Life update, March

a quarterly update that might not go out quarterly

1: Events with Misha

This week, I’m doing something that’s exciting to me. I’m helping out with a couple of events run by my friend Misha Glouberman, who I just wrote a post with. This event is on Saturday, and it’s a social stunt where Misha will help us get to know each other to the depths of our souls in 12 minutes, and it’s almost sold out. This one, Trampoline Hall, on Tuesday, is an SF edition of Toronto’s best entertainment night, featuring lectures by local luminaries speaking outside of the area of their professional expertise. It’s sold out right now, but there may be more tickets released soon, so click here to put your name on a waiting list. I’d be happy to see any of you. 

I’ve known Misha for about 15 years, and he was a big inspiration to me in my late adolescence. At the time we met, I was surrounded by a snobby culture, with peers who were quite obviously doing an imitation of an imitation of an imitation of European intellectualism. All of our choices were mediated through the demands of a particular aesthetic, a particular kind of Toronto uncool/cool that is so silly it’s hard to even talk about. Misha was different. He had a manner that was completely his own, where he was a bit like a chatty lawyer, and a bit like a surrealist comic. He was the opposite of snobby: He openly talked about reading cheesy self-help books among peers who would never do that, and not for the sake of being self-consciously hip. When I asked him for his advice about studying philosophy—he studied it at Harvard—he told me that I shouldn’t study philosophy. And, of personal significance, he ran a negotiations course that represented my first real foray into listening to other people, along with other public events that altered my assumptions about what social interaction could feel like.

As I left Toronto, I kept being inspired by how Misha ended up successfully bending his life into a career that smoothly transmutes his natural gifts and interests into money. He’s one of the most gifted communicators I’ve ever met, and now he just goes around helping people communicate more effectively for a living. This served as a direct model for me—it gave me faith that if I rambled around following my interests, one day I’d be able to monetize some combination of them. Maybe this kind of life path is more mainstream now that the Creator Economy has become a thing, but when I grew up, I wasn’t surrounded by entrepreneurial people, and certainly nobody who was entrepreneurial in such a personal mode, so this was usefully mind-breaking for me. 

So it’s really gratifying that now, I can do some work with him, and introduce him to my Bay Area friends. Misha’s passion for human connection isn’t totally novel in the Bay, but his mode is a nice contrast to the hippie-inflected one that tends to prevail around here. So please come out and say hi if any of that sounds good to you.

2: Lost in perfume

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like to lately, because the perfume company is on its way. We’re in a funny stage where it is half-real. Material elements are in place: there’s a bank account, thousands of empty bottles in a New Jersey warehouse, two fragrances are currently being tested to ensure that they don’t give volunteers a rash. But much of it is still jumbled, a daydream scattered across Google Docs and emails and Asana. 

By every indication, we will be a successful enterprise. Due to a tremendous stroke of luck that I can’t really talk about right now, we’re working with some real pro perfumers, who have brought our ideas to life in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. The perfumes we’re releasing are products I’d be proud to wear, and in fact want to wear daily. This is despite the fact that I don’t know how to do any of this. Basically every week I’m at the limit of my knowledge. How do I evaluate a potential warehouse? What should be the size of a master carton? How do I, like, manage people? When so many perfume labels have existed, how do you arrive at a design that looks original without looking ludicrous?

For my personality type, the novelty makes this absolutely exquisite, and the constant discomfort makes it challenging. Every day there is a new little thrill, and a new little stress. It’s just enough work to distract me from thinking about my happiness too much, which turns out to be good for my happiness. I no longer really notice that I dislike the city where I live, and I spend less time wondering about what future books I’ll write.

I can’t write much more about this right now. Partially it’s because there’s a lot I can’t disclose until later this year, when our first presale will happen. But partially it’s because it’s not really essay-shaped. When I’m in the midst of doing things worth writing about, there is a period of time when I’m powerless to write about them, because they exceed all of the previous narrative shapes in my personal library, all of the rehearsed anecdote-forms that I can press into service when I encounter a routine peccadillo. This is new, so I don’t know what it is.

There are other things I can write about. But I don’t have time to render them very well. This is a challenge for me: How can I bring myself to write them poorly, and put them out half-finished? Those who remain subscribed to me will witness my attempts.

3: Sometimes life turns you into a life coach

Simultaneously, after four years of doing writing coaching, I have been turned into a life coach. There is something irritating about this— I hate the phrase “life coach.” I think it’s synonymous with “grifter,” for good reason, in that a lot of people with this vague title don’t do much. To distance myself from the most prominent stereotypes, I call myself “personal coach” on my website, but everyone knows what this means, so probably not much distancing is done.

Anyway some of my writing clients started saying to me: Hey, I like talking to you about emotions and relationships, could we just do that instead? And I was like, feels weird, but I won’t refuse if you want to pay for my time, let’s try it. Soon, the conversations I had about non-writing subjects overwhelmed the number of writing-related conversations, and people seem to enjoy this part of my work more than the writing coaching part. As in, the reviews are in more exaggeratedly positive language. So, fine, that’s what the day job has morphed into.

It’s a weird job in that doing it well requires perpetual confusion. If I come to a call assured that I know what someone’s problem is, nothing good happens. So, instead, I get on a call with someone, and I try not to understand what they tell me. I ask some annoying questions, try to listen, squint at the patterns they’ve described, and some hunch falls out of my mouth, a tentative description of something they might not have perceived about their current position. Sometimes this seems to result in people seeing their lives in a new way, with surprising effects. Sometimes I’m completely wrong, but being wrong allows us to lurch towards a mutual understanding, and this can work too. 

I don’t feel responsible for this? Like I don’t entirely know how I’m getting the good results that I apparently am getting. It’s not like I’m doing a straightforward technique I learned. It’s more like there is an emergent phenomenon that appears between me, the other person, and my internet presence. I think my writing voice sort of primes people to come in with an unusual level of honesty, and I can sink into that with them. And if I can stay with people in that bubble of honesty for more than a few minutes, something useful is typically unearthed.

Anyway, I really like doing it. I am very happy to do this until I fully transition into the fragrance industry — if that occurs — and my professional life becomes somewhat less emotional.

Photo credit goes to Saul Leiter.