest.  When I read his books, I wondered about him, despite writing about his life, he seemed mysterious, or never revealed himself.  Each of his stories would flesh out a piece of his life with a sometimes absurd sense of humor.  In recalling an earlier time in his life, David Sedaris would have objective, somewhat omniscient distance as a narrator.  Early David Sedaris would be examined with a dismissive, self deprecating eye, someone who "tended to exhaust people" or unsuccessfully took up random pursuits like conceptual art or competitive swimming primarily to get attention, to the forgiveness and dismissal of his future self.  He was ostensibly vulnerable in recalling his past missteps, but not vulnerable enough and still mysterious to me as a character.  I didn't feel close to him or like he exposed himself in his stories.  I think maybe making something out of nothing requires creating an anecdote that takes a slice of one's life and makes a certain point to make room for other anecdotes.  The interesting thing about books of essays is that because the essays are about discrete times in someone's life, they may not have an obvious unified purpose to be collected in the same place.  Joan Didion's book of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem was easy to cull some sort of large profundity, big steak, out of, because the stories were set during one period in her life, divided into encounters with people she met, and meant to be a slightly sloppy microcosm of the meaningful social moment captured at its time.  It was easy for me to see useful import and poignancy or a unifying theme in Joan Didion's writing for that reason, because they came from one time in her life and either reflected on American history such as counterculture in the 60s, motherhood, aging and other things it bothers me to talk about.  Perhaps the unifying theme in two of his books that I read are a similar tone shared in the essays.  Naked tends to be edgier, angrier, with longer sentences, longer, more autobiographical.  Me Talk Pretty One Day has taut, hilarious stories that frequently brought me to tears with their humorous commentary about the absurdities of languages and their rules.  There are glimmers of familial pathos and pain, the meandering path he took to get to a place as a very successful writer, and meaning and poignancy delivered with a lighter touch than his deft skill at telling an anecdote.  I guess I wonder if he is a "deep" writer, an "intimate" writer, if his skill in entertaining people while they're in the bathroom moves him up from the NY Times Bestseller list to that of a reliably great modern writer or even modern classic.  Maybe I'm missing a greater depth in his stories or unifying theme in each book. 

One thing I do know, is that what David Sedaris is presenting makes me want to get closer to him, to know the protagonist.  Personal essays expose one's life to a reader and offer them an opportunity to relate to the writer.. or not.  Observational humor causes the audience to relate to a comedian who is freshly exposing common elements in their lives. Observational humor, particularly narrative humor, forges a warm connection between audience and comedian because it illuminates elements in human lives and provides a window into the comedian's life/how he sees the world.  This is why I love to listen to the albums of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Patton Oswalt, whether or not they narrate anecdotes about their lives, just being able to enter into their perspective, the way they see the world, is a warm rapport that doesn't leave me feeling like I don't know the comedian.  Even if they are creating a persona (like Anthony Jeselnik who I don't pay attention to) or editing their stories to only include what audience members respond to, their voice and the way they flesh out and finish their stories provides clues to whatever their point of view might be, even if they are miserable alcoholics or, like George Carlin, way nicer and quieter than their abrasive onscreen character.  There is an honesty in sharing one's observations.  Creating distance while exposing one's life and thoughts with charisma is an uncomfortable juxtaposition.  I only found myself missing Aziz Ansari, pacing my apartment after watching the good comedian, because of emotion or the strangeness of seeing such a real talent in its raw developing stages and possibly missing other parts.  

The promise of meeting David Sedaris after a reading and the possibility that he will talk a fan's ear off further brings the possibility of vulnerability and connection.  I hoped that if I stated my case strongly enough, or drew him out enough, the very tired writer would come over for salmon some time next week... or at least we'd have a good laugh.  Yet, his attempt to have a personal conversation with each fan who wanted him to sign the book was maybe an exercise in politeness and grace.  As well as quirk and observational ability.  I guess I wanted to overshoot and be friends.  Even though a creative talent and a fan that doesn't create anything aren't equals.  Creative talents are allowed to be distant, loony, cold, experiencing things and observing people in the service of their art.  I wanted to be friends with David Sedaris.  So does everyone else.  People's creative talent is obvious to the cold objectivity of an outside observer.  Especially a wise professor or talented writer.  However workaday it may be.  Meaning we aren't special, we are consumers of David Sedaris' gift, people whose only art is life and only production is children or things like raising revenue or supporting a companies' bottom line.  So there is always a power differential.  We aren't equals any more than Rembrandt was with Ferdinand Bol or Gerrit Dou.  Or with Hendrikje Stoefls.  Personal relationships don't come to be as valuable as the art produced and being good at pleasing or befriending an artist doesn't come to mean much.  You are a person in their painting.  I think Sondheim already tackled this in Sundays in the Park With George. 

