Forms of Insecurity, 2024

Dear Friends:

Greetings from Virginia! I’m at what’s become an annual trip to our parents’ house with the Jenny half of Shenny to watch March Madness’s opening weekend. If you’re wondering why I do such a thing, I’ve got an essay you should read. Between all the rounds of squeaking shoes, Jenny and I will hit the enormous antique mall and maybe some golf balls if the weather’s good. Here’s us doing that in 2022:

Dad gave me that shirt so the golf course would let me in.

I’ve booked myself a massage at the spa in Colonial Williamsburg (it’s in the modern zone and not, like, involving some be-apron’d maiden prodding me with old rods) to get myself some much-needed alone(ish) time. Work demands have been especially demanding this winter. Plus lots and lots of travel, not exactly for vacation purposes. Three weeks ago, I was in New York with some of N’s family, and I love all of them, but his mom and aunts are 3 of 17 siblings, and as happens there were many stories told around games of cards about people I wasn’t sure I’d ever met.

Of course, sitting gamely through such stories is what it means to be an in-law. There’s just 5 of us Maddens (we’ll grab dinner with the Shani half of Shenny back up in Fairfax on Sunday). I love my family dearly, and one way I’m loving them these days is how they can no longer surprise me. I know all the stories they tell, and it’s a comfort I’m soaking up for as long as I can get it.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Financial Atonement
Sometimes, I lose money from boneheaded decisions. Pride: I don’t care what the sign says, I can park here for 10 quick minutes. Sloth: I need to check my credit card statement every month? Gluttony: Screw my plan to switch to beer after one spendy cocktail, I’ll have a fourth. I’ve got a savings account to cover sudden unexpected costs, but when the loss is my dumb fault I tend to stew about it. I atone for these sins by opening a new note and recording the lost amount—recently it was $500 from forgetting to cancel our long unused Google Fi account—and then I deprive myself of things I might like to buy. An upgrade to premium economy for my cross-country flight is only $49? Staying in coach takes $49 off my atonement debt. Bringing lunch from home = $13 off. Finding / making surprise money works, too: a refund on the thing I subscribed to having already been a paying subscriber (I really need to read my statements) = $120 off. I’m about halfway through my atonement, and I feel … well, N. thinks this is all a bit mortification-y, and he’s not wrong. But the alternative? Being always smart with money? I’d rather buy a fifth cocktail.

2. Defector.com
Defector bills itself as The Last Good Website, and they might be right. I say this even though it’s, on the whole, a sports blog, and thus to me like 80% illegible. But the people behind Defector are very smart and very disinterested in upholding the old stories about Our Republic (or our former president) that most New York media still seem beholden to. Thankfully, there’s more than just the sports, including some of the best writing I’ve found online about arts, culture, and particularly the ongoing mess of the news media (category: journalismism), and this is what led me to happily subscribe. (Just $8/month!) Well, this and the fact that Defector publishes an annual report of its financial situation. Without display ads, they’re making a profit and paying contributors competitive rates and bumping up the salaries of staff writers to better match the top of the masthead. It feels like a magic trick, but it turns out all it takes is making a quality product and giving people a community in which to enjoy/critique it together. (The comments sections are robust, respectful, and usually entertaining.) Plus: they’ve got crosswords! A recent themeless one took me around 13 minutes to solve, making it around a Saturday on the NYT Xword hardness scale, but with much more diverse and current cultural references.

Forms of Insecurity, 2024

So far this year, a thing I’ve been doing is collecting psychopaths. Psychopathies? On the bus, an hour after it’s stopped raining, I squeeze past a man who has his plaid umbrella open, holding it in his seat like a shield against everyone. Psychopath, or germ phobe?

Then, once I find a seat, I see him wipe at each panel of the umbrella with a little napkin, running it along the ribs of the undercarriage. I get drying an umbrella open to avoid rusting the works, but this is something else. This is a man who bought an umbrella he doesn’t like to get wet.

Then, once he feels he’s capably dried the precious thing, he takes his little napkin and drops it out the bus window to the ground.

Psychopath.

I see people standing outside, alone, wearing a mask that covers only their mouth. My school schedules its fire drill in the University Center—the one building on campus where you can get food—for 12:30pm. They also close the Faculty/Staff Lounge for Spring Break without either sending an email or putting a sign on the door.

Where are people’s minds if not in this world I’m trying to live in?

On the bus again (yes, I get it, I spend too much time judging strangers on the bus, my point is coming up in just a sec), an answer comes to me. A White guy in his early 30s, wearing the kind of hat only Dylan could pull off, sits at the front of the bus across from a nanny, who’s lifted the bench of seats on her side to sidle her stroller in out of the aisle. Then, two more nannies get on with two more strollers, and the guy looks up from his phone for a second, watches both nannies squeeze themselves together into the aisle, and then goes back to his phone. He’s sitting surrounded by strollers, all traffic in and out of the front door now blocked. The rear of the bus, where I sit alone, watching, is otherwise empty. For the rest of the ride, he never once looks up from his phone.

