P.S.

Hey Kid,

I realized that last letter presupposes two huge things. 1) That you have a BASIC level of social confidence, and 2) that you know who you are.

Since you start wanting to be cool when you're too young to have much social experience, the first thing you need is the confidence that you do, in fact, have basic social skills. You want to know that you're not accidentally doing something inexcusable. Being home schooled, I had neither confidence nor social skills. I was a bit of a wreck, actually. I'd like to suggest that the only noteworthy social gaffes are those which cause other people annoyance or discomfort (this is the point of learning etiquette), but in high school, almost any kind of abnormality or eccentricity is considered inexcusable--if people don't like you. What you want to know is how to make yourself likable, rather than how to avoid being obnoxious.

The best guide for that I know is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it when I was twelve and it changed my life.

Here is the basic information in the first half of that book:

Fundamental Techniques for Handling People:

• Don't criticize, condemn or complain.
• Give people a feeling of importance; praise the good parts of them.
• Get the other person to want to do what you want them to by arousing their desires.

Six Ways to Make People Like You:

• Be genuinely interested in other people.
• Smile.
• Remember and use people's names.
• Encourage others to talk about themselves and listen to them.
• Discuss what the other person is interested in.
• Make the other person feel important.

I'm not saying I'm great at any of these all the time, but what reading this did was give me a checklist. I treated it like a checklist. As dorky as it sounds, when I was twelve I printed all of these out onto a card that I carried with me everywhere. Any time I went into a social situation, I would look them over again beforehand to make sure I had them solid.

Because I had this external authority, plus enough know-how not to, say, fart in public, I could say with certainty that I was at least "okay" while I fine-tuned... and fine-tuning can go on forever. It was like those yearly academic standardized test. Maybe I didn't have any friends when I got into high school, and maybe I'd never been able to compare my education with other kids', but at least I knew for a fact I wasn't retarded.

The second thing you need to know is also crucial: who you are. As long as you behave like someone you're not, you're always going to be a little awkward, a little less confident than you could be, and it will show. You have to know who you are so you can confidently be that person. As far as I know, this is where cold, hard trial and error comes in.

One of the things a lot of people don't seem to realize about overcoming their fears of being socially inadequate is that you can PRACTICE social confidence. But, like all kinds of practice, you begin by failing. I value bravery, so I can spur myself to take social risks that might involve falling on my face, if I remind myself that it's brave to be willing to fail in the service of something better. Fortunately, the more you practice, and the more you fail, the more you'll end up succeeding in the end, not least because you'll stop fearing social failure quite so much.

We learn who we are in relationship with other people. The only way you can figure out who you are is by putting yourself into situations with other people and trying new things. Try everything. If an action fills you with fear or guilt or shame, ask yourself if those feelings are reasonable and, if they are, consider not doing it again. If the feelings AREN'T reasonable, it's probably because I (or someone) taught you false values, and you should fight those feelings with all your might.

For instance, my parents taught me to feel fear when going into New Age shops, because there were supposed to be demons in them. Observation says that's a ridiculous thing to fear, so I decided not to let that fear control me. If I, on the other hand, were to teach you that everyone who claims to love God is a fool and you're a fool to befriend them, then you might want to look at the feelings of shame you'd have around deists and tell me to fuck off.

It's risks like these that show us who we really are. Choosing to fight shows us what we really value and what we really believe. The pain we feel in fighting for what we believe is how we know that the fight is worth it. That's what is meant when people say that pain "builds character."

God, kid, it's New Year's Day 2007, and I'm spending my whole day writing letters to you. I tell you I love you at the end of every one of these letters, but I've got tears in my eyes telling you this now. Who or what is this future I'm really writing to? Why does writing to you make me so passionate I cry? You don't even exist.

But, oh, I love you,



C.

This Entry is About How to Be Cool

Hey Kid,

It's something to realize that you no longer care about being "cool." Priorities change. I buy meat thermometers now, not leg warmers. I get EXCITED about it, too. As in, "Let me show you my new meat thermometer!"