I wanted to know what brought him to doing drugs, how he felt about his mother, the fact that they cursed in the house (slightly tougher parents than my family), growing up with all those sisters and which he was closest to, whether he could relate to his father, why he wanted to date Hugh so much, what makes them get along, whether he thinks he is now getting the attention he wanted, what he really thinks of his fans, when he started writing, when he got good at it, how he met his friend Alicia, things I wonder.  I always want to ask REALLY intrusive questions.  But, the fact that I feel like they're unanswered (whereas with Joan Didion I mostly wonder whether her daughter was easy, how and whether she learned to cook, the challenges of being a mother, whether she was actually a good one.)  These questions also remain unclear so's to create more books.  His love for and estrangement from his engineer father is obvious in his books. 

I am not a stranger to fear, fear of beginning, changing, and constructing an entire plan by myself.  Somehow for years I've avoided having to be a "self starter" (perhaps due to the slightly bite-sized and regular homework assignments, the loopholes in an ostensibly Dewey-based education system from truly "constructing my own education," and other ways I've slipped through the cracks or out of the system without letting it make me feel upset too much.)  I've been surprised and blindsided by the combination of having to develop the skill of being "the CEO of my future decisions (responsible for top down planning)," being forced at work to take drastic initiatives and also construct things from top down, as well as a differently flavored ability to self reflect that began in my early mid 20s.  (As I gain distance from my childhood that I've tried so hard to imprint with fidelity on my brain, my memory comes to new conclusions and falsifies facts.)  This may be because I am the type of person who continually checks in with myself on my status and how I'm feeling, the kind of person who curiously noticed veins popping out on her hands and had to reconcile to them.  Or maybe I am like a person whose muscle has atrophied to a breaking point and who notices how weak they are when they have to use them.  I am continuously shocked about new developments that I register before their crest both in the collective and in myself before I reconcile myself to its long term existence.  I am curious and overwhelmed that this is a muscle slightly different from the ones I've had to use.  One thing that seems to define being an adult is others taking a more or less hands off position to curating your activities.  You curate the course of your life with long range goals that I used to find super annoying and pointless on health class worksheets or soft skills segues in all the fact memorization of public school. 

I also considered long range goals the corporate self help harping of Type A people, but perhaps it is necessary for the survival of people who don't know how to dictate the course of their lives without imposing outside structure.  Hollywood has always pictured Type A women portrayed by Amanda Peet and Katherine Heigl as side-note effective, but annoying and in desperate need of a lifestyle change.  Their ability to streamline themselves and their team as an effective speeding bullet toward their bottom line is powerful and assertive in the business world, but definitely not a trait in someone I would want to "have a beer with" or talk to.  Chris Traeger's relentless, desperate positivity in the face of aging and loneliness is also seen as more of a trite crutch and less of a tool that maximizes success.  Taking the reins of my career life and redirecting it myself terrifies me and doesn't stir me from an inert state.  Perhaps giving shape to my ideas with the large exoskeleton of long term and short term goals emulates an imposed outside structure that I so long for. 

I have been content to remain a child, a baby, that is what I'm told.  I have often surrendered to a sense of fidelity and hope.  There is a possibility that I will never achieve any personal goals or career.  Time is not going to steer me toward something or change me magically.  I have continued to be someone who is inert and doesn't move unless there's outside imposition.  This is a personal trait I could use to my advantage by lighting an artificial fire under my ass, whether igniting the historic shame I knew since childhood, the shame of when a spoiled and sheltered person feels when caught by an outside authority, at being outed for being spoiled, the fear of outside judgment that keeps us spoiled babies behaving disgustingly only in the shelter of a house with two acre zoning. 

I used to love to read a site that called on people to discuss and reflect on their lives with a Jungian and Freudian slant.  People would reflect on how their past got them to where they are and, while it also involved terms like "collective consciousness," "projection," and "shadow," it also involved a great deal of reflection on roots, or blaming things on the mother and family.  The people on that site frequently came from raucously bad childhoods and broken homes, unbelievable horror stories, and looked back with forgiveness and the understanding of the strength and positive qualities it developed in their lives.  They talked about how things currently unpopular are meaningful, such as one's roots and family tradition, the ego, the idea of male and female energies, one's values, boundaries, and what couples owe each other to make it work.  They forgave the sins of the mother and gained strength of character, denied a childhood, they gained resilience.  I wondered where my parents played into my problems because as far as I could see, though spoiled into a horrifically selfish paste, I was given a lot of love and support my whole life.  I really am a difficult, controlling, selfish, egotistical, headstrong person.  It can't be denied that as a child I sometimes felt like a "monster," over sensitive to itself, completely cold and callous to other people's emotions, and it took a while to deny the monster within while still taking selfish actions. 