Psychopath.

That, I tell myself, is where people’s minds are in 2024: their phones, their own minds. People all seem suddenly locked inside themselves, unable or unwilling to let others in. However, this is not the insecurity I’ve framed this week’s Main Matter around. This is just life in a city: a ton of people working to stay inside a self-protective bubble.

I seem to be working my bubble these days by watching others like a hawk and judging everyone in the city as wanting, assuring myself that my behavior is unimpeachable. And there’s the insecurity I mean.

The insecurity is mine, and lately it’s in overdrive. The other night at a book reading, I interrupted a conversation a friend was having to tell her that people were trying to cut in front of our book-signing line, and that she needed to assert herself forward.

Insecurity: uncertainty or anxiety about oneself. What is it, then, that’s uncertain in me?

Let me give you another example. At the gym, behind the front desk, there’s a whiteboard. Announcements, closings, the current temp of the pool, etc. Last month, it had a whole panel that read CELEBRATE BLACK HISTORY, with names of leading Black figures written around it: Harriet Tubman. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyoncé. Sornjur Truth.

Wait. They just have meant Sojourner Truth, but I quickly wondered whether I had it right. I couldn’t tell you whether she lived in the early-20th or mid-19th century, and I felt stupid for not knowing this, but all the same I, this White person, went up to the students of color working there: ‘Just FYI, Sojourner Truth’s name is misspelled.’ I pointed at it.

By the time I finished at the gym, someone had corrected it, and I felt the way I used to when I’d tattled.

This month, the panel reads CELEBRATE WOMEN’S HISTORY, accordingly. More names written in the margins: Harriet Tubman got to stay. Beyoncé, too. I saw Ruth Ginsburg. Princess Diana. Amelia Earthart.

I stopped and sighed. Was I going to do this again? Two women sat chatting at the spot where I swipe my ID to get in. ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a name misspelled on the Celebrate Women’s History sign,’ I said, pointing somewhere behind me.

‘Oh really?’ one asked.

‘Yeah. Amelia Earhart.’

‘Okay,’ she said, and then we all went on with our days.

Two days later it still wasn’t corrected, and I was left wondering what, if anything, to do.

I get that nobody likes to be corrected, particularly about their language use, and as someone in the business of teaching people what they don’t yet know I find this frustrating. I can see how, in being corrected, a person might feel they’re really being shamed, or having some flaw in their character revealed.

The only thing you are when you’re wrong about something is not yet wiser about it. Even when you’re wrong again and again, after multiple corrections, it’s possible that you’ve got certain learning needs or styles that nobody’s been able to lead you through yet.

Anyway, it seemed to me that celebrating any incredible woman involves first getting her name right. I don’t know if the refusal (if that’s what it was) to correct Amelia Earhart’s name was about the insecurity of being wrong, or about something else. Regardless, this too, is not the insecurity I’m framing this Main Matter around.

Now is the time where I need to face the fact that the intellectual arena I’m engaging in is the whiteboard at a campus gym. If I were a different kind of thinker, I’d have a ‘but’ here, where I’d justify my choices. But I don’t have a but. The intellectual arena I’m choosing to engage in in 2024 is a whiteboard at a gym. Or being silently right on the bus.

What’s, then, uncertain in me? Maybe it’s my own actions regarding others. All I’ve done this week to help Palestine, for instance, is hope, again, that the U.S. stops funding genocide, and why has it taken so long to return that text? But I think more so, I’m feeling ill-equipped to engage directly in meaningful arguments. If someone walked up to me and, however politely, asked me to explain myself on any position, I’d likely walk away.

Disengagement is feeling too much like a kind of strength in 2024. Maybe it’s just me, but then again, recently some students at work were in such conflict with each other than some are opting not to be in the same room as others. On the phone the other day, one of our instructors suggested just getting them together in a safe, public space, with me as mediator, and helping them resolve these conflicts.

I would love to do that. I am ready to do that, but it’s clear we’re long past any hope of success. I don’t think I could get them to agree to meeting if I paid them.

Again, I get it: our 2024 bubbles are strong. That I myself have gone from just getting mildly annoyed by odd busmates to creating this narrative about a growing collective psychosis means that I’m becoming less tolerant of others, of the deep and vast variation within our species. If I love cities, and if I love being alive, I have remember how to love different people’s differences more than just in theory.

The antidote to all this seems to be community, those chosen families that counter our sense of isolation—whether urban or otherwise. This year has kept me apart from whatever community N & I have built in San Francisco, and clearly it’s showing. Which is another reason I’m glad to be here in Virginia this week, with my birth family, getting an overdose of ‘my people’ that I hope can steer me to sunnier horizons for the rest of this already long year.

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store are these heterosexually secure frat paddles given to ‘Dad’ Brad in the 60s: