In the film The American President, President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) is repeatedly attacked by rival senator, Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss), and in the face of these character attacks, he chooses to simply "not dignify it with a response."  His staff pleads for him to stand up to the guy, but he’s convinced that answering to him is meeting at his level.  Until the end of the film, when he makes the decision to address the press with a kick-ass-takin’-names impromptu speech, where he answers to the accusations, setting the record straight with efficacy and aplomb. 

Is this the way it works?  When should you–or your children, friends, whomever really, when, and in what circumstances, should you– stand up for yourself and dispel the rumors?  When is the high road the wrong road? We’ve all struggled with this at some point in our lives, had people cough up lines about "yesterday’s news," urging us to just ignore it.  It will all go away eventually, and of course, it always does, and if you’re one to bite your tongue, it goes away and you’re left knowing some people got it really wrong.   And then you have to ask yourself if you care.  And then, why do you care?

Once upon a time ago there were sites, plural, dedicated to hating me.  Now, the "once" in "once upon a time" isn’t really accurate because I’m sure they still exist.  I looked at them once in a while but never once, ever, commented.  I never posted under pseudonym coming to my own defense.  I never responded.  Ever.  No matter how angry or hurt or wrong I thought they might have been.  I made the choice not to respond. I’ll get to the why in a second.

There was a case of someone I knew in the periphery of my life, who took offense when I didn’t want to befriend him.  He was unbalanced, sad really, and took to calling me vicious names and wrongly documenting my life, diverging his take on things, painting the picture he wanted people to see, more incongruous than a Magritte.  The press notified me asking if I wanted to comment, to clear things up, and I all but said "no comment."  I said I wished him only good things.  There was my chance to clear it all up, but I didn’t.  High road.  Why?  Well it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t have plenty to say.  It was because, really, what would have been the point?  When telling your side of things it’s just giving people something to throw more shit at.  No matter how right you may be, people who want to vilify you will, despite the evidence.   Why?  Because it’s entertainment.  Because it gives them something to do.   

I’ve never been one to read a tabloid, but it’s impossible to exist without knowing Britney shaved her head, and I do feel bad for her, for anyone, honestly, who’s attacked so publicly.  "Yeah, but it comes with the territory" is a sad little excuse for people to be atrocious.  "When you put yourself out there, you ask for it."  I assure you, no one who puts themselves out there asks for it, but they get it, and the more they’re in the public eye, the harsher the lashing.  I’m not here to comment on the ills of it because I too have been entertained in the same small way.  People subscribe to it for entertainment’s sake, even when it’s your life.   But it really isn’t ever about you.

I was able to step outside myself and see all the really mean things that were happening for what they were: entertainment.  For everyone involved, both the hater and the hated, the rumor/situation/sites/all of it seems much bigger than it really is.  When it’s about you, suddenly, it’s a big deal.  It’s all you can think about.  You hit refresh and drive yourself crazy with what to do.  Let me say it again, for ALL people involved, you’re making much bigger a deal out of it than you should.  You think it’s this huge thing, but it’s not.  It’s called having a sense of proportion, and it’s so so easy to forget this.  It’s why I say, GO OUTSIDE.  Go to the gym, get a manicure, see a movie, realize there is a life outside your dramas.  And eventually you’ll realize–with some distance, but eventually–that none of it matters.  And that makes it easier to not respond.

People will love you, will absolutely HATE you–people who don’t even know you!–because it gives them something to do.  So eventually, when I refused to respond to any of it, people got bored of the saga and things became "yesterday’s news."  I never once defended myself or said one harsh word about any of the people who were inexorably attacking me, or heartlessly creating their version of snarky humor at my expense, not because I couldn’t.  But because adding "a side", albeit my side, by giving my information, meant people would continue to take them, sides.  And while part of me believed, "But if I tell my side, then people won’t believe her/him/them," the rest of me realized, "Yes, yes they will."  No matter how convincing you can be, people will respect you less for it.  And fueling any of it would make it worse.

I sometimes respond to harsh comments in the small moments when I forget it really is just about entertainment, when I take it personally, because really, it’s only human, and any one of us would eventually feel the same way, that need to defend ourselves and respond to accusations.   I pull a Shepherd and set the record straight, but I’ve learned when it comes to the public, blogs, press, gossip, it’s best to let it run its course without me. Besides, we all know how I feel about running…I’d sooner give blood to a first-year medical student who cannot find the vein.

Four is harder to write than one, two, and three because I realize, now that I’m up to number four, that there are more than four ex-friends.  There are two more than four, which, last I checked, makes six.  I’m sure if I think harder, there are more.  This post was intended to be about my number four, but first I’ll say something horrible. 

The blind leading the blind.  It’s the best way I know how to describe her. Number Six, the last of my ex-friends chronologically, is the least important "friend" in this "more than four" scenario. I feel kind of terrible admitting this, just kind of, using words like "least important."  I don’t want to be mean.  I want to be honest, and I’m finding I cannot do one without the other, which is my fault.  If I had more love and light in my life, if I were a different person, a "sweet" person, I couldn’t say these things.  But I cannot half help myself.  I will go on and on here, without editing this too long post, because maybe I’ll find something more in it one day.  I believe, in the bulk of our lives, when we find someone or something we cannot stand, when we’re rubbed the wrong way, it’s usually to do with something we don’t like in ourselves.  And I’m trying so hard to see it, to admit something to myself, but this is just a case of "I don’t like you anymore, if I ever did."  I guess it goes to show how I made polite room in my life for people who didn’t belong.  And that’s what’s wrong with me.  I’ll tell you what’s also wrong: I just can’t help myself, even now, when we no longer speak.

She is an accident you cannot turn away from (I think the term "trainwreck" is stupid).  I liked to watch, and continue to do so via her blog.  Horrible, indecent of me, I know.  I just can’t help myself.  Some of us with sitemeters check our stats and know when an ex is checking in us, certain they must miss us or be curious.  Sometimes though, in my case, it’s the story of the girl who couldn’t look away.  I know plenty of people who feel this way about me, too.  I say go for it.  Read me.  Hate me.  Who the hell cares?  I’m actually comfortable enough in my own skin, with who I am, that I don’t care what you think.  I’d never get offended or feel "unsafe" if people who were no longer in my life read my blog. It’s why it’s public in the first place.

I met her at a writing class in New York.  We didn’t become friends until well after the class had ended and we bumped into each other in a cafe.  During class, I remember always being annoyed when we had to read her material, the same words, circling.  She became overly offended when she received mild criticisms of her work.  I remember one specific time her snapping at another woman, barking really, saying she didn’t like being spoken to in a certain tone.  No one was yelling at her, but she took the critique personally, as an attack.  I imagine she went home and cried.  She was too damn sensitive.  And I guess that’s the thing, that in the end, broke me of her.  She was too damn sensitive to the world, whipping up dramas when they didn’t exist.  She stirred things into messes when they were perfectly orderly.  I remember thinking at the time, "what a fucking head case," glad I wasn’t the one to set her off.

But then, after meeting her at the cafe, I realized she just plain amused me.  Not in that "I’m laughing with you" way but in the "I’m laughing near you and at you, really I am.  How can you not tell the difference?" way.  We went to Barnes and Noble, and I listened to her insist to me that she was going to find a lover.  She’d shop for new bras and attract one.  If the love of her life came along, great, but really she was looking for a lover, no strings, "you know, the way the Europeans do it."  Everything to her is classier everywhere but here.  Everything is always better than where she is.  She’s unhappy in her own shoes, despite how many she buys.  She favors formality and prefers to be called by her titled Ms. with her surname than the comfort found in our first, given, names. She finds friends in hotel staff, in anyone who’ll pay attention to her. Please, talk to me; I’m bored.  People who are bored, I believe, are just flat out boring themselves.

She never found a lover, though she entertained the thought, when she insisted a young married man was flirting with her in the SAKS elevator.  She wanted to pursue things.  I wanted to throw up.  “What are you doing with your life?”  I know, I know, but I so want a fling.  Grow the fuck up.  And yes, I’m judging you. 