Now I am beginning to see what choices my parents made that left my muscles atrophied after childhood.  And why they made them.  I was an oversensitive and easily depressed child.  I remember begging to see various R rated Oscar nominated movies, Dead Man Walking, The Green Mile, etc., saying I could take it, and coming home with my eyes bugged out and depressive thoughts in my brain.  I remember when I got my first watch at six years old, and how, being taken to a beach traditionally inhabited by old people and half empty, in my most Dixie cup color schemed windbreaker, on a windy fall day, when I sighed about how time flies, or saying at 10 years old how I felt like an 80 year old woman.  Thoughts like these are typical for the wondering mind of a 10 year old. 

With the rush of pubescent obsessions and later adult responsibilities, our brain gets slightly quieter about these things.  This is why I wasn't taken to depressing ceremonies.  Until a couple weeks ago.  Granted, my nuclear family is three people (plus me) who had to move for a job away from our Brooklyn distant relatives on one side who tended toward trashy Russian Brooklyn fashion and mores.  I dreaded having to go to extended family parties as a kid with the scarlet haired women with penciled on eyebrows and six course meals at tacky Russian restaurants with unspeakably bad 80s haired pop pumping in from all the tvs.  Or awkwardly hanging around when my parents visited friends and had no one to babysit.  As a glowering spoiled kid I was receptive of very few people, most of them being my brother.  I believed that "kids ruled" and didn't have a now-fashionable retro sense of how a Confucian style respect for elders or African style being part of a large community is what prevented millenial happiness after the Boomer evolution following America's nuclear family, two car garage 50s.  I'm oversimplifying, I really was an intense, literate, deep.... horrifically spoiled and sheltered, kid.  And kind of still am. 

I was curious how to universalize and theorize about my Russian Jewish roots, what could I say about the women of my family and the attitudes I inherited from them.  I felt more like a liberal arts student than anything else, and for a long time didn't care to dissect my cultural identity like this interesting website invited me to.  Especially because a certain war whittled away at elders who led completely different lives than their expatriate children, liberated by the Iron Curtain.  A friend of mine with a coven-like sensibility was interested in channeling my grandmother.  Hmmm.  How little my grandmother and I have in common and what a shame it is.  She lived in a village with several sisters which was probably cleaned of men in WWII.  She suffered through famine, migration to the city outside her village, had her husband, a tank commander, die of gunshot wounds in his prime, as well as her oldest son who I don't hear much about, and had to raise her two boys by herself.  She was inveterately kind and helpful to others, I hear, and, while using corporal punishment and things to keep the boys in line, sacrificed her personal happiness to raise them.  In other words, like at least one of her sisters, she was an indisputably good, strong, matriarchal woman who learned to provide, scrimp and save, as the poignant Zhvanetski skit says about the war generation.  The kind of women who save shoes, ship out cheaper items to relatives, work endlessly, recycle underwear to the embarrassment of their grandchildren, and demonstrate the strength and kindness tested by years of privation.  This goodness is a kind of power.  I'm a weak sauce, to be kind to myself, intellectual and we have nothing in common.

I had to attend a scary event and had to learn what my family was about.  Stories were passed around about the strength of my grandmother's sister.  The descendants of my grandmother's sister differ from mine in the way they kindly and evenhandedly accept and continue to socialize with people we disdain for their selfishness and wrongs toward us, specifically the offspring of my grandmother's slightly more evil sister.  And also they don't avoid my annoying uncle like I probably shouldn't do.  My grandmother's sister was not only a peerlessly strong and kind woman, but a first female medical graduate, a sought after heart surgeon, and one who did not disdain to help pretty much anyone, who remained positive and welcoming.  Matriarchal strength is an interesting virtue in a culture that still has patriarchal values, so many strong and good women in this war generation of my family. 

How did they relate to the generation of women who emigrated to the US?  Some of our relatives are certainly self sacrificing and welcoming, but the bleakness in their lives that they hide scares me, so it's not often that I visit the avenues at the end of the alphabet in Brooklyn.  Perhaps the coddled children, the ones sacrificed for, who finally profited from their parents labor for their comfort are the ones not tested for the strength of their kindness, and as a result, layabouts reclining and being fed grapes.  I find that Russian Jewish parents are slightly less cold, expectant, and demanding that their children succeed than Asian parents.  Or at least this is how I was allowed to loaf about in liberal arts school.  Unconditional love also doesn't balance accounts, so I was ignorant of structural responsibilities and what I "owe" other than it amounts to everything.  So I am neither strong nor good, but receiving beneficence and guilty.  

