“It lets us travel the way a child travels…round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

—Don Draper, pitching the Kodak Carousel on Mad Men.

I remember playing with the yellow plastic boxes, and my father saying, “Don’t put your paws all over the slides.” I used to hold the squares up to the bedroom window to see tiny pictures of monkeys and babies. They weren’t that exciting, but in those days telly didn’t start until 3 o’clock.

Zambia was mine. My younger sisters were born in Limerick, but I was born in the town of Mansa, Luapula Province, Zambia, Africa, The World, The Universe. I had no memories of the place, and no real curiosity about it, but it was exotic and scary in a lions-and-tigers kind of way, and at eight you’ll use whatever might make you special. I liked to tell people I was born in Africa, in that hair-twirling way of small girls who want your attention.

“And I was on an aeroplane, and on the way home from Africa I got sick out the window,” I remember announcing in class one day. One of the boys said that the windows on aeroplanes didn’t open, so it wasn’t true. I would be 16 before I got on a plane again, and none of the other kids had been on one at all, but his challenge put a stop to my boasting. It still stings. (Not long ago my mother told me that yes, I’d had some bad water on a stopover in Ethiopia, and vomited the whole way back—but not out the window.)

My mother was 20 and my father 24, and they were a few days married when they went from Ireland to Zambia to start their teaching careers. It wasn’t a completely unusual choice. Ireland has a strong bond with Africa through a shared colonial history and decades of Catholic mission and relief work. In the late 60s and 70s, the newly-independent African nations were offering contracts for foreign engineers, doctors, and teachers, just at the time that the first Irish generation to get free secondary schooling were coming out of college with their first-in-the-family degrees. The bolder ones were glad to sign up for a three-year adventure.

My parents weren’t the only young couple on that long journey heading out on one of those contracts. They watched the other passengers to see who stayed with them past Rome, past Addis Ababa, past Nairobi, and on to Lusaka. A girl with a shiny new wedding ring turned to my mother on the last leg, weeping, and asked her “Do you miss your mammy too?” They are still friends with Esther today.

Esther’s baby, Danielle, was born a month before me. She was Town Mouse and I was Bush Mouse. I was the first white baby born in the Mansa clinic, 18 months after they arrived, and my mother didn’t see a doctor until late in her labour, when we were both troubled. Afterwards, she washed in a pitch-dark bathroom and then discovered next morning that it was thick with flies and filthy; it made her sick. She remembers the local women laughing at her mottled, funny-looking baby, but says she didn’t mind.

We didn’t have many photos from Zambia in our house in Limerick—a few square, white-bordered prints of leopards, my christening, and the gleaming young men on the football team at St. Clement’s Secondary School, where my father taught. But there were dozens and dozens of photos of my younger sisters, born six and nine years later, and I decided—with more logic than bitterness—that this was because they were so clearly cute, while I had brown hair and glasses.

It wasn’t until a trip home last September that I remembered the yellow boxes of slides. My parents hadn’t owned a slide projector, and we had never seen them properly. Over the years their pictures had faded first into mystery and then into oblivion. At some point they had been shunted up to the attic. My mother wasn’t sure about letting me have them—I’m known to lose things—but I persuaded my sister to climb up to the attic and pass them down to me, in a precarious operation that had the three of us yelping “Oh Jesus! Watch it!”

I brought the slides back to San Francisco and eventually got round to shipping them to a scanning service down the road in Burlingame. They sent them on to Mumbai, where Indian workers would scan each slide by hand and color-correct them for my digital approval, then return them to San Francisco along with a DVD copy of their contents.

We are moving, says my friend Richard, from a world of things to a world of flows. The Zambia slides had a long journey in years and miles. They were carried across four continents and three decades, encased in yellow plastic boxes, in suitcases, in bubble wrap and styrofoam peanuts, in cardboard boxes and packing tape, until one day their atoms were reborn as bits and their hidden stories began to flow.

I opened the links on my computer at work. There was the baby that was once me—smiling, pondering, sleeping, bawling, floating. There were my parents, hip and beautiful and improbably young, wearing bright colors. And there was Zambia, dusty, sunny, with new brick buildings and vivid red bushes.

These were my blurred stories but not my memories, and I wished that I were discovering them with my mother and father instead of sitting alone 5,000 miles away. Digital photos don’t live anywhere. There’s no ritual of setting up the projector and dimming the lights. You’re not passing loose photos across a kitchen table, or squeezing in beside someone to turn the pages of an album. Loosed on the web, these photos seemed ephemeral and indestructible, detached and yet achingly intimate, years ago and yesterday.

I sent the links to my sister in Canada and to my friends at work, because I wanted the photos seen. How can you not bite your lip at the sight of a tiny baby, wet and kicking after a basin-bath, even if that baby is—somehow—yourself?

As I said, I was six when my sister was born, and as an almost-only child I believed myself to be self-sufficient. I remember vividly the night I learned to read, some time before I was four. My mother was re-reading an Enid Blyton story about Santa Claus getting stuck in the chimney of a factory. I was curled under her arm, sucking my thumb and imbibing the bliss of a story, and then there was a moment when the words on the page unscrambled, and I knew by the shape of them what each one said. It was fabulously exciting. From now on, I could read myself a story any time I wanted, forever and ever. It was my emancipation.

That’s what I remember—being a good girl, being the big sister, being able to tie my own shoes and put on my pyjamas, being able to learn off my spellings and read my own bedtime stories. All my life, I have shrunk from needing things from others. Yet these Zambia photos tell a different story, one that makes my throat swell. I wasn’t an independent little creature. I was a baby who was swaddled and held—in the crook of my father’s arm, on my mother’s hip, on their laps and shoulders, in lakes and on land—and I accepted it with grace and satisfaction. My parents didn’t have a Baby Bjorn to keep their hands free for their iPhones. Even though the Zambian babies were carried in wraps, it hadn’t occurred to my parents to do the same. They brought me everywhere—on safari in the back of a friend’s tiny Beetle, to parties with their childless friends, backpacking through Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. We were a trio.

This year, 2010, my parents will be married forty years, and my mother will turn sixty. I no longer gaze up at them daily with total dependence and devotion, but now I know how much I once did. And through their old photos I’ve learned to read another love story.

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective—and mine is painfully so—can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;—*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door—but for the child Elia—that “other me,” there, in the back-ground—I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ’s, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood.—God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.—I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself,—and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite?

—Charles Lamb, ”New Year’s Eve,” 1821

Tomorrow Patrick comes to stay. My couch has missed him, and so have I. He’s one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, and though both our worlds are wide, we share a hometown. I grew up in Limerick in the 1980s, and he grew up there in the 2000s.

Among many other things—student, hacker, writer, pilot, traveler—Patrick is an entrepreneur. He was 17 when he started to write software that would make life easier for middle-aged eBay sellers, and 19 when he sold it. Paul Graham, whose essays I’ve long admired, was his mentor and investor through his Silicon Valley incubator firm, Y Combinator. (I’ve wondered if that “Y” indicates the chromosome requirements for running programs, but that’s a mean little thought.)

Since then, Patrick has gone back to college and kept up his start-up ventures, from making Wikipedia fit on an iPhone to designing payment systems for developers. Every so often he’ll tell me off-handedly that he is meeting with some improbable supporter—the president of the European Commission or some billionaire CEO. And we laugh at the ridiculousness of this world that will give you all kinds of unexpected help as long as you have the balls to try, the brains to back it up, and the belief to keep it going.

Though I work with big corporations, my favorite clients are usually founders rather than career executives. They are the artists of the business world, who see what isn’t there and bring it into existence. They are romantics.

I suppose I collect entrepreneurs. I’ve worked for start-ups, made friends with many founders, and even married a man who turned out to be one. Ten years ago, when we were deciding how much of our savings to put into his new business, my ex-husband said, “Owning stocks is betting on other people. I’d rather bet on myself than anyone else.”  I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t a bigger appetite for risk, it was a different definition of risk. And it was just the opposite of everything our Irish upbringing had trained us both to work for—the gold stars of a good Leaving Cert, a profession, and assumption into the Dublin elite.

Even now, it’s hard to imagine preferring to bet on myself. But Patrick would take that bet, I’m sure. It’s a confidence shared by the twenty-odd entrepreneurs I know across different fields and different countries. It sets them apart from those of us who look for the misleading signals of other people’s belief. As I got closer to start-ups in the 1990s, I noticed how many people felt more secure joining a new company with 60 employees rather than six. What the crowd thinks matters more than where the cash is going.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into an essay on enterprise—especially as Paul Graham does those so well—but I find myself listing the traits that make founders different:

They are challengers.

When I move into an apartment, there’s a period of about two weeks when I can see what could make it better. Then I get used to it, and for years that crooked mirror stays where it is. Entrepreneurs don’t get comfortable with the mediocre. They see the gaps between what is and what could be.

Sometimes, they even see gaps for other people.

Much of my consulting work involves enforcing empathy—helping clients  see the world from the perspective of other people. It’s  hard, and that’s probably why so many founders start or stick with the stuff that they themselves (and their friends) care about.  We end up with no shortage of t-shirt design companies, indie coffee shops, and mobile apps.

But some people can look beyond their own tribe to identify what people who are not at all like them might need or want. I’m thinking of Patrick with his eBay seller tools, or Cameron Sinclair building houses for and with the four billion people who are neither destitute or rich, or Liam Casey helping people dance with the chaos of the global supply chain.

They have a bias for action.

They might  play with ideas in words for a while, but before long they want to make a prototype. And then they want to move it forward. And forward again.  “That thing we were talking about last night? I mocked it up. I think it could work.”

They are connectors.

“Do you know so-and-so?” The entrepreneurs I know are constantly suggesting and making introductions—texting mid-meal to someone you “should really meet.” Karma is capital.

They can inspire others to help them.

Sometimes it’s charm, sometimes it’s force of will, sometimes storytelling. However they do it,  founders have an ability to make other people see something, believe in it and pitch in. And often, they just ask for help directly—an underrated superpower.

They define discomfort differently.

I like having someone else worry about my paycheck, even though that means it’s much smaller than an independent practitioner’s. And I like the notion of “after work”—the time for Down Dogs, bon-bons, and Mad Men.

My founder friends can tolerate a level of uncertainty that would paralyze me. They can live without material comforts (on my couch), and drive themselves like mill horses. What they can’t stand is the idea of spending their time and talent on someone else’s ideas.

They don’t need approval.

Several of my entrepreneur friends are academically brilliant—and several others struggled to pass school and couldn’t wait to get out. But none of them got hooked on hits of teacher’s praise, and they avoided a lifelong addiction to recognition from above. Their own opinions matter more to them than those of authority figures. In a strange way, I think this frees them up to ask for and listen to advice more effectively, because they’re looking for information, not confirmation.

Above all, they are relentlessly resourceful.

Paul Graham pointed this one out as the key defining trait of successful entrepreneurs. They will find ways to get around problems and get stuff done, long beyond the point where sane and well-adjusted people would abandon a project.

I feel lucky to know so many makers and doers. Life is more vivid with people who are shaping some corner of the future, however small. You get to talk about possibilities, fears, creativity, change, big choices, leadership—all the good stuff. And I know, too, that it can be lonely for founders, who must constantly project certainty even as they suffer night sweats over making payroll. For them, being able to question, worry, or even just gossip with an outsider can be a break from a consuming enterprise, and for me—well, it’s nice to feel useful.

My cellphone ring is the sound of unmet obligations.

At fourteen, I spent hours a night willingly tied to the family phone, dissecting the gossip from biology class. Now that I’m a so-called grown-up, I dread being dragged into cyberspace—that place between phones—and my subconscious isn’t subtle about acting out.  Every month or two I shed cellphones in cabs and on airplanes, and more than one client has chased me down a hallway to return a phone I’d left at a meeting. I lose the charger or just forget to plug it in. I turn the ringer to “silent” mode during yoga class and forget to switch it back for days at a time. I bought an iPod Touch but not an iPhone: on a voiceless Touch, I never have to answer, “Will you run a workshop in Tokyo?” or “Why didn’t you call me back?”

After years of this, almost none of my friends or family rings me any more, and I’m perverse enough to be a small bit disappointed. The trouble is, I do like talking to them—I just dread the picking up part, the explaining and apologizing for my latest spell of neglect. If I were an octopus, I’d spend most of my time pretending to be a coconut.

A 1.30 AM call is hard to ignore, though. Last night the sound got tangled in my dream for a few seconds, and I was confused when I stumbled out to the kitchen to answer the phone. What could have happened in Limerick? To Mum or Dad? Was this going to be the last moment of Life Before…?

It was an Oakland number, and over background noise a woman said, “Hello? Hello? Is Shawn there?”

Goddammit, lady…

“You have the wrong number,” I snapped. “And it’s 1.30 in the morning.” I could see that I’d slept through a few earlier calls.

She sounded drunk and riled. “Ma’am, I’m sorry I have a wrong number. But you should tell your man not to be givin’ out this number to women.” Another woman hooted.

I sputtered for half a second and hung up, and went back to bed and stewed. I thought about texting her some playground answers:

Whoever Shawn is, he thinks you’re busted.

If you have to make the booty calls, you’re working too hard for it.

Be sure to bring the blue pills, honey. My husband is 82.

My apartment looks out over the whole city, and mostly I watch its drama from up here—the sun going down behind Twin Peaks, the street lights and house lights coming on, the cars snaking down to the Mission bars, the moon rising. The hill I live on is so steep that a few days ago my leather sole slipped out from under me and the bruises are still contour-mapping my hip and elbow. Up here, it’s easy to stay in and skip another Saturday night out.

The week before, my upstairs neighbors had come home at half-past two and yelled and stamped for a good few hours. I tried not to catch the words of their accusations—eavesdropping is fun only with strangers—but I couldn’t sleep through it.

Now I lay sleepless again, pulled into another Saturday night story by disembodied voices. I imagined the woman who called, all done up in skimpy club gear. Youngish. Hopeful about some Shawn from the night before or the week before, a San Francisco guy with a 415 area code and a sharp hat. He gave her his number and didn’t take hers, and that meant she could believe, if she wanted to, what he’d said. That she was hot, she was beautiful, she should call him, they could go out.  And tonight he might be wondering about her, waiting for her voice on a Saturday night at 11, at midnight, at 1.30.

All night, between phone calls, she would be bright and loud and hard-edged with her girlfriends, eyeing the talent and ordering rum-and-Cokes, but while she sipped she’d wonder if he was home by now. Would he sound sleepy-sexy and happy to hear from her when he picked up—heeyyy? Would he tell her to come on over? Would he make her breakfast?

She got me instead. Poor old pet.

I’ve worked with my immigration lawyer for 12 years now, and no one knows more about me than Ken. He may not know what makes my heart beat faster (too much red wine and coffee, Ken), but he has the facts.

He has an original copy of my Leaving Cert results, and he knows the exact and dismal grade I got in my Organizational Behavior mid-term 15 years ago. He has letters from every company I’ve worked for, and unlike my parents, he knows what I did there, too—in fact, he helped me get work permits for most of them. He has maintained a trail of my addresses matched only by my Amazon account. Copies of my fingerprints, birth certificate, social security card, marriage license, divorce decree, and passport live in his files. He has written proof that I’m not tubercular, am HIV negative, and have been vaccinated according to today’s medical fashions.

If I were a private eye, hired by the children of a lovestruck billionaire to find dirt on me, I’d break into Ken’s files first.

His official client is my boss, Susan, who is my sponsor. She’s the one who paid him to make the case to the United States Immigration and Citizenship Service (USCIS) that my job is specialized enough to justify hiring a Green Card holder, and then to show that I’m qualified to be that very special alien.

The Green Card process is straightforward if you’re trying to hire a foreign scientist to build rockets. It may take a few years, but it’s not hard to prove that, in order, a) this job requires certain skills, b) no qualified Americans are available to do it at the prevailing wage right now and c) this talented foreigner is qualified to take the position based on her PhD in rocket science and her five years’ experience building rockets in Tanzania or Switzerland.

The path is twistier if, as in Susan’s case, you’re trying to hang onto an Irish BA graduate for a job that involves anything from making a diorama of the contents of a high-school locker to writing speeches for coffee moguls to coming up with a list of names of emerging stars who should be invited to Davos. (“Preferably females from the developing world…,” is always the whisper added to those requests.)

These are the requirements for a job like mine: curiosity, apophenia, empathy, and common sense, plus fair-to-middling writing skills and an ability to improvise.

The USCIS doesn’t count chronic apophenia as a qualification for becoming a resident alien in the United States. Nor do they take into consideration your card-counting ability, or your yellow hair. All that matters is your educational attainment in a relevant field and the work experience you racked up before you started the job in question—again, as long as you can show that it’s directly relevant. My Spanish degree looks muy bonito on my resume, but since I don’t have Spanish-speaking clients, it’s of no use to my Green Card application. Nor are the 18 months I spent failing to become a banker, way back when.

Over the past four years, Ken did the hard labor of proving that my job warranted special qualifications, and that no qualified natives had presented themselves when Susan advertised the position. What remained was to prove that I was worth a Green Card—that my degree, my paltry marketing diploma, and my lurching career were enough. Though I had no faith in my resume, I believed Ken would fix all my faults and lacks, so I was surprised to get a letter this past February. I shouldn’t have been.

“Request for Evidence,” it was titled. “The documentation submitted is not sufficient to warrant favorable consideration of your petition.”