She invented a life to live, in words, not actions, and eventually all that came out was talk. And I’ll admit it; I humored her.  She was my entertainment.  When I saw it was her on the caller-ID, I rolled my eyes, turned to Phil and said her name in a groan, but I picked up anyway.  I returned her calls.  I’m as much to blame because I invited her in.  She always had a sob-story, always felt life was hard on her, a world collapsing, was always verbally confessing she hadn’t found her place in the world, yet felt extraordinarily comfortable with herself.  “I embrace alone,” was her bullshit mantra.  She fucking hated alone, worse than rude New Yorkers, the subway, or God forbid, men from Queens.   She said “alone” as if it was the high road, but it wasn’t one she walked by choice.  She lived in measurements of default.  A victim who proclaimed and protested, "I’m no victim."

Yet, I was always inclusive with her, inviting her out with my friends, to my house when I threw parties, making plans with her often… because I felt sorry for her.  She didn’t really retain friends, or make them, for very long, and she complained about it.  I tried to help her out, knowing just how hard it can be making new friends in a city, or anywhere, really.

The woman swam in deep, showered in it, stirred it into her coffee with her powdered sweetener.  She shopped for "deep" in the shoe salon at SAKS.  She wanted to be deep, in every single conversation, because she wanted friends.  I saw this clearly, her need to connect to people, thinking the best way to do so was to divulge the deep in her life, right from the start.  (And people think I’m TMI girl.  Ha).  The more we confide in people, the more they want to confide in us, but this was her schtick.  She ate grief for breakfast and wanted you to taste it again over a shared lunch at Artisinal.  It wasn’t honest or heartfelt; it was rote.  Regurgitated words, over and over.  The same story, the same things.  And my heart just didn’t go out to her.  When she spoke, I felt as if she’d said these words before, as if she were bored with her life and used her own words to entertain herself.  She had to be terribly bored; it’s why she called so often with nothing to say.  And she could talk about that nothing f   o   r   e   v   e   r. And not in a fun mindless way, where friends go on forever, but in a drone.  She spoke of dates who didn’t want to see her again.  She complained when one didn’t pay for her coffee and looked annoyed to be there in the first place, complained when one asked to take a piece of her muffin, insisting she was absolutely disgusted at the idea of sharing food.  How could I be friends with someone who couldn’t share food?  She wouldn’t share lipgloss.  Yuck.  I hate people who won’t share their fucking lipgloss.  Germ freaks are different than the garden variety who clean their lives with q-tips.  I understand people like that, and dare I say, love them more for it.

When she wasn’t complaining about how her date (gasp) wanted to shake her hand even though he had a cold, or complaining that someone asked to eat part of her blueberry muffin, she was calling to entertain an idea aloud.  "What about if I got a dog?  Except, I wouldn’t want it to lick, and I cannot imagine it in my bed.  I’d need to wipe off its paws each and every time it came in from off the streets.  I could use disinfectant wipes on each of its paws, each time, right?  And it couldn’t shed.  I don’t want any hair on my clothes."  Unless you have a farm or sheep that need herding, what is the point of having a dog, other than loving it to death, on the lap of your life?

She wanted to make a difference in the world, to help others, but mostly, she was a complete mess.  And anyone who’d listen to her, well, it’d be a case of the blind leading the blind.  The woman is a mess.  Everything was always happening to her.  She confessed to me one day that all she wanted in life was to get a two-book deal from a major publisher.  Ahem.  "That’s all I want," she said.  "And I won’t be happy until it happens."  I pointed out that recognition isn’t always the best reason to do things, reminded her that I hadn’t gone out looking for a publishing deal.  “Well that’s all I want.  I’ve decided.”  You know, telling your story is one admirable thing, but not being happy unless it’s published and recognized is what they make therapists for.  "No," she insisted, "I want this book to be important, to be read."  Really she wanted validation that she was a good writer with things to teach people.  How to be a mess, 101.  Okay, now that is mean.  I take it back.

I ended our friendship over email, I’m pretty sure.  Which kind of sucked of me.  It was cowardly because it’s easier to be brave and composed between paragraphs.  I’d written about her before, and when she phoned me, asking if it was about her, I denied it.  I couldn’t bring myself to admit it was her.  And that’s what’s wrong with me.  How can I be such a coward?  Why didn’t I just admit it?  Because I didn’t want to hurt her.  “I’d hope you could tell me things like that, if it were about me,” she said.  But I couldn’t be honest with her, because maybe that meant being honest with myself.  It would mean asking myself, why am I giving space in my life to this person I don’t even like?

