Tiny Pineapple

Let me back up just a bit…

An American Life, Act 2

I didn’t realize to what extent I had defined myself by my job and my marriage until I lost them both two years ago (ironically, on the exact same day). It was as if the script I’d been working from for the previous 12 years of my life had been yanked out of my hands, and there I was — 40 years old, divorced, and unemployed — with that famous aphorism hanging over my head:

“There are no second acts in American lives.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Last Tycoon, 1941

Well, with all due respect to one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, the boozehound was full of crap. The fact is that unless your character had the good fortune to keel over before the end of Act 1 you really don’t have a choice. Script or no script, the second act curtain is going to rise and you’ve got to come up with something whether you like it or not.

I can attest to the fact that the first few scenes of the second act aren’t pretty. You’re not really sure who you are anymore, you’re operating in a new and unfamiliar context, and you have absolutely no idea where you’re going with it. But after two years of sometimes painful improvisation, I was beginning to feel like I had a pretty good handle on my character again.

Now, I’m not so sure.

The “Fun Parent”

The other day I was watching an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody with my daughters. (I apologize if your ears just popped from that rather abrupt change in altitude. In the future I’ll try to warn you in advance if I’m going to go from from F. Scott Fitzgerald to The Suite Life of Zack & Cody in less than ten sentences.) It was an episode entitled Dad’s Back:

Kurt, a rock-musician and the twins father, comes to the Tipton Hotel for a visit. Kurt will allow Zack and Cody do things that Carey would not approve of them doing. Zack decides to leave the Tipton when he gets in an argument with his mother about his homework, by stowing himself in his father’s tour bus.

In the episode, the boys keep referring to their rock-and-roll father as the “fun parent,” so their single mom goes overboard trying to prove that she can be the “fun parent,” too. Zaniness ensues.

During one of the commercial breaks, I turned to my daughters and said…

Me: Well, girls, I’m sorry I’m not the “fun parent.”

Emma: (looking confused) What do you mean?

Me: I mean, I’m sorry I’m not the one who does fun stuff with you all the time.

Emma: (still looking confused) But you are the fun parent.

Me: What?

Zoe: You are the fun parent, Dad.

Me: No, I’m not!

Emma: Yes, you are.

Me: I can’t be!

Emma: You take us to movies…

Zoe: And you put comics in our lunches…

Me: (waving it off) That’s not enough to make me the “fun parent.”

Emma: (pointing to the TV) And you watch The Disney Channel with us…

Zoe: And you take us to Disneyland every year…

Me: But I also make you do your homework, and practice the piano, and clean out your backpacks, and clean your room, and make your beds, and floss, and…

…and I spent the rest of the commercial break trying to convince them how not fun I was. In the end, they rather diplomatically pronounced that we were both “fun parents,” but I think they just did that to shut me up because the show had started again.

The thing that really struck me about that conversation was our very different takes on the role I play in their lives. For the last two years I’ve concentrated so hard on providing them with consistency, and predictability, and routine, and boundaries that I saw myself as the drudge, the disciplinarian, the pinchpenny, and the taskmaster. But it had never occurred to them that I wasn’t the comic relief.

[Note: For the record, I’m not the “fun parent.” Case in point: For Zoe’s upcoming birthday, her mom is flying her to the destination of her choice for a weekend getaway. Me? I’m getting her a new set of sheets for her bed. “Socks and slacks. Gee, thanks, Hanukkah Harry…”]

The Scale of Self-Awareness

This disconnect isn’t just connected to my daughters. Based on the responses I got from people who know me very well, either they don’t know me very well or on the scale of self-awareness — with rocks at the bottom of the scale and Oprah at the top — I fall somewhere between styrofoam and oatmeal. I found myself saying over and over, “I can’t do that,” or, “Surely they’re thinking of someone else.”

So when it came to setting my new year’s resolutions, it almost seemed like I was setting them for someone else…this “Grettir” guy, who looks like me and talks like me, but who is very different from the person I think I am.

This seemed like a real problem until I read the latest Infrequent Mailing from Coudal Partners. Here’s the part that really grabbed me:

“Susan and I have developed a method for getting to the heart of a design problem. At least for CP, it works just about every time. There’s no ‘critical path’ to follow. There’s no magic mission statement (ugh) to compare sketches against. It’s not about making a list of pros and cons. Nor thumbtacking a wall full of magazine pages, color swatches and screenshots. We don’t make concept boards or matrixes of 3” x 5” index cards, nor assemble demographic, ethnographic, psychographic or any other kind of graphic profiles. We just do this.

“We screw around for a while and then we start throwing things away until we’re done.

“The short essay, What We Talk About When We Talk About Work covers some of this ground. In essence our methods are subtractive rather addititive. It’s why Josef Muller-Brockmann and Stanley Kubrick are heroes. It’s why we love whitespace and simple geometric compositions. Hell, it’s even why The Pixies are important. It’s the application of craft in pursuit of the simplest, most focused communication of an idea. But, this isn’t really about work. Last week, while on a lazy Mexican vacation with my family, something occured to me.

“What’s good for design is good for life.

“Maybe it should have been obvious to me right along. Maybe I should have figured out years ago that worrying and overthinking and trying to keep up with other guys is all a distraction from the simple essential stuff. Maybe you all know this already, but nobody ever told me. Or at least I never listened if you did.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and take an “if I can only do this one thing then I’ll be happy” attitude. That of course never works. I recently read a draft of a new book that led me to the following conclusion.

“The reason we are so often unhappy is because we don’t set our goals for the people we will be when we reach them. We set our goals for the people we are when we set them.”

You can see why it appealed to me. It combines the idea of “doing more of less” with the prospect that a lack of self-awareness might actually be an asset in this endeavor; that knowing exactly who I am isn’t nearly as important as knowing who I’m going to be.

But that will have to wait until Friday, which is my next night off…