Every year or two, my alma mater unknowingly does this to me: sends me into irrational panic attacks and mini-nervous breakdowns regarding the passage of time; specifically, the passage of my time. Now of course I am not referring to the liberal peppering of mail addressed to me from Sarah Lawrence’s Alumnae/i Office delivering messages of, “Hey, Atherton Bartelby Class of 1996! Give us money / include us in your estate planning / put us in your will / etc.!” I can deal with those missives. I am referring instead to the far subtler “you’re getting older!” mailings from the same office.
For example: the alumnae/i directory published several years ago, which, although I had updated my personal information well in advance of the deadline to do so, still listed me as being partnered to Gavin, my college boyfriend…who by that point in my life was three boyfriends in the past. Two years ago, it was a notification that last year was my ten year reunion, and did I want to come and have fun and reminisce?! Um. No. Last week, on Friday, the panic-attack-inducing mailer took on a new form: in the stack of mail that was mine that my fabulous roommate had tossed on our dining room table, sandwiched between an ARTafterDARK promo mailer and my permanent Gordon Biersch Passport Rewards card, was a relatively unassuming mailer that I receive from my alma mater every quarter, labeled, “Class Notes.”
The dreaded “Class Notes” mailer is a peculiar, three-pronged torture device: 1) it allows you to keep all of the losers whom you used to avoid like the plague or dropsy or whatnot on campus apprised of the minutiae of your adult life post-undergrad; 2) it forces you to concisely yet eloquently and wittily inform fellow alums that you a) have not, in fact, died or been murdered since you last submitted Class Notes over a year ago and b) are far less successful in life than they are or than you planned to be at your current age; and 3) it causes you to realize (if you are me) that, come your birthday on Tuesday, July 10, 2007, you will be precisely one year away from your “Scary Age” of 35.
As the deadline for submission was June 15, and as I had not submitted an update in, oh, about twelve years, I sat down at my dining room table last evening with my laptop and a very full glass of Pinot Noir to compose it.
And promptly acquired a very serious case of writer’s block.
At first I tried being facetious and humorous…
Following the emotional train wreck of global proportions that was his 2006, Atherton Bartelby decided to bid adieu to the Islands of Aloha and hitched a flight on JAL to Tokyo with wealthy Japanese shipping magnate Hiroshi Matsumoto. He was last seen strutting the streets of Harajuku with no less than six Comme des Garçons shopping bags slung from various appendages.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said aloud to myself, Ctrl+Aing and hitting “Delete” before taking another gargantuan pull from my wine glass.
Next I attempted outright (yet serious) fiction…
After two whirlwind years of acting as Lead Technical Producer on BBC’s award-winning series “Planet Earth,” Atherton Bartelby has taken an indefinite extended sabbatical from television production and retreated to Mallorca in order to treat the wounds he received from performing once-in-a-lifetime videography of the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
“Ugh. WTF?!” I exclaimed in frustration, again Ctrl+Aing and deleting. “No fellow alum is going to even believe that I know how to use a carabiner now, much less a fictitious story of me being an on-location BBC producer.”
I rose from the table, lit a cigarette, began pacing, and speed-dialed my friend Kristina. “I am dying!” I whined melodramatically when she answered, all cocktails and house music heavy in the background noise.
“Atherton,” Kristina scolded, after I had explained my trauma to her, “you are ‘dying’ over the composition of a fucking ‘Class Notes’ submission?! What the fuck?! You are a fabulous writer. You write a blog! You vomit up every personal trauma and flaw you have online and you can’t write a God-damned ‘Class Notes’ submission?!”
“I know!” I whined again, inhaling deeply from my Marlboro Light.
She paused knowingly. “Did you stop seeing your therapist again?”
“He was getting boring!” I exclaimed defensively.
Kristina sighed. “Just write it!” she hissed, and hit “End.”
I sighed, laughed to myself, extinguished my cigarette, and returned to my laptop and refilled glass of Pinot. I took a deep breath, and began…
Atherton Bartelby continues to work as a Senior Graphic Designer for the Honolulu office of a global financial services firm by day, and as a freelance writer for several online and local print publications by evening. He currently serves on boards and committees of several local arts organizations. Although often quite insanely busy these days, Atherton always seems to find time for amateur digital photography throughout the days, working on his tan on the beach on the weekends, and attending and throwing parties on the cocktail circuit in the evenings. Life is good, for Atherton, right now, in Paradise.
I sat back, took a deep breath, and re-read what I had written. “Life is good, for Atherton, right now, in Paradise,” I repeated aloud to myself, watching the sun set over the buildings of Downtown outside my lanai. And I felt a smile slowly stretch my lips as I realized, for the first time in quite awhile, that this was actually true.
I hit Ctrl+S, closed my laptop, and rose from the table to again refill my Pinot glass.
(And resisted the intense urge to include, again facetiously, something about “rocking out with his cock out”…a bit too inappropriate, even for a Sarah Lawrence College Class Notes submission.)
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