It came from the USCIS processing center in Lincoln, Nebraska. I’ve been to Lincoln once. Tim drove me through it on a cross-country trip during the Christmas holidays of 2007. We bawled the Bruce Springsteen song over the roar of the old Honda. The muffler had dropped off in Detroit, and though Tim lay in the snow at an Iowa truckstop in order to tie it back on with yellow baling twine, all we got was a few miles of clunking and scraping before the renewed roar of internal combustion. A blizzard chased us across the plains. Every so often we’d pass a yard with a Clinton sign or, more rarely, an Obama sign. Whenever we stopped for coffee at a McDonald’s, our ears rang, and then froze. At the Wal-Mart on the Nebraska border, the cashier asked if we wanted a cooked chicken for two dollars. They would have to throw the chickens out at closing time, and the staff weren’t allowed to take them home. We ate it in a motel room, watching coverage of the Iowa caucus.

After twelve years living on the coasts, it was my first real visit to America. It was wonderful.

When I got that letter from the USCIS, I thought about the person who wrote it. February 2nd, 2009 it was dated: I pictured her pulling on a bulky jacket, cold to the touch from hanging in the hallway overnight, and stepping outside to shovel the driveway so she could get to work. On the car radio, she would hear more still about the unemployment rate, consumer confidence, and the banking crisis—enough misery to make her look for a music station. Then a stop for an Egg McMuffin, maybe, and the pleasure of that first sip of office coffee, and a chat about The Bachelor with the woman at the next desk. After that she would turn to the next file in her tray: a fat packet, 18 months old, with neatly tabbed sections for application forms, college transcripts, complicated descriptions of dotcom-era jobs in New York City, paystubs and tax records, and a covering letter in lawyer language setting forth why this Dervala Afria Hanley should get to get to stay in the United States.

She wants to live in San Francisco, this woman with the unpronounceable names. She has a fancy-sounding job—a Marketing Strategist, whatever that is—and she earns twice as much as a USCIS caseworker in Lincoln, Nebraska. Per the regulations, she doesn’t smile in the passport photos, and there’s a haughty look on her face, as if she shouldn’t have to sit through this. Born in Zambia, the application says, and then a string of jobs in London, New York and San Francisco. Divorced.

“Job losses in January reached record highs in every state…”

Must be nice to live in California in January.

When I think of a USCIS caseworker sitting at her desk in Lincoln, Nebraska this past February, assessing my application, I am amazed at her generosity in asking for more evidence instead of turning me down flat.

Ken and I scrambled for a few weeks, collecting more letters and transcripts. We had to ask my colleagues to dig out five years of corporate tax returns and other evidence that the company was real and could pay a worker. Then he mailed off another fat packet, and I waited.

Driving to work last Monday I thought about when I would have to start planning for failure. My H1-B work permit expires a year from now, and without a Green Card, I’d have to leave the US once again. My home country seems to be in its worst state since the Famine, if the local radio podcasts are to be believed, and the rest of Europe is hardly better. It seemed a most miserable prospect, and yet, even in the privacy of my motorcycle helmet, I couldn’t make the case that I have more right to my job than the thousands who are being laid off every day. I began to wonder what new adventures would be pushed on me. I was getting ready to improvise again.

And then another of Ken’s measured notes arrived in my email inbox, pleased to inform Susan that Dervala’s I-140 immigrant petition had been accepted, and that once a Green Card number became available my full application should be approved.

It’s a thrill. I’m not a lawyer, or even a dealmaker, so I blurted out to everyone in Twitter or text message radius that I’d been approved for a Green Card. That’s not quite true yet, but it’s truthy enough for me to take big breaths of relief, to cry at little and then laugh, to start wondering about all kinds of things that have always been above my station. And to feel a small girl’s pride in doing it all by myself, without needing a man’s accomplishments to stand behind.

Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. I love you.

On Saturday night, I made a pact with my friend Alana that we would post on our blogs at least once a week. I don’t remember whether I suggested this plan or just agreed to it, but my motives were self-serving. I love Alana’s stories, and I want her to write more for me. As for my own writing—well, it’s become clear that I need a push to do anything in life beyond lying around, eating bon-bons and buying shoes on eBay.

It didn’t take us long to start debating how little we could get away with. Four lines would count, but a tweet would not. A photo would be acceptable if it had a meaty caption. We moved the deadline from “by Monday” to “Tuesday…any time.” We asked Dr. Boroditsky to harass us if we failed to produce, and she agreed.

We didn’t name an end date to the experiment, and frankly, it’s shaping up to be a bit like my mother’s so-called Slimming Club. For years her friends have met every few weeks to report on their dieting progress, over a glass of wine or three. If they haven’t reached their target, they pay a fine. And when the group raises enough money—once or twice a year—they all go away to a hotel for a weekend and promote themselves to gin-and-tonics. My dad and I were once baffled by this incentive scheme, but it fits right in to this era of twisted bonuses.

Short Pig (photo by Dan Jurafsky)

Long Pig

“In a pig dilemma. On the one hand, intelligent, sentient creatures. On the other hand, they’re made of bacon.”—Twitter from @rionam.

Lera and Scott roasted a pig for New Year’s Eve. He joined us at the table with a piggy smirk, plump and burnished like a Marbella ex-pat. Roasted birds never look like living chickens or turkeys—they come out of the oven not just faceless and smooth but also upside down, so that those aren’t really legs we’re dislocating. But our guest of honor sat up stoic as a sphinx while Lera, in a spectacular yellow silk dress, carved away his backside. On our plates: pale-pink, juicy pork. On his bed of banana leaves: a young pig with bare hip bones and a chayote in his mouth.

Our piggy reminded me of the spit-roasted guinea pigs with which Ecuadoreans celebrate Easter. In the wealthy parts of Quito the supermarkets sell them wrapped in plastic on polystyrene trays. They crouch on tiny rodent feet, bald and buck-toothed and looking very cold. Cuy, they’re called, a horribly onomatopaeic name for a guinea pig. Kwee! Kwee! I ate one finicky bite at a market stall once, and it tasted like Kentucky Fried Rat.

