Two friends whose blogs I read regularly recently wondered what would happen if the oft-asked, “What do you do?” were turned on its head. (See here and here; they were musing on a question initially posted here.)  Instead of the cliche, what if your cocktail party introductions started with “What don’t you do?”

The universal premise, I suppose, is that asking someone “What do you do?” is an inadequate way to start a conversation. Certainly, it can make the person being asked feel inadequate when responding (indeed, I’ve been there  — see below).  Putting myself in the position of the asker, however, I actually don’t find the “What do you do?” question particularly loaded. If I ask people this, I do it with a journalist’s hard-wired and genuine curiosity. Oh, you’re a landscape architect? Commercial or residential? Oh, you’re a physician? What’s your specialty? My sister is in medical school and is loving her E.R. rotation. You’re a personal trainer? Who are your typical clients? How did you get into that field? Are you, like, super athletic? Oh, you stay at home with your kids? You know what? I’m kind of jealous. Let’s talk some more about our children and our choices and what your favorite part of the day is.

I see the question as a way to connect with people. Whatever we “do,” we do for 80% of our waking hours, and I’m truly interested in that which fills most of your days. If what you “do” is not representative of who you are or think you are or would like to be, I’m also interested that. Let’s talk about it. What are your avocations and the books you read and your dreams? Maybe I need to be more imaginative about how to get to that deeper level, but asking, “What do you do?” seems a direct and logical place to begin. I promise I will maintain a journalist’s objectivity and will not rush to judgment without asking a foll0w-up or two.

On the other hand, for most of my life, if you had invited me to your cocktail party and asked me “What do you do?” I likely would have (a) hightailed it to the bar; (b) started to cry; (c) left; or (d) all of the above, in that order.  Today, I’d take a hard-won delight in telling you that: I’m a lawyer and married and a mother (and I admit that at a cocktail party I’d probably answer in that order). And I’m a writer (or, used to be. Or, am still? Depends on the day). I might even get around to telling you that I’m a daughter and friend and niece (and oenophile and yogi and pop culture junkie).  Though my answer to your question may be cocktail-party minimalist, it is — however surface-skimming — true and clear, and this is a relief.  There’s more to me, to be sure (much more than you probably want to know) but having fought to the surface, I’m just happy to rest there for awhile.

Still, I’m surprisingly intrigued — to the extent I’ve spent the past few days actively thinking about it — by the “What don’t you do?” question because I find it more difficult to answer. Not because I’m particularly self-confident, but, rather, as a (hopefully reforming?) perfectionist, it’s disturbingly easy for me to turn this question around into “What should you be doing that you don’t do?”, and, thus, an opportunity for even more self-improvement. (Because if you don’t do something, that’s a character flaw that must be corrected, right?) For example, here is what immediately sprang to mind: I don’t lift weights; I don’t volunteer enough; I don’t thank people or actively connect with them as much as I’d like on the phone or email; I don’t think before I speak sometimes; etc; etc. The “enoughs” and the “as I’d likes” and the “sometimes” slip in much too quickly. It is difficult to own up to not doing something without trying to right it.

So I’ll try again: As an inherent part of my personality — attaching no judgments or negative connotations or resolutions to change — what are things I just don’t do, period?

I don’t:

• Go to the movies
• Deal with the car (oil changes, car wash)
• Open my mail until there is a significantly unavoidable pile on the hall table
• Put the toilet paper on the roll
• Count calories
• Throw out the plastic tab on the milk or orange juice cartons after I open a new one
• Assemble things
• Close the cabinet doors or dresser drawers
• Take constructive criticism very well
• Make photo albums or baby books
• Confront people
• Eat chicken in restaurants, or pork, duck, or game anywhere
• Buy my child toys (not out of principle; I just don’t have time/think to do it)
• Drink hard alcohol
• Do crafts

I actually don’t care about “righting” any of these things, to the extent they are things to be righted (e.g., closing the dresser drawers or opening my mail). As it turns out, this admission is liberating. For a time, my mother read a lot of self-help books. I remember one was called something like, I’m OK, You’re OK. What do you do? What don’t you do? I’m OK, you’re OK.