I spun out after this event, I weakly sought some help or someone to calm down my obsessive emotions.  (The obsession is a 2009 development that I used to fight the darkening uncertainty of my post-Clinton and post-Bush environment with serpentine ritual.  Everything had to be more okay than my closing doors four times and spending 20 minutes picking out mismatched socks for a "good day.")  This was maybe why I was sheltered by my parents from the disease and suffering as a child, maybe it's in my nature to be sensitive, emotional, and fall apart like a two year old.  In my family, it's well respected to either freak out only when there's reason or to maintain composure for the sake of others.  Perhaps selfishness is a cardinal sin in our self-sacrificing culture.  One that judges people on the strength of their goodness in crisis moments or their ability to nurture and protect others.  And, in Russian Jewish history, there are so many crisis moments. 

Maybe I was born sensitive, requiring shelter or else my nervous constitution make me lie on the floor and throw up.  Maybe I deserved a childhood devoid of the selfish, neglectful, addict parents that forced the people on the site to step up as children and act like adults.  Perhaps if I were required to clean blood off a wall or cook my brothers and sisters dinner as a child I would have fallen apart inside.  Part of being an adult is not being allowed to fall apart on the outside or obviously and pleadingly, overtly be unhappy and seek help. 

I can say that one thing at the root of Jewishness is the unconditional love and nurturance of the children.  And not necessarily pressuring them to fit a mold or withholding physical affection.  Some children are fed and fed, physically as well as emotionally, as the stereotype goes... bagels, potatoes, and tomatoes shoved in their mouths by worried grandmothers as they are trying to play on the beach.  So much of Judaism has been holding out for a better time, shoring up strength for the future, and taking care, because sacrificing for children is worth it simply because they are our children and we want them to be happy.  When the debt to parents is immeasurable, how is it going to be paid off?  Where do our responsibilities begin?  They seem to ask for nothing and give everything. 

I can also say that two generations into my family, there is a tradition of women unexpectedly becoming worried, overprotective mothers.  My mother, her sister, my cousin, worry and tend and circle their children like brood hens.  However, my maternal grandmother isn't described this way.  Gay and fun loving, she and my grandfather created an intellectual household and nurtured their girls, but their long work schedules allowed the children to run free.  Somehow my mother developed an internal sense of pride, independence, and also following the rules out of respect to herself.  She wasn't disciplined or coddled into it.  I don't know how she did it's part of her character.  Neither was my paternal grandmother this way, obviously, due to using the rod on her boys.  My brother and sister weren't even raised the way I am and this may be why I'm at a disconnect.  Or why I don't gain profit from blaming the past on why I am so weak muscled now in terms of coping skills and adult ability.  Perhaps I over coddled myself. 

I am not a strong person in terms of putting on "woman pants."  I understand the value of being a female "Marlboro man" during moments of crisis, shielding emotion from children and spouses, mostly to avoid tiring the man out with your emotions, to help and feel the adrenaline rush of basically being a strong type of woman until you somehow break down internally.  This sort of activity, helping and clutching up in crisis is a deep matriarchal tradition in my female line.

I don't do self abnegation and help that requires bottling up anything.  I tend to fill with negativity and emotions that goad me to crumpling at somebody's door as a neurotic bag.  I deposit my dirt and trash and fear at other people's doors hoping that they'll prop me back up.  Just as Woody Allen collapses in a neurotic thought pile up, each hobbling his mind and body worse than the other.  I don't have a mechanism to press on or be positive, I resent people who expect me to put on my dress and lipstick and not feel things.  The people with whom we can't share our feelings are part of a long list, men who we are afraid of boring or seeming like a fussbudget, coworkers who gravitate toward alpha positivity rather than Debbie Downer, friends who prefer to rely and dump their feelings on us, and others who spiral out and worry.  Silencing the negative cyclone of thoughts tends to make me feel weak.  I don't have an internal engine of building myself up.  This is not the mechanism of a grown woman who can control her feelings, stand on her feet, protect her children and nurture her surroundings.  The hearth must be kept and it must be warm and pleasant.

I know what must be done.  I know that really children buckle under feelings of fear and weakly deposit them on anyone willing to listen.  Or somehow dump their burden.