Slow Like Me
(Page 2 of 3)
March/April 1997
By Jon Spayde, Utne Reader
I panicked. Time was passing! I was famished!
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Laurie's hopeful smile faded little by little as I began chattering away and increasing my spoon speed by what I thought were subtle increments. Soon I found myself wolfing a bagel in three bites. I washed it down with a violent slosh of mango juice.
"How are you feeling about your job?" Laurie asked.
The job was fine, but I wasn't making much progress with my slowness assignment. At work a few days later, I played back the tape of what I thought had been a dignified telephone interview and listened to my voice. I sounded like a chipmunk on crystal meth.
Every time I tried to ease out of my usual frantic, trying-to-look-busy hallway sprint, the little man behind my sternum gave me the finger.
As for the rest of the modern world, that wasn't a problem. In fact, the modern world was the only thing that slowed me down at all. Traffic gridlock allowed me to follow Thich Nhat Hanh's advice: breathe and accept, breathe and accept--when I could remember to. Writing e-mail messages and faxes instead of talking on the phone gave me time to deliberate about what I wanted to say. Voice mail made every phone call a choice, not a distraction.
My problem was the inner twinge that told me that there was not enough time in the whole universe to do what I needed to do. Sometimes the twinge prodded me to rush around like a maniac. Other times it whispered a bleary "what's the use?" in my ear, and I did nothing for what seemed like forever.
I put off the assignment. I figured I could always cram in a little slowness at the last minute, just before the piece was due.
Meanwhile, at home, the laundry was piling up.
Laurie and I had been living in our house for a year and a half, and home ownership was weighing heavily on me. I didn't want to think of myself as anything but an apartment guy, a sort of eternal ex-New Yorker. "Get the super to fix it!"was my battle cry.
I was vaguely blaming Laurie for "trapping" me in a purgatory of household responsibility. Now it's not as if she's some kind of demanding domestic goddess--she's an artist. She dresses in black with funky, colorful accents. (She taught me to dress in black, for crying out loud, and rescued me from my powder-blue Jantzen pullovers.) But she was sending signals that she would like me to do my half of the chores.
"All this home owner stuff is driving me crazy," I said one night. "Laundry, laundry, laundry!"
"We'd have to do laundry even if we lived in an apartment," Laurie said. She's always saying things like that--things that make sense. It drives me crazy.