Worse still, I’d invited her to our wedding.  It was one of those, I HAVE to invite her, how could I not?  Beforehand I’d sent her the menu, insisting she eat something beforehand, or order the vegetarian option (not that she was even a vegetarian) because I knew what a picky eater she was.  "Dietary restrictions" she says, insisting to waiters she’s allergic.  "Because if I say I’m allergic, they really won’t put it."  She’s allergic to life, to really living, to garlic and butter (except when she’s in Paris and it’s on bread) and a host of other things, except sweets.  My wedding was too loud, too cold, and too fattening for her.  She sent her food back.  Who the fuck sends food BACK at a wedding???  You suck it up.  You either push things around on your plate and eat afterwards, or you eat it with a smile.  You don’t go making someone else’s day about YOU.  You eat the bread.  You don’t hold a secret meeting with a waiter insisting you want things different from everyone else.  DRAMA.  Always.  And every single person within earshot of her complained about her. That was the straw.  She claimed she was in pain and had to leave the wedding, and maybe she was, but the fact that I expected her to act this very way, was the icing.  That was it.   It wasn’t the isolated event; it was the culmination of them.  All her small catastrophes and even smaller triumphs, all in her mind and making. She apologized, but it was too late.  I owed myself the apology.  I should have apologized for making room and finding energy for people like that, not bad people, not mean people, just people who didn’t enrich my life.  And it’s my own fault now, finding entertainment in her demise, even when she celebrates, I roll my eyes.  Big fucking deal.  She celebrated each time she finished a chapter, each time she completed something.  Get over yourself.  You think I throw a party each time I finish a sentence?  Okay, being mean again.  Clearly, I feel quite strongly, and a nerve has been hit.  Why do I dislike her so?  I am nothing like her… what’s wrong with me?  Maybe all the things I’ve already said, maybe more, but maybe, just maybe there’s no reason to analyze the crap out of it.  Maybe, and this is sometimes hard for me to say, maybe I simply just don’t like her.

"Greatness is measured by your gifts, not your possessions."  It’s written on the tab of my Mother’s Milk tea bag.  I’m "snowed in" here in Austin today.  Iced in, really.  Austin shuts down when the city dips beneath 32 degrees.  The city isn’t outfitted with salt trucks.  They track a bit of sand here and there, not enough to make a discernible difference.  Every television program is stamped with a weather-warning ticker.  Grocery stores are closed.  The post office is closed!  The town shuts down.  We haven’t been able to get to the hospital.  Now that we’re parents, I’m even more neurotic, insisting Phil and I cannot travel in the same car during such storms.  "I refuse to leave them without any parents, and since I’m drinking the tea anyway, they cannot live without me, or my milk."  It’s really not the kind of thing to joke about.  Still, I tell Phil I love him as he sets off for the hospital. 

So the quote on my tea got me to thinking about success and how so many of us apologize for it, are asked to dumb it down with words like "modesty" instead of "proud."  So I dug up this post I once wrote and never made public and decided, fuck it.  It’s about time… 

I most likely won’t.  There are things you don’t write on a blog, not a blog that people actually read anyway.  Namely, success.  Because when you write about your personal successes, and you’re me, it’s giving the haters something else to throw shit at.  Mostly people cheer and are happy for you, and even with "most," you get hung up on the bad and the mean.  Why?  Is it because you deep down doubt yourself and wonder if you’re really worthy?  I don’t think so.  Not in this case.  I’m fine with not being liked.  It’s not the greatest feeling, but I accept it.  Not everyone has to like who I am or what I write.  "Well if you were just more humble," or "if you were more self-depricating," or "if you didn’t take yourself so seriously" or "if you laughed at yourself more and weren’t so self-absorbed," or "if you weren’t so fat with a big forehead."

If. 