And so doesn't it just figure that now, FINALLY, people think I'm cool? How did this happen? There's no good reason why anyone should think I'm cooler than anyone else (especially, I imagine, you). I BLOG for one thing. Plus, everyone knows cool is about confidence, but I've never been confident about being cool because, due to being home schooled, for years I couldn't even say what "cool" was. I think what I have, instead, is confidence in everyone else's sense of un-coolness. I know that everyone feels socially inept and that even the nicest people come off as assholes sometimes. And I understand that almost everyone is secretly wondering if they're DOING OKAY.

If you understand that almost everyone secretly worries that they're the lamest person at the party, you can use the situation to your advantage by:

A) Demonstrating that lame is irrelevant to you. Exhibiting enviable qualities makes you cool by default, and everyone wishes lame were irrelevant to them. This is the more practical way of saying what everyone says: Be yourself. Good ways to demonstrate this include anything which makes it obvious that you're not taking yourself seriously, i.e. dancing around for the fun of it, un-self-consciously wearing something silly, making jokes, and seeking people out to talk--about themselves. (Not focusing on yourself is a good way to avoid thinking about how lame you are.) In other words, do whatever it is you really want to do, and enjoy it. Then:

B) From your self-verified position as Not-Lame, you pull other people into your reality. Helping other people stop feeling lame is cool. For me, this has required actively learning about things other people can relate to. As much as everyone claims to hate ABBA, everyone in my generation can relate to it, and by relating with someone I can pull them into my reality. Learning the words to all the major dance hits of the last twenty years can improve your social standing DRASTICALLY.

Improving socially has been a major preoccupation of my life. Coming to social interaction as late as I did means that I've been a lot more conscious about the process of shaping my social self. Last night one of my friends said, "Haven't you EVER been shy?" I explained that, as a product of home schooling, I missed eight years of primary social programming. As much as I might WISH to be inhibited, I simply don't know how it's done. I AM shy, I just lack the means to express it.

The reason she said that is because it is an under-reported fact that I am the person you invite if you want to make sure there is dancing at your party. I attribute my success to home schooling and an absolute lack of shame about appreciating ABBA. As a home schooler I spent my entire childhood with no friends, no MTV, and endless time alone in my room perfecting homegrown dance moves to Amy Grant. When people say they wish they could dance like me, I understand it is because they don't realize that THE GOOD DANCERS ARE MAKING IT UP. And coolness, too, is about knowing that EVERYONE is making it up.

Obviously, that's not to say you can't be uncool, or a bad dancer. Sometimes when I watch people dance, I realize that it's probably never occurred to them that the point of dancing is to FEEL GOOD. It turns out it doesn't matter how good-looking you are, if you look like you feel good in your body, you will be attractive. Likewise, if you feel good in your soul, you will be cool.

Knowing these things, I believe, is what occasionally brings on a tidal wave of strangers insisting that I'm "cool" and that they wish they were like me. Believe me, this is as embarrassing for me to relate as it is for you to read. Very little in life can make me feel more insipid than thanking someone for thinking I'm cool... but sometimes, (like last night), that's the only thing left to say.

At any rate, if that's any kind of proof of coolness, then maybe my "secrets" of coolness will be of use to you. It took me until after I stopped caring to figure out how to win that war. But you, kid, probably have some more years in the trenches.

I love you (and, having said all this to you, feel totally uncool),


C.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Hey Kid,

This Friday Dav came home early with the beginnings of a bad cold. He doesn't like store bought cans of chicken soup (I do) so I told him I'd try to make a homemade batch, which I've never done before.

The recipe I used was pretty simple, but it took around two hours to make from start to finish, starting with a whole raw chicken. As I made it I was thinking of you, I was imagining one winter day making homemade chicken noodle soup for you, with the flu creeping up on you. I don't know if you'll know that that's special, that not all moms do that, and you might even hate it, maybe start associating it with being sick. And maybe it won't be special to me by then, maybe it'll just be the chore I choose to do. But this was my first time, and from start to finish I put my love in it for Dav, and a little bit in it for you, and it tasted wonderful.

I'm really looking forward to being able to be the kind of mom who makes you soup, and chocolate chip cookies (the way my mom used to at the start of every school year), and takes you to the botanical gardens to look at flowers and trees and herbs. I'm looking forward to taking you out to see the Geminids fall through the night sky, making picnics to eat in the park, and giving you the books I read when I was your age.