There was champagne, berries and cherries, and a suckling pig: the right winter feast for our dying empire. (Even Whole Foods doesn’t stock lark’s tongues these days.) I was mournful as the corks popped and popped again. A few months ago I gave up drinking, and what I miss most is champagne. Clarity is a gift, but not at parties, where you want your mind to be as soft as candlelight instead of bitching at you about having to talk to strangers. At midnight I borrowed a few sips of champagne from a handsome artist, but it was warm and flat: a glass half empty, and not enough to get me to fake an interest in following him to see The Titz play at 2AM.

It’s weird to come home from a New Year’s Eve party so undrunk that you floss and meditate—consciousness altered in reverse. In San Francisco, unlike Ireland, no one seems thrown by mineral water in their presence, and my friends aren’t big drinkers anyhow. Nothing outward changes. Even still, learning how to get around without a wine glass makes for a social experience that’s sharper, foreign, and exposed. It takes me back to our school parties at 12 or 13, when we had to figure out how to make things happen before cans of Ritz pushed one moment into the next.

I like Lera’s parties because she collects autotelic people. Scientists, artists, filmmakers, activists, and the odd entrepreneur roam her kitchen. They steer their own lives and look inside to measure how they’re doing, tracking discoveries, not bonuses.  In their company I’m sheepish about my corporate job—about taking, rather than making, assignments, and about the dullness of business thinking and its stumpy language. Their glamour reminds me to be queasy about my part in trying keep this maimed and frightened beast of consumer culture limping along, when it should go to the glue factory like Boxer before it.

So this year I looked to the artists with more interest than usual, trying to figure out what they think about what’s going on in the world. Art is a luxury, so economically they’re even more screwed than the rest of us. But they’re used to living unpadded lives, and compared to us worker bees, the ones I know seem to be relaxed and inspired by the shifts.

Artists scare me, to tell the truth. I’ve worked with designers my whole career and I have a good and pragmatic eye for what they do. Not so with visual arts. Without words or faces, I’m lost, and it’s hard to find the entrances where the questions go in. I’m the one who’s googling the artist’s statement or squinting at the gallery captions. When I come up against an artwork that hasn’t been wrapped in a story, it’s like having to taste something new with my eyes closed. There’s a scramble to classify: What is it? What is it? And it’s mixed with a bit of panic that this thing could bite back.

Here in San Francisco, machine art is big. It’s the spawn of punk rock and the garage engineering of Silicon Valley—both of which have been around for a while, so that you find middle-aged men dismissing “wannabes,” “Boring Man,” and “straights” (the heirs of squares). With undisguised pity, they ask strangers why we have day jobs. It’s kind of funny.  (Not that they’re all above the baubles of our time: “I’m anti-materialism,” said the artist who sat pig-left of me at dinner, “but my phone broke, so I got an iPhone.” He waved it around, excited about the Ocarina program that turns it into an eerie but lovely instrument. It wouldn’t be a San Francisco party without the iPhone app moment.)

Rather than asking about their work, I come at it through the side-door of biography, quizzing them on how they live and what they care about. We don’t even have the dole here in the U.S., so people who survive as full-time artists need hustle and discipline as much or more than they need talent. In a paycheck world, they have to create their own structure.

If you have a pencil and a junk mail envelope, you can write a poem on a bus. All this applicationless engineering, however—street sculptures, big fire, flying machines and head-slapping robots—that takes space. And materials, tools, and fuel. And permit-wrangling. And many hands.

So the tribe of artists becomes the patron. They share couches, burritos, and beer in Vienna, the Mission, and Brooklyn. They trade studio space, scavenged materials, and crew labor. In place of the family that couldn’t figure you out, they offer warmth and love. They throw fund-raising parties to pay the medical bills when you blow your jaw off building a confetti cannon. They see you through addictions, weddings, and creative droughts. You turn to your tribe for inspiration, encouragement, collaboration, and brutal assessments of your work. You promote their shows, and they show up at yours.

The scarcity of money binds artists together like rice farmers. As one writes: “We teeter on a financial apocalypse, what do I care? I have always lived on that edge, I am fine with eating rice ‘n’ beans, and thrilled to eat a piece of salmon.”

I asked that guy whom he was trying to reach with his work. “Everyone,” he said. (Privately, I translated this as “Everyone who already has tattoos.”) “It’s about getting people to wake up, using fear and anxiety to push them to change their lives.” And he told the story of asking the composer John Cage how he knew that whatever he was doing was working. “If just one person thinks about it afterwards, I’ve succeeded,” Cage said.

Their safety and comfort comes from the tribe, and it gives them the freedom to provoke the rest of us to look at how much we give up for our security superstitions and physical comfort. I’ll go on the Coney Island Cyclone, in the belief that someone must have carried out a safety inspection, but I’m terrified at the idea of cuddling a fire-spewing robot that could go rogue. I suppose that’s the point—to make me see how much I want everything in my life to be “up to code.”

Not much has truly changed this year. So far, most of us still live in the same homes and work at the same jobs, surrounded by the same people. But the mental contraptions we’ve devised to pad ourselves from pain and deliver pleasure have broken down.

My pal Tucker Nichols once put on an art show called “Together We Can Prevent Earthquakes.” I never got to see it, but that sly title sums up our illusions. We haven’t let go of our babyhood fantasy that we are omnipotent and all our needs will be met. We’ve believed—lord help us—that we are in control, or at least that some three-letter force who cares about us is in control, whether it’s God, the law, the FDA, the SEC, or the DHS.

We’ve been following hollow safety rituals: shuffling barefoot at the airport, swallowing for years the anti-anxiety drugs that were tested for six weeks, driving SUVs because it feels safer to sit up high. We trusted the bond-rating agencies who were paid by the issuers. We turned our lives over to corporations, and in return we expected a comfortable ambient temperature wherever we go, and enough material comforts to keep death away.