Have you heard of Radio Ink magazine?

What, you haven’t? I’m shocked. Well, let me introduce you, here (scroll to p. 26).

David Rhode is a Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban on his way to interview a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. As it turned out, he was taken hostage by the very subject he was supposed to be interviewing (though he didn’t find this out until weeks later) and was held for seven months, until he escaped. This week, the Times has run a five-part series by Rhode, recounting the experience. (Read the first installment, here. Then read the rest. It is worth your time.) It was big news when he finally escaped because the Times and other news organizations had never publicized his abduction to begin with. Rhode’s story is incredible, not only because of the obvious — he was kidnapped by the Taliban — but because of its insights, as a result of his capitivity, into what is actually going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan (for example, how utterly brainwashed these uneducated young men are in their anti-American thinking).

Afghanistan, the news media has recently let us know, is the big story right now. Bigger than Iraq. And, yet, it’s difficult to understand why. Who is the army? The militia? The Taliban? Al Qaeda? Rhode’s reporting starts to delineate the “enemies” from the “allies,” and yet also underscores how difficult it is to tell one from the other.  It helps one understand why the decision to send more troops there is so fraught. 

My interest in this area also has recently been piqued by Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War. Filkins, another Times reporter, does not merely recount the stories he already reported from this region. Instead, he opens up the rest of his reporter’s notebook — his observations and personal analysis of his reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq, before 9/11 and before and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. We read about his interactions with warlords, politicians, soldiers, and the often overlooked civilian. I was given this book by a pro bono client, whom I’m representing in his application for political asylum. My client, an Iraqi, is mentioned in the book several times. (After reading Filkins’ accounts of some of the things my client went through — things my soft-spoken client plays down — I have moments where I am so glad I am a lawyer and can help someone like this and yet despair that I can’t do enough.) I haven’t read many other books on the conflicts in this region, so I can’t compare Filkins’ approach or effectiveness, but his book has given me important background into why the U.S. is finding it so difficult to accomplish what it wants and needs to in both of these countries.

Too gorgeous out to write a long post — need to get my work done and get outside! But please click on this link to see the “Opinion” column — a fusion of art and photos and observation — in today’s Times. It is a subtly provoking and lovely musing on women and the law.

As some readers know, I traveled almost around the world from July 1999 through March 2000, armed only with an Arcteryx backpack. I have no pictures of that trip, only three journals, densely packed with my minuscule, typewriter-like handwriting. Someday I’ll get the nerve to look back at them and write something meaningful.

I don’t think of that trip either with frequency or urgency, but every now and again I’m pulled back. For example, just this past weekend, Little Bug and I were taking an early Saturday morning walk. Believe it or not, among the boutiques on Newbury is a Buddhist gift shop called Prem-La, and swinging over the door is a big sign with the “Buddha’s Eyes.”

“Owl? Owl!” pointed Buggy at the sign.

See, they do kind of look like owls’ eyes (isn’t my baby smart?). I don’t think I had ever really noticed that store before other than to perhaps note the Tibetan prayer flags out of the corner of my eye and wonder in passing how on earth a store like that stayed in business. But, now, those Buddha’s eyes immediately (I’m not being dramatic — the connection was intense) transported me to the wondrous and yet frightening three weeks I spent in Nepal, subsisting on garlic soup (for the altitude sickness) and staggering up some 18,000 feet to cross Thorung-La on the Annapurna circuit. Those eyes were all over Nepal — on stupas, homes, t-shirts — and were utterly otherworldly, mesmerizing to me then.