I know that if I do all of this that it won't seem like much to you, it'll just seem obvious, the thing moms are supposed to do. But I hope this record of this one moment when it wasn't obvious will somehow show you that these things come out of love I have for you years before I even know you. I desire to do these things for you, to be this kind of mom for you. These dreams are deeply precious to me, and I'm trying to teach myself to make them real for you, even now.

It's not pathetic. My life is more than living for the future, or living for you.

I just love you, right now, is all,



C.

Anger

Hey Kid,

I was going to write you about drugs, because drugs are supposed to be one of those things parents are afraid of discussing openly with their children, but, honestly, we can do that any time. Later. What I'm really having a hard time talking about is anger. Anger's something I've been dealing with lately, and my inability to face it and my antagonists is part of why I've been too unhappy to write you lately.

Anger is not something I was raised to feel. I suspect this is a temptation for a lot of parents, to kill their kid's anger as soon as possible, convince them that it's not okay to be angry. When I was fifteen, and my emotions were officially going out of control, I told my mom over the tomato patch that I was freaked out because sometimes I felt so very, very angry.

She looked up from the garden hose, "Are you ever angry at us?" she said, meaning herself and my dad.
"Sometimes," I said. She looked so sad.
"You know," she said, "God doesn't want you to hold anger in your heart toward your parents. It grieves Him mightily."
"But God gets angry all the time in the Bible," I said.
"That's righteous anger," she said. "That's different."

A year later I was hospitalized for suicidal depression. Gosh, I guess I haven't mentioned that before. This is definitely something I haven't wanted to talk about. There's not much to say, unless you want to get into the grim details, but, to be brief, my parents drove me out to Colorado on the pretense of visiting relatives. And then, late on the second night of driving, led a sleepy, pillow-clutching me into what I thought was a Motel 6, and left me there. That place was my first mental hospital. I was admitted into the Christian program to deal with suicidal depression. I was depressed because I had begun to question my family's Christianity and they were treating me badly as a result, which naturally made me very angry. However, I'd been taught from childhood that I wasn't allowed to be angry with them.

The classic line from therapy goes like this: "Depression is anger turned inward."

I had a lot of anger--but I didn't know it, because I had been taught very well not to acknowledge it.

It's been eight years since that time, as of this writing. I've learned to get angry, but I still don't always know how to deal with it. Sometimes it spirals out of control and I take it out on the wrong people. Sometimes I get very sick from holding it in, and there's bile in my mouth all the time Sometimes I pretend I'm not angry, and then I feel ashamed.

Lately, I've been angry because some people were insulting and rude to me, and I tried to placate them instead of telling them that they had to stop. Worry about how to save those friendships was making me very sick, and I knew I had a problem, but I didn't know what to do about it. I began to think that maybe I was wrong to think of having you, because how can I handle the stress of having a kid who will, inevitably, have conflicts with me, if I can't handle the stress of these petty conflicts now? And what kind of anger management skills could I possibly teach you? Wouldn't I just doom you to a life of headaches and stomach ulcers?

And, kid, thinking of you was enough to make me do something about it. I went back to the people I'd first tried to placate, and I told them off, and then I told them I did not need them in my life anymore--because why would I? You might think someone's a good friend, but if you argue, (and arguing is normal and fine and usually it just means there's been a misunderstanding that needs to be worked through), they'll show you their true characters. If someone's true character is a person who thinks it's okay to be insulting, vicious, and condescending, then they're idiots and bad people and you don't need to keep them in your life. And if you're in a group of friends who see what's happening, and they don't care enough about you to point out that it's wrong for friends to be insulting and vicious and condescending to each other, then they're not really your friends either. Just go ahead and tell them where to get off--and do yourself a favor and refuse to be insulting and rude when you do it, so that you can walk away knowing you're the better person. You see, I always skipped over that part where you explain why you're angry and why what the other person did or said was wrong. I thought, why bother? You're going to walk away anyway, why risk further flaring tempers? I'll tell you why: self-respect.

Self-respect may sound like a buzzword, but it turns out life really is better when you think you're worthy of basic courtesy and love.