And right now, that all seems to be working about as well as any other propitiation rites. We now know that “they” weren’t taking care of us, and that our sense of safety, comfort, and control was just a collective feeling with no basis in fact. That collective feeling has shifted to fear and anxiety—the way we live just isn’t working.

Like it or not, we’re getting a do-over. We have to figure out once again what we value, how we are going to survive, and how we want act as a community. And though I’m concerned for those who have already been badly affected, and anxious about my own future, I also feel a great sense of possibility. We’re going to come out better for this suffering, and may even look back at the last decade of numb materialism as our most miserable days. And even though I don’t like being mocked as “straight” and “corporate,” I think we straight, corporate types can learn plenty from the tribes our artists have made for themselves. They know a thing or two about living through fear and insecurity.

Douglas Rushkoff is working on a new book. Get Back in the Box is one of the few books on innovation that made sense to me, so I’m looking forward to this one. Rushkoff, like the fantastic Ronald Wright, knows his history, so he can explain not just where we are but how we got here.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.

Born in the Renaissance, necessitated by the Industrial Age, powered by workers, paid for by consumers and eventually sold back to us as shareholders, today’s faceless fascism – what Mussolini called “corporatism” – is a closed system that conquers not through exclusion but total inclusion. Everything, even dissidence, is assimilated. And in the process, life itself is reduced in its complexity, unpredictability, and intrinsic value.

Instead of depending on a parental dictator or nationalist ideology, the system of control to which we have succumbed depends on a society cultivated to see the corporation as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.

By request, and late as usual, here’s the stuff I liked the best in 2008:

My favorites of the 60-odd books I read, in no particular order:

What is America?, Ronald Wright.
This is my one must-read, along with his Brief History of Progress.

How to Be an Adult, David Richo.
Some of us are late bloomers.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
See above.

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry.
Set in my dad’s home county of Roscommon, where nothing is ever set.

A Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield.
Buddhism properly synthesized with psychology.

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan.
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat.
I went back to novels in 2008, after stepping out on fiction for several years.

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill.
Took me right back to New York, 2001/2002, when we were waiting for more stuff to happen.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz.
Oh, Oscar…

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
He’s high on my list of White Man Pundits.

Lush Life, Richard Price.
All the L.E.S. is here.

Break, Burn, Blow, Camille Paglia.
Essays on 40+ amazing poems—even George Herbert is in here.

The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp.
Dammit, hard work is the only way.

I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, Hafiz.
Hafiz makes me laugh.

The Orgy, Muriel Rukeyser.
Great American poet goes to Ireland’s Puck Fair in 1957.

Luck & the Irish, Roy Foster.
See today’s New York Times piece on turning luck.

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama.
I read this long before I believed he’d make it.

And my soundtrack for the year:

I Am Shelby Lynne, Shelby Lynne

Just a Little Lovin’, Shelby Lynne

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

Shaft, Isaac Hayes

Little Honey, Lucinda Williams

Washington Square Serenade, Steve Earle

Pocket Symphony, Air

Rockferry, Duffy

His Best 1947 to 1956, Muddy Waters

Volume One, She & Him

The Man Comes Around, Johnny Cash

Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague

The Essential Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton

Dear Science, TV on the Radio

A bunch of Glen Campbell and the Rolling Stones.

“On election day itself, as the state of California determines whether to make one last-ditch effort to hold back the inevitable evolution of love in the 21st century, Julie and Amy decide to get hitched (again). It is an act of love but also of protest, an affirmation of commitment but also a land-grab for legal rights.”—From a wedding invitation

“Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality… I think it’s a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case.“—Jon Stewart to Governor Mike Huckabee, The Daily Show

I

Cleo wore a princess dress and carried a basket of flowers. She handed each of us a flower and primly arranged the ones left over. Then she set them aside and climbed into the alcove where we’d left our coats—as high as her head—and with a “Watch me!” she jumped off. It was a good day for solemnity and leaps.

We stood at the top of the marble staircase in San Francisco’s City Hall, holding our flowers while we watched Julie and Amy, Cleo’s parents, take turns explaining how and why they loved each other. All week, they had fretted over whether to get married to mark this extraordinary time, and in the end they said yes—again—and each went off to write her vows. It had been fourteen and a half years since they’d met in New York City. They had enough time behind them to see their rhythms and loops, and enough time ahead to set lifelong intentions. They had tested out better and worse, and believed that they could rise to whatever life presented.

So they stood up in front of some friends who loved them, their six-year-old daughter, and a motherly Justice of the Peace, and vowed to stay together for the rest of their lives. This part bored Cleo a little, I think. There wasn’t enough about her. And then, a few minutes before 5.30 PM on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, the Justice of the Peace smiled at Julie and Amy and said:

“By the power vested in me by the State of California,

I now pronounce you

spouses

for life.”

We all clapped, and a few of us cried, and Doug took photos with a sheet of white paper stuck behind his flash, either to soften or sharpen the light, I don’t know which. An Associated Press photographer took some shots too. While we hugged and congratulated, Cleo showed her friend Annabel how you could skid on the marble steps, and then we all walked down together. There is no better staircase in San Francisco on which to flounce the skirts of a party dress—even in motorcycle gear I feel like Scarlett O’Hara in City Hall.

There were other knots of people just like us—pairs of tuxes, pairs of dresses, some with supermarket bouquets, some with kids. When we walked outside there was a crowd of activists on the steps below, waving placards at the traffic. Some wore costumes, others wore slogan t-shirts. Many of the drivers honked their support and waved, and the activists blew their whistles and chanted back. We stood for a moment and watched. The news crews were parked across the street and a helicopter dangled above. The atmosphere was both festive and charged.

“These two just got married,” I said and pointed at Julie and Amy, and everybody on the steps turned to look up and celebrate them, punching balloons into the air, cheering and applauding. Cleo looked bemused at first, but then she took it as a natural wedding thing that strangers would whoop at her mothers and admire her dress. This is going to be a big memory for her.