If I cared that much about what some stranger behind a cloak of anonymity had to say, I wouldn’t write anything honest.  I’d care so much, and be so afraid of not being liked that I just wouldn’t write it.  Clearly I don’t care all that much or my writing would have changed.  I’d begin to poke fun at myself more, down play things, act.  And it is brave to keep doing it with all the shit I take.  It would be easier to stop, or to adjust and cater.  I’m not about easier.  We’re not put here to live an easy life.  We’re here to learn, I think, to grow.  To overcome fears.  I’m not afraid of being hated.  I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I’m well aware that the more visible one becomes, the more people will be vocal about loving and hating who they are, what they stand for, or how they wear their hair.  The minute I fear how someone will respond to something I write is the moment where I’ll stop being completely honest.  And for what?  Fear of what?  Not being liked?  Believe me, I’ve been rejected enough times in life, for just being me, that I’m not about to let some anonymous clump change who I am, or how proud I’ve become of myself.  And I am proud.  I’ve been rejected by lovers, bosses, sororities, and The Wasband.  Bloggers who comment, who either have or have not ever met me, are the least of it. 

I gotta say it’s damn nice being nowhere near the NYC Marathon.  I received a text from Alexandra today: "Today is the marathon.  Thinking of you and how far you have come. XO."  I knew it was the marathon before I heard the "dink dink" from my phone.  It’s a milestone day, I guess, where we’re prone to reflect where we were once, and where we are now.  If you read through my past entries, dated a year ago, today, you’ll see these anniversaries served as markers, mile markers, measuring how far I’d come.  It’s why we call them milestones.  But let me tell you what it’s not, what I’m not.  I’m not one of those people who is going to define herself by her catastrophes, or by the sad that has burrowed into my life.  I’m not going to mark my life in the deaths of things or people. I know some people who still set the dinner table for loved ones who’ve died.  I cannot imagine their sorrow.  This isn’t about the Miss Havishams of the world who clearly need help.  It’s about those of us who stew in it because we think it helps to define us.  I don’t believe life is about grieving. 

Every experience, the good and bad, every person who has touched my life is worth remembering, but it’s not worth dwelling.  There’s a difference between expressing a memory of a loved one and not being over it.  Some people, somewhere inside themselves, think the sadness brings them closer, helps to honor the people that came before.  Being sad, still, proves how much it meant.  It’s almost a temper tantrum to prove your point.  See? I still hurt!  That’s how important the event was in my life.  The sadness brings them closer, connected.  It’s proof.  Guess what, shit happens, and sometimes it really sucks, and we can miss and ache and feel sad, but at a certain point, what is the point?  Yes, it’s the NYC Marathon again, the anniversary for me, the day my life changed as I knew it.  Good.

"Good grief," as I’ve written in Straight Up and Dirty.  It’s about time to let it the fuck go.  I’m no longer living my life in anniversaries of what was.  I think the people who do this are giving themselves an excuse to wallow.  “I’m allowed to feel sad today.”  Why?  Because something shitty happened a year ago?  I understand profound sadness, but gearing up for it, anticipating the anniversary of it, is just added drama.  Live your life in the now.  The then always catches up when we’re not looking, not on anniversaries or anticipated events, but on the sidelines, in found letters, slipped between tattered books.  In perfume scents on strangers, in songs, in dreams that might haunt us.  Grief might find a way to sneak in, but we needn’t very well invite it into our lives, offering it a place mat and coordinating napkin ring.  At a certain point, that shit should be left off your table.  But I think it’s up to each of us to figure out when that point is, when is it still just an excuse to wallow and feel like shit, just because you’re entitled?  You’re not special because you’ve overcome the shit that’s been thrown on your door.  It doesn’t make you unique that you’ve turned crap into craptastic.  You’re special and unique because you were born that way, at the very beginning, before all your "life-defining" moments.  Don’t find a reason to grip the bad because you think it defines who you are now.

*As an aside, this site isn’t called Greek Tragedy because I think my life is tragic.  It was named such, in part because of my Greek heritage, and in part because the "Greek system tragedy" that happened to me in college was all about how to handle rejection, which is a life lesson, one I explore often on this blog because I think so much of how we handle rejection hangs on our self-esteem, a subject about which I’ve always been fascinated.   