And then, tonight I stumbled upon this Times article on the revamping of European backpackers’ hostels into something a bit more upscale than the stereotype. Oh, but how I lived the stereotype for the first four months of that journey as I traipsed across Europe — in the first hostel I ever stayed in, in Amsterdam, where I was almost too tall for the stairwell and was almost electrocuted by a shower head that inexplicably shared space with the overhead lightbulb. Or at the hostel in Normandy filled with happy Brits and lots of very cheap, very good French wine, which was drunk into the 10 p.m. summer dusk as we relived the day’s tour of the D-Day beaches. Or the hostel in Sevilla, smelling like cat pee, and next door to potentially the best bar in the world, La Carboneria, where a group of Australians tried to recruit me to help them drive their ambulance across Europe (for real). Further east, the only bus or train out of Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic left at 9 a.m., so travelers at the Australian-run hostel ended up staying days, weeks, or months past their intended departure because the amount of (real) absinthe consumed often made it hard to get out of the hard, wooden bunk beds before noon. (On my first night there I heard a distinct “thud” from one of the common bunk rooms. “What was that?” I asked another guest. “Oh, it must have been one of the Australians falling out of the top bunk again.”) One of my favorite hostels was the Mountain Hostel in Grindlewald, in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, in the shadow of the Eiger, where dinner was an almost cliched combination of cheese, chocolate, and French bread and the duvets soft and clean. One of the worst was in Budapest and was called, simply, “Back Pack Hostel.” Here, travelers slept on mattresses on the floor, seven or eight to a room. My room was in a musty basement, and I distinctly remember waking up in the middle of the night to see a random dog skulking around the floor (ugh!). (Check out the website if you have time — the pictures say it all…)

The Times article describes hostels filled with wi-fi, internet access, bars, and private baths. That sounds nice. The article, however, also had pictures of the hostels’ common rooms — much nicer than the ones I remembered — but what really affected me (and inspired this post) were the travelers themselves,  pictured relaxing over foosball, a cafe table, a drink. More likely than not, they had met only hours earlier. More likely than not they would head out together that evening for drinks and would stay up very late, sharing stories and perhaps shots of absinthe (take a teaspoon full of sugar, dip it in the absinthe, and then light it on fire; the sugar will liquify, then stir it back into the absinthe to cut the bitterness). They might even travel together for a few days, as I ended up doing with the aforementioned Australian ambulance drivers (we re-met in Tangier while waiting for a train to Marrakesh; re-meeting the same group of crazy Australians is not as random as it sounds). 

These pictures made me nostalgic — achingly so — for such spontaneous moments of camaraderie. I’ll never travel avec backpack again — I don’t particularly want to — but I also realize with certainty that neither will I stagger off an overnight train and explore the cobblestones of a new city at dawn. I actually would like to do that again, just as I’d like to drink cheap Italian (French, Spanish) wine outside, maybe gazing up at some European church steeples or some Alps, with strangers/new friends until the light fades away.

Last night I attended a seminar on social media networking for journalists led by one of my former professors at Columbia J-School, Sree Sreenivasan, who has become a kind of new media/technology guru. At the time, he taught a course called something like, “New Media for Journalists,” in which we learned how to use the Internet for research and maybe how to create a webpage. In other words, there wasn’t much to the class (frankly, I remember finding it irrelevant — no offense Sree. You were just way ahead of all of us — I mean, I only acquired a legit email address in 1995…).

Of course, little did we know back in the mid-1990s how integrated journalism and the internet would become, and how this integretation would “threaten” traditional media. If I were still a print journalist right now, I would be fighting like hell to get as many Twitter followers as possible (Sree mentioned that some guy had just scored a book deal based on his Tweets — blogs are, like, so over) and would of course have a blog. Yet, were my employer a newspaper, they’d probably be fighting me every step of the way, lest I give my content away for free.
>My brother-in-law, the internet-savvy Pax Arcana, had a witty (as always) — but yet astute and insightful — post yesterday analyzing this impass and the looming failure of traditional media. Yes, it will cease to exist as we know it. And until recently I was one of the traditionalists who would argue, “You can’t let a newspaper fail.” But face it Bostonians: someone is going to buy the Boston Globe, sell off its cumbersome assets (printing presses, trucks), outsource weekend delivery, and move almost everything online.
Anyway, the overall point of the seminar was that the conversation (the big, meta conversation) is now online. It’s on Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. So journalists have to get in there – to get story ideas, to make contacts. This may seem obvious, but if you think about it philosophically (or even from a marketing perspective) it can be kind of overwhelming.* And, of course, media companies have to be where the conversation is, as well, so they too need Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. (That’s why CNN and Astin Kutcher apprarently are locked in an epic battle to be the first to claim one million Twitter followers. For reals.)
And, to that end, Marbury v. Madison Ave. has to be there too — so you can now follow me on Twitter (where you’ll get a Tweet each time I have a new post, or with links to other articles and tweets, and/or whatever else I figure out you can do on there).