Julie’s cousin had to go back to her kids—she was temporarily a single parent since her husband had quit his job to spend months volunteering for Obama in a faraway state. The rest of us made our way to a nearby restaurant to celebrate with wine and plates passed family-style. The customers at the restaurant bar were already tipsy with victory, their elbows nearer and nearer the TV, heads thrown back. “He’s got Pennsylvannia,” they shouted, and our chairs scraped back to see for ourselves. My Blackberry chirped: someone still at the office reported that Obama had won Ohio. In a neatly recycled celebration, Julie paid the restaurant bill with cash raised from selling Cleo’s outgrown crib.

II

Barack Obama was elected that night, and I went to the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, which was hosting the No on Prop 8 campaign party. It was jammed, and I squeezed into the lobby and watched his acceptance speech on the smallish screens behind the reception desk, standing on tiptoe and peering around a pillar. I could hear him but barely see him. He was alone on a giant stage, talking about the hundred-year-old lady.

The St. Francis was a fire hazard. I’m slight enough to weave through crowds so I made my way up to the second floor to find my friends, only to discover at the top of the stairs that no one was moving. Our bodies were pressed together and some people held champagne glasses overhead. We had become a single, breathing mass trying to pour a tentacle down the stairs. On the third floor, people were peering over the banisters to see if they would ever get down. Finally a security guard arrived and shouted instructions into a bullhorn: “No more people going up. No elevators. Make your way DOWN and to the street, and keep moving.”

The people in this crowd had led the fight to keep gay marriage legal in California, and a majority of their fellow citizens had just voted to take this right away from them. I thought of the Christian superstores of Orange County, and how sure their customers would have felt about their votes. In his acceptance speech, President-elect Barack Obama had just acknowledged gay Americans, and yet Julie and Amy’s freshly-signed marriage dangled between today’s law and tomorrow’s.

We had won and we had lost. This crowd—familiar with the rhythms of progress and setbacks—opted for cheerfulness. People practiced saying “President Obama” out loud.

Almost everyone who made it to the exit paused at the door to take in the scene in Union Square below. A cable car was stuck just in front of the hotel, and a gorgeous African-American girl took over the bells and played the staccato rhythms of “Yes, We Can” over and over so that the crowds could roar along.

The tourists had come out to watch the Americans. The only other passengers who stayed on the marooned cable car were a Japanese couple, the man snapping photographs and the woman covering her giggles as the crowd waved up at her. At the edge of the crowd, holding up cameras and then breaking off for multi-lingual discussions, were Italian students, middle-aged Germans, and some excited French. A dull-eyed Irish girl scratched the backfat rippling out of her cami while her sister and their boyfriends held her shopping bags and stared off, waiting for something to happen beyond the world turning upside down. All over San Francisco, strangers were dancing together.

III

The week before Christmas I went to the last Saturday night showing of Milk at the Castro Theater. As is fitting for the neighborhood, it’s a fabulous 1920s movie palace decked out with frescoes and gilt. Before each film, a platform rises slowly to stage level, bearing a bald man in a red jacket seated at an organ. With his back to the audience, he plays several songs to loud applause. Any movie at the Castro is an event, and none more than this one: the last time I was here, part of the street was roped off for the filming of Milk.

The film opened with real footage of men being pulled out of New York bars and loaded into police wagons. They were homosexuals, and therefore criminals and psychiatric cases, and they covered their own faces as if they agreed with those assessments. That was the detail that shoved me into tears that lasted throughout the film: these men—fruits, faggots, queers—were already imprisoned by shame.

I myself am a flaunting, flaming, flamboyant straight, known to flirt publicly, hold hands on the street, and wrap myself around a man on the dance-floor. I wear lipstick and high heels, and motorcycle jackets—sometimes all at once. I’ve brought men home for Christmas and expected my family to accept them. I’ve exercised my right to have a heterosexual union officially recognized, even though I didn’t uphold the institution of marriage very well. I pursue my straight agenda in spite of underwhelming results.

And yet for all my heterosexual brazenness, I also know about shame and fear. When I was growing up, Ireland had closets for all kinds of conditions that sat outside a narrow range of normal. We had a never-ask, never-tell culture of festering secrets, and every close Irish friend of mine can spill those tales today: madness hidden in plain sight; babies given away and never spoken of; violent wives; gay uncles in London; neighbor men with wandering hands. Our ferry ports and airports were pressure valves.

In AA, they say you are only as sick as your secrets, and your secrets will make you drink. I think this goes for societies as well as individuals, and it takes a long time to get over such training. In my own life I’ve kept silent about relationships, weaknesses, and beliefs that might threaten or draw censure, and in the face of bigotry, I’ve dissented mostly by walking on to more tolerant places. Anonymity matters to me.

IV

That’s why Harvey Milk’s bravery moves me to tears. For forty years he lived a cramped, coded, half-hidden life, as expected, and in return for that sacrifice he got to keep his job and a relationship with his family. And then, at forty, he decided that the price for these small rewards was too high, and he stepped into the San Francisco daylight. Somehow, he had saved up enough faith in himself to believe that if only people knew him and others like him for who they truly were, they would learn to find them ordinary rather than disgusting. He practiced radical acceptance, of himself and of others.

Milk asked for safety and respect—and with a smile he offered his own respect even to those who might fear or abuse him. He refused to underestimate people, and tried to inoculate them against homophobia by letting them react to a dose of his presence: a real, live gay man. He stood on a box and asked for an end to the secrets that protect only darkness.

Silence is complicity, and I am sad for people who still live in the many places where “gay” is a noun, not an adjective. For all the people, not just for “the gays” who are cast out. When some people have to live in the closet, we are all stuck in the dark.

In my home town, the compassionate line was once: “I just feel sorry for gays. It’s very hard for them, very lonely.” The circular logic has pissed me off since I was a teenager. Twenty years later, I live in San Francisco, where homosexuality is banal. Most of my gay colleagues are married with children, and busy with car-pooling and grade-school admissions. They’ve racked up decades together, their dogs growing from puppies to gray-muzzled shufflers. There is no pity required for these unlonely lives, and no need to fear such ordinary people. All that’s required is equality.