Now, there are people you can't simply tell off and walk away from forever, and one of those people, at least until you're 18, is me. To you I can only say: it's fine if we argue, but let's both behave like good people when we do it. It's normal and healthy to disagree. But I want to show you by my own actions that I respect your point of view and that I'll admit it when I'm wrong. My parents never did that for me, so I never learned it was okay to respect my own point of view. Now, granted, I was a teenager and sometimes my point of view was totally wrong, because I didn't know that much about life. Like it or not, you'll be wrong a lot too. But not all the time. Sometimes I'll be wrong or unjust, and I hope we'll be able to work through those times. I hope you'll feel like you can stick up for yourself. That's why I write these things to you, though, to remind myself of things parents seem to forget, so I won't be unjust as often, and so that I'll remember to respect your point of view, so you'll know how to respect yourself.

You know, you should totally feel free to make me re-read parts of this, if you think I've forgotten.

I love you so much, Kid,



C.

Why We Don't Commit Suicide In This Family

Hey Kid,

I realize that the only acceptable follow-up to my last letter is to explain exactly how life ISN'T miserable and pointless, but I'll tell you what--it's tricky. I can tell you that, so far, I haven't offed myself because I don't want to make other people's lives even more miserable and pointless than they already are. And since that seems to be the most convincing argument for me, I'll try to explain it to you.

Suicide makes other people's lives, (not to mention your own life), more miserable and pointless because:

I) If they love you, your suicide points out in no uncertain terms that their love wasn't interesting, useful, or beautiful enough to keep you around, which is another way of saying you never really loved them back. And while life may be pointless and frequently miserable, it has not extended the courtesy of rendering us heartless.
II) If they don't love you, your suicide points out:

A) They weren't important enough to you for you to try to acquire their love. Of course, why should they be? The heartless bastards.
B) Life, at least to you, was miserable and pointless enough to end. Suicide, in my opinion, is a fairly convincing argument for your own perspective. However, don't let the cheerful prospect of finally driving your point home lead you to believe suicide is The Answer, because even if your suicide were to hit the morning papers:

1) Most people don't read the papers anymore.
2) If they do, suicide has long since become the most boring headline in section B, page 13. The fact that this is absolutely true ought to validate your point that life is miserable and pointless but:
3) Even if they do read about your boring suicide in section B, page 13, most people have the all the perspective, compassion, and capacity for reason of a dense cloud of gnats. And that brings us, finally, to:
4) If they do have a whit of feeling or thought for your little act, if it does occur to them what a convincing argument you've just penned, if for a second they feel the morose weight of their empty lives, they will assume the smug, sorrowful expression of news readers everywhere, turn to their families who wait around the breakfast table and either:

a) Say, "Let's go to Disneyland, everybody! Disneyland!" That's because they think they can halt the niggling sense of meaninglessness with an abnormally Good Time. What a legacy for you!
b) Mix a Paxil and vodka tonic. Or,
c) Go, "Tsk tsk, isn't this sad?" And everyone will agree that it's sad and say aren't they lucky to be so happy and healthy and religious?, and then they will forget all about you and study the Family Circus, possibly for minutes.

All of which to say, there probably isn't a reason for being here, and your life probably won't mean much in the end, since 150,000 people die every single day and what do you care? But suicide is easily the whiniest way to die, as well as the most self-pitying, and the most snivelling, especially if you live in Western Civilization, and so we don't kill ourselves if we respect two things:

1) Our intelligence. And if you're smart enough to figure out that life is meaningless, surely you're smart enough to figure out how thoroughly you insult yourself by ending it.

2) The people we love and who love us. Because they'd care if we were gone. And we'd care if they were gone. So we stick it out and think about them until we stop thinking about ourselves. And when you stop thinking about yourself, for some reason, life gets a hell of a lot better. I guess, to be honest, that's the main reason I keep writing you.

The only trick there is to making meaning in your life, as far as I can see, is figuring out what you love and focusing on that. It may only be meaningful to you, but that's all you need to know. Never lose sight of what you love. Religious people, for example, are often more purposeful because they've decided to brainwash themselves into perpetual focus on what they're told they love. Now, I'm not saying I know what love is, as I've mentioned earlier, but I am saying that you can know WHAT you love, because it's whatever's worth staying alive for. If you're smart, you'll sit down right now and start a list.

