Definition

My mother begged a favor--no need to beg, I keep telling her--but this one turns out to be a favor she'd promised to somebody else and was now asking me to stand in for: i.e., I was doing a favor for someone I don't even know, and, it turns out, somebody I resent for begging favors from my mother, who's a natural giver and easily taken advantage of. I did it, of course, but I was pissed off about it.

But I digress.

You know the kind of person who talks and talks and talks--who defines themselves down to the smallest detail in one sitting--who doesn't really require interlocution: it's all about them? This woman--the favoree--is like that. In half an hour I knew about her marriage, her mother, her hair dresser, her practice of Buddhism, her life in Oakland, CA. It was all bad; she's roundly victimized by all of it, in her telling. I knew, too, that she was a woman with a lot of money who wanted to live like she had none: fighting with her only sister over her dead mother's condo. That kind of shit.

Now it's not that I want to be like this person in any way. But I realized that I'm the polar opposite in almost every way, and the extremity of the comparison made me feel a bit, well, lacking. I can know somebody for five years and they still won't know some basic things about my life. It's not principle: it's just how I am. At different times in life I've wished I could just rip open the door--let them just look and see what's in there. But I don't know how: it's not my nature.

When I was in college a friend took me to a sidewalk tarot card reader. I can't remember the reading, but as I left she slipped The Hermit card into my hand. I looked at the image--this old man in a cape with a lantern at the top of a desolate, snowy mountain--and felt such resonance with it. Comfort, even. A type, not a dysfunction. I still have that card somewhere.
Kids pull you out of yourself; you have to talk to teachers and other mothers, and I see in that mix all the types: people thriving on the audience, people who feel awkward in their own skin. I stay in it through sheer force of will. I'm craving silence the whole time.

* * *
I saw Brat Camp last night, for the first time. At least two of the nine kids are adoptees. Pissed me off--knee-jerk; 2 out of 9--that's not representative of the population of troubled kids. But why this defensiveness? Adopted kids--especially those adopted as older kids--are statistically more prone to be troubled: more prone to commit suicide, more prone to have trouble having normal, happy adult relationships. Or, perhaps: troubled kids are more likely to find meaning in the fact of their adoptions than those who aren't troubled.

Need caffeine.