I nearly just posted a letter to a friend, one of those, "I’d never send this" letters where I tell her exactly what I think.  Then I erased it because it’s inappropriate to post, but even more, I realized, why can’t I say these things to her?  I suppose sometimes a friend needs to ask our opinion before we give it.  I want to tell her that I think she’s running from her life, filling her time with busy work and plans, instead of creating a rich life for herself here.  I want to encourage her to go for more walks, to invest in herself not through dating, but in signing up for classes in things about which she’s always been secretly interested. Not some one off class either.  She needs routine and should stick with it. Scour the pages of Time Out or some other About Town section, then go to a museum or play or book reading.  I wish she’d slow down, sit with her silence, and realize no matter where she tries to go, that silence will still be there.  And it’s not about transforming emptiness into a quiet peace either.  It’s about sitting still and saying, this is actually how it should be.  Let me make the most of this.   

When she is here, she creates projects for herself, insisting she’s on a mission to find a lover.  Busy work because no job appeals to her unless it’s tied to fashion, and even then, she’d like nothing more than to quit any job, no matter how fabulous, to say she’s writing her book.  Why can’t she make herself happy where she is?  Read a book in central park, fix herself a picnic.  Instead it seems she is running from herself, thinking there’s some point in her future that will make her happier than she is now.  She doesn’t realize, even with all her talk, that she’s wearing Dorothy’s slippers, and the power is with her, and has always been within her, to change her life at home.

My last day in New York, I headed out to Forest Hills, Queens to visit my grandfather.  I’d tried to see him before I moved to Austin mid-April, but he wasn’t up for visitors.  It used to be that he’d get excited, over the phone, from the idea of plans.  We’d go to Parkside restaurant, or at least say we would, and he’d look forward to it all week.  But when the day arrived for me to visit, he’d phone with "really not up for it."  A part of me was relieved I didn’t have to travel, that I could instead tend to my list of "have-to."  I feel badly saying that because I, of course, love him and would do anything for him.  But I felt relief instead of disappointment.  I imagine my grandchildren will one day feel this too.  They’ll prefer to spend time with their friends, or at the movies, than sitting with their grandmother in a living room, being offered a bowl of fruit. 

I didn’t feel that way this time.  I would have been disappointed if he’d turned us away.  I was in from Texas and knew we wouldn’t be back until mid-September for our wedding.  He lit up when he heard we were coming, my father said.  "He’s like a little boy, now.  He gets very excited about visitors, about dinner, about news."  Before he liked the idea but turned us away.  "He’s reverting," my father said.  And I understood.  When we age we become childlike again, in the care of others.  Learning to walk slowly.  Someone helping us to the bathroom. 

He looked frail and is now barely able to see.  Philip brought him a poster from my Borders reading: a huge photo of me with my name.  My grandfather pressed it up to his face and smiled when he made out KLEIN.  I couldn’t believe how much his sight had deteriorated since last seeing him.  He didn’t look good.  It made me want to cry.  "I’m so proud of you," he said.  And a tear slipped down my face. I went to hug him, putting my hand on his shoulder.  I felt his bones this time.  He did not look good.  It scared me, seeing how he couldn’t see me. 

I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your sight.  Though I don’t think he’s afraid; he’s at peace, which is always a comfort.  He chose chemo.  He wants to do what he can to be here, but I think he’s tired.  He has stopped controlling things, handed over his finances, and he now lives in the small pleasure of visits, phone calls, and fresh black plums.  "Steph, you’ve got to take some with you."  Before I left for the airport, he asked seven times, wanting to be reassured that I had taken some of his fruit, in a plastic baggie.  "Jewish grandmother" was all I could think as my Jewish grandfather pushed me out the door with food. 

"When you get to my age, Steph, it’s always something."  "Something" now consists of chemo, diabetes, tumors, of two nurses, of Vernell (our family housekeeper who has been with us since before I was born).  He’s ninety years old.  He refused to celebrate his last birthday with us, fearing it was jinxing his life.  "I’m just so proud of you.  You didn’t pull strings.  You made your dreams come true on your own, and very few people can say that.  And now you’re getting married to a wonderful man in the Jewish religion.  That’s very important."  I put my hand on my lower abdomen.  "And you’re having babies," he added.  I wondered if he’d seen me just then.  Life amazes me.  I hope he’s able to come to our wedding.  I hope he’s around to meet his great-grandchildren.  I miss him already.  And I feel guilty about that too.  He’s not even gone.  Because while we’re young, as I am, we have a hard time letting go, of realizing really, what we cannot control.  We’re left to follow by example and let things slip, like a silken bow untied, loose to loss.