*And exciting. Last night’s event reminded me how passionate I am about the media on that very meta/philosophical level — as much about the industry and its scope as about the craft itself.

Once again, Michelle Obama inspires me.  This time, it is her arms.  If a working mother of two young children — who is undoubtedly far, far busier than I — can have sculpted arms, I have no excuse. 

My love for Michelle (can I call her Michelle?) cannot be simply be that of the flighty “girl-crush” used for actresses and the like.  Instead, I would compare it more to that of my grandmother for Jackie Kennedy — we catch a glimpse of our best selves (not to get all Oprah!) in the First Lady.  My grandmother saw a stylish, educated, barrier-breaking Catholic woman; I see an educated, lawyer-mom not afraid to stand up for herself — and Michelle’s barrier-breaking quality is not so much race as it is a woman who is living the life so many of us do — juggling work and kids and doing so openly and, hopefully, honestly.

In any event, just as Michelle inspired me to stop dithering about heading off to work as a corporate lawyer (remember this piece?), she has motivated me to stop dithering about exercise. My running clothes are sitting at my feet, under my desk, and if I don’t walk out this door at 5 p.m. to sneak in a run before heading home, I’ll have all of you to answer to!

I know it has been ages since I’ve posted. I won’t make any excuses but instead will just dive back in, especially since I can’t not link to Timothy Egan’s blog today in the Times about Wallace Stegner. As some of you may know, I wrote my senior thesis (a grim or glorious rite of passage for every Princeton senior) on Stegner, which was rather grandiosely named “Between a Myth and a Mountain: Wallace Stegner and the Literature of the American West.” I was going to write about medieval manuscript illumination or something ridiculously pseudo-intellectual like that. But then I spent the summer between my junior and senior years in Sun Valley, Idaho, and this Jersey girl was absolutely awestruck by the “sound of mountain water” (the title of one of Stegner’s collections of essays on the West). I came back in the fall and begged to switch my topic, and my love affair with the American West began in earnest.  

Stegner not only wrote fiction but also wrote a lot of non-fiction about writing fiction (making it quite easy to analyze his work for a thesis!). He was a firm believer that to know who you are, you have to understand the where that, consciously or subconsciously, influences you. I think I’ve posted on this before — the idea of a “sense of place.” In any event, living in Idaho that summer, and then again a few years later, made me truly understand what he was talking about. If you are from the West, the mountains — or the sky — are always more vast and more important that you are. 

But even being in New Orleans this past weekend (more on that later) reconnected me with the idea of a sense of place.  I’ve always felt that being “from” New Jersey (yawn!) means that I don’t come from a place with a distinctive culture.  (Sure, we can claim a sort of prideful possessiveness when Bruce sings at the Superbowl, or we can talk about the Shore or tomatoes or the mob with a kind of reverse-snobbery, but the state doesn’t have a real cultural touchstone, even though we may pretend it does to make ourselves feel better…)  Sometimes I wish I were from the South or something so that I could cling to a more defined sense of culture. For example, in New Orleans, the heat and the humidity and the mix of the African-American and French cultures have produced a unique sense of place and self (more than anyone, perhaps, my friends from Louisiana are deeply drawn and connected to their swampy homeland…)

In any event, the link to Egan’s article is here.  Thanks to all who forwarded it to me today.  (I also noted that it was one of the Times’s most emailed articles of the day — which makes me quite happy.  Perhaps my thesis was not all for naught…) If you have not yet read Stegner, start with Crossing to Safety, then read The Spectator Bird (my favorite), and then tackle Angle of Repose.

I couldn’t express it better.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before. - Jane Austen

If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next. – Jane Austen

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. – Jane Austen