It's a Metaphor, Babe
I recently met a man at a vineyard in the Uco Valley of Mendoza who spoke pretty much exclusively in metaphors. He is handsome, light-eyed, wealthy, wild, and free. He works in sales and boy does he sell. Somehow in the course of twenty minutes, Scott and I had learned much of his biography and born entrepreneurialism, from opening a snack kiosk in his high school that earned him money to buy a horse that he rode home one day, much to his parents’ surprise. He later worked in kitchens in the States and UK which led to opening a small chain of pasta restaurants in Colombia. He recently returned to his native Argentina to ingratiate tourists to this particular brand of midrange Malbec.
I would put money on him being an Aries. He’s the kind of guy who when his sun shines on you, there is no warmer light. He’s a type I know very well, a type that colonized my good sense for much of my teens and twenties. He is a man who I imagine to be the source of much ire to women across the globe, particularly to his two baby mamas. They both live in the same town with children two years apart in age. His name is Andres, and I enjoyed hearing his take on life.
“I’ve built my home to feel like a vacation from my youth, pure fun!” he said. “A pool, a slide, everything for my kids when they come over.”
He gave us sunburning Anglos a tour of the vineyard, and whether it was dehydration or his cadences he was hypnotic in the story: “You have the winemaker, the workers, the environment, the grape, it’s all part of the puzzle, all part of the team.”
Somehow, after I’d had a few, I asked him how he seems so preternaturally relaxed. He told me about his meditation practice, and made a hand gesture that looked suspiciously like a penis entering a vagina (A not so subtle sales technique??? SOLD!). But he was trying to show how you have to enlarge the circle of space around you so that which bothers can’t grate as easily. “You meditate and mediate and mediate, and sit and sit and sit, and then one day you’re going through your life and you realize then, that’s when you’re meditating.”
It was a life philosophy, a feeling, I drank up like wine.
A few days later we found ourselves at La Sebastiana, the home of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The audio guide walked us through each room and told us of the whimsy with which Neruda curated his home and his life: here you see the portraits of English nobility in ruffs facing one another so they should never be lonely. Here is the sink he attached to the wall but never connected to water, just because he liked it. Here is the bed where he would take afternoon naps, and whenever he visited a friend in the afternoon he requested a space where he might doze. Here is the armchair he donned “The Cloud” where he’d sit and gaze out at the harbor, contemplating the sea. He often hosted cocktail parties where he would don a disguise, sometimes changing several times throughout the night. He loved jokes, though he was bad at telling them.
I thought about what my posthumous audio tour would sound like:
Behold the living room sofa, covered in beloved dog Bonnie’s shed. We at the Liz Greenwood Foundation have attempted to remove it, but it remains. The dog has been dead for decades now, that’s just how much she shed. Greenwood spent much of her creative output vacuuming. Imagine the books we’d have if she hadn’t spend so many hours toiling over dog hair!
Man, I said to Scott. I want to live a life of such playfulness and joy. How do you bring in that kind of whimsy into everyday life, not being a poet, or rich, or a man? I joked that I’d have to stop doing laundry altogether to have enough time to come up with different costume disguises. I doubt Neruda did laundry.
One of my new year’s resolutions is to chew more. I mean that quite literally, because I tend to gobble down my food and I’m wondering if chewing more can improve my digestion? But as Andres might say, it’s also a metaphor, babe.
I've found one way to chew more, and I recommend it so enthusiastically: a gratitude exchange.
GRATITUDE! Can't you just see the word in gold foil bachelorette script across a hardbound journal at Paper Source? I prefer to conceive of gratitude as a way of noticing what’s working out rather than what’s not. Every morning I text Helen five delights. She texts me hers, I relish seeing her gratitudes. We've been doing it for a few months now, and these lists are a unique and very intimate way to know a person. Some of my recent items include:
-tho being a woman and a mother is always tough, I’m grateful to be both at this particular moment in human history
-made two onerous phone calls
-umbrella, that I remembered one and as an invention
-made a very good decision to change into warmer socks
-Theo eating pancakes
-me eating pancakes
-being cognizant that things are very good right now
It might not be a disguise, or a vacation house, or an afternoon contemplating the sea, but it does feel delightful.
Other recommendations:
Taika Waititi pretending to sleep at the 2005 Academy Awards. He encouraged his fellow nominees to do it, but he was the only one who actually did.
Taika Waititi generally.
I’ve been holding off on checking me email as long as humanly possible in the morning and it feels GREAT! Like being on drugs. Sifting through promotional emails sets off a process of existential dread and anxiety that is entirely avoidable, turns out. It’s hard at first and then you’re high on that shit. Cannot recommend enough.
I really liked 1917, even in spite of the sight-gag casting of Benedict Cumberbatch. Fight me.
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. I GASPED!
What’s delighting you these days?