V

I remember chatting to my neighbor, Bryan, around the time San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom brought in gay marriage a few years back. Bryan is four years older than Barack Obama, and has seen plenty. He grew up in Watts, and remembers the confusion of the riots in 1965. He was one of five black students in his class at the University of Iowa. He lived through the exuberant seventies in gay San Francisco, and then through AIDS in the eighties and nineties. His long-term partner can get no citizenship status here, though they could get married and get citizenship in Scott’s country.

As we sorted our laundry in the garage that day, I put out some opinion I’d read about the dangers of rushing through gay marriage legislation. There was an election coming up, or just past, and people were saying that the sight of lesbian weddings had galvanized the opposition. Strategically, for everyone’s sake, might it have been better to wait until after the election?

Bryan interrupted me. “People will always tell you to wait, there’s always some reason to wait.” he said. “Well, I’m sick of waiting. It’s time.”

Dear Bryan, dear Harvey, dear Barack, dear Devin, dear Julie, Amy, and Cleo: thank you for your gracious impatience and your weaponless courage. Please keep pushing us to come out of the dark.

Further reading: Frank Rich in the NYTimes: “You’re likeable enough, gay people.“

“There’s a word for you ladies…but it isn’t used in polite society outside a kennel.”
—Joan Crawford, The Women

Winter finally showed up in northern California this week. When the rain started I was on my motorbike 40 miles from San Francisco with a busted visor and no waterproof gear. Drops stung my face hard enough to draw blood from my lips, and by the time I got home I had to be thawed out in the bath like a Christmas morning turkey after a drunken Christmas Eve.

After that I was only fit for a Sunday Matinee: make milky coffee, snap a bar of Valrhona chocolate, draw the blinds, wrap up in my pet blanket, and watch a 1930s movie. (I know it isn’t nice to brag, but the modern spinster life is delightful.) I watched The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 version with Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and 131 other actresses. MGM claimed that even the lapdogs who appeared were bitches.

As I learned all over again during a week of silent meditation, my attention is a misguided combination of fickle and compulsive, always trying land on written words. My laptop has become a test of commitment. If I love a movie, I can watch it through. If it flags at all, I start surfing Wikipedia and IMDB to read the background detail. (Once I get as far as Twitter and Slate, it’s over.)

I have more stomach for car chases than catfights, which bring back the trauma of Fifth Class lunchtime, and I made it only twenty minutes into the spats and bitchery before wanting to know more about Norma Shearer. How did such a squat, stiff, cross-eyed little thing ever get to star over Ros Russell and Joan Crawford?

She was disciplined, that’s how. When her father lost all his money, her mother moved her and her sister from their big house in Montreal to a verminous room in New York City so that the girls could become stars. Norma worked—exercising her eyes to fix that squint, studying dance and voice, hauling around to every audition in spite of the insults to her figure. She was turned down by the Ziegfield Follies for having short legs.

When she got to Hollywood, she kept working harder than the other actresses—retaking screen tests, practicing angles that disguised her defects, pushing for better material and better roles. She became MGM’s biggest silent star in the twenties, long before she persuaded the studio head and boy legend Irving Thalberg to marry her and crown her queen of the lot. And when the talkies came along, her fluid Canadian accent worked, unlike poor Clara Bow’s Brooklynese.

I felt better about The Women once I could root for Norma Shearer, who played racy, modern divorcees as well as this wronged, noble, and boring wife. Women’s roles were wobbling all over the place in the 20s and 30s, and she tried out several on behalf of the millions of young women who depended on Hollywood instruction to tell them how to live and what to wear.

The movie was released on the day that Hitler invaded Poland. I can imagine Brooklyn seamstresses and shop girls luxuriating in their Sunday off, forgetting daylight as they sink further into velvet seats and stare up at that endless beauty salon scene that opens the movie. They watch the rich ladies get manicured, massaged, and covered in creamy facepacks and cucumber eye pads. They study the suffering involved in electrode facials and calisthenics and store up information on how to act when you have money—how you stride in and demand a top-to-toe “makeover,” claiming to be bored to tears with your “look.”

A decade into the Dirty Thirties, nobody in my Brooklyn theater can go to the Elizabeth Arden salon on Fifth Avenue, unless they are the manicurists who paint rich ladies’ nails Jungle Red. But for a quarter, they can go to a matinee and gasp as the movie switches from black and white to Technicolor for a ten-minute fashion show that has nothing to do with the plot. Look at these modern women, switching from sportswear to cocktail dresses to ball gowns! Short, well-padded models twirl in Adrian’s avant-garde outfits as they pretend to see Paris, play tennis, and go on a cruise.

The fantasy is exotic, and also minutely specific. It shows exactly how these rich ladies put their lives and looks together, how they manage their servants and their men. It reminds me of British children’s books from the same era, which spent pages on loving descriptions of Nestle condensed milk, sausages, pink ham, and slabs of chocolate, so that half-starved readers could transport themselves to picnics and “midnight feasts” where no one had heard of ration cards.

The rules that underpin the glamour in this movie are simple and stark:

1. Get used to what you’ve got. You may rise from the perfume counter to vamp in a bubble bath, as Joan Crawford does. But you’ll never belong, and when the rich are done with you, you’ll be kicked right back to the department store.
2. Take comfort in the fact that rich ladies are miserable. They don’t have enough to do, so for sport they take each other down. And one by one, they get their comeuppance—
3. Because all husbands step out on their wives. A smart woman knows this, stays sweet and loyal, and waits out his weakness until he’s glad to get her back. And when a man chooses you over another, that’s victory. That’s triumph.

I feel your kinship, Brooklyn girls and women: sales clerks, mothers, typists, servants, elevator operators, seamstresses, factory girls. I could so easily have been one of you, attending George Cukor’s Sunday university to learn what I could and couldn’t do.