Every other good thing that happens to you after that is just gravy. Delicious creamy gravy.

And by the way, kid, I'm saying these things to you, in this calculating manner, because I don't want to guilt you into living life. Mothers are very good at the emotional appeal, the whole "you'd rip out my heart?" business. But for now, while you don't sit in either my uterus or on my couch, I can still occasionally think rationally about you and about life. This is the rational appeal for life, to life, for you and for me, because unfortunately if you're anything like me you'll probably be a moody son of a bitch (ha ha! true on so many levels!). At any rate, if you're anything like most of Western Civilization, adolescence will be hell, so I imagine these thoughts might come in handy. Although I'll grant you, Dav, if he becomes your father, is one of those lucky few who sailed through adolescence like a prince on a shining schooner of light, so maybe you'll get lucky.

I love you.



C.

Damn Unlikely

Hey Kid,

I just don't know, kid. I just don't know.

There are so many good reasons why I shouldn't be a parent. Jesus, I can't believe I'm saying this to YOU, of all people. Hello ammo!

I look at this journal and it seems so terribly neurotic. Here: maybe if we analyze everything RIGHT NOW--and I mean EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD--maybe you'll live better and I'll be a better parent and maybe, maybe just maybe, NOTHING BAD WILL EVER HAPPEN. It's not just neurotic, it's a power trip, and as power trips go it's exceedingly naive, which is exactly how I don't want to be.

This week I began to feel that maybe staying alive really is pointless. That certainly makes having YOU pointless.

A lot of different shitty things happened this week, and if you're sitting there reading this then they clearly weren't that bad, but I'll tell you the kicker. On the road between Kingston and Montreal, there's a detour to a little town in the plains called Merrickville. Merrickville was the kicker. Merrickville made me want to kill myself.

I took the detour because I'd been told it was a nice place to have lunch. It turned out to be nothing but a tourist trap: a few little shops with arty beaded necklaces and crystals for sale, a painting studio or three, flavored fudge, and a restaurant, as advertised. I sat down alone in a dark dining room half-full with other tourists, all significantly older than me, and while I waited for my food I eavesdropped. I always eavesdrop--is that a crushing blow to your idealized view of me? Probably not.

They were all deep in conversation, table by table, "chatting" I suppose. They talked about the things they'd bought from the arty little shops, and what they might want to buy later, someday, and about other people's problems. They wore sweatshirts, bulged out of their chairs, swiped fronds of greasy over-processed hair out of their pasty faces, and they just talked and talked and talked about nothing at all.

Do you realize, once upon a time, those people were just like you?

Once, at SOME POINT, the majority of them had to have been bright eyed and healthy and maybe even attractive, or at least wanted to be. The majority of them, considering the bourgeois circumstances, probably went to college at some point, and certainly all must have had some kind of dreams for their lives. They probably wondered if there was a god, perhaps asked themselves in despair if they'd ever find love, perhaps laid awake every night when they were twelve, thinking about death. Did they realize that one day they'd wake up and say to themselves, "Hey, let's go to Merrickville today! Yes, Merrickville will be a GOOD TIME"?

Probably not. One hopes not. I certainly never said that to myself. Merrickville, for me, was an accident.

I sat there and realized that this is what life becomes, for most of us. We become used to the mundane swing of events, the fact that life is not as romantic or exciting as we hoped, that we will work at jobs that bear very little resemblance to our hopes, and may never bring meaning to our lives. Or to anyone's life, for that matter. Worst of all, we get used to it. We stop caring. Or they stopped caring. Me? I'd rather die now and save myself the trouble of faking a life.

Today Dav and I went to the World Press Photo exhibit down the street, all the winners of international news photo contests, lit up and lined around the edges of the room. I saw pictures of bloated humans face down in filthy streets, little children with ragged nubs for arms, very few smiling faces, mostly starvation. Reasons why we don't read newspapers anymore. What can I say? You laugh or you cry. I cried.

Life looks like nothing but a simple brutal choice: either we suffer horribly, or we choose to feel nothing at all.

Yes, there's always drugs and spending to excess if you'd rather be abnormally happy.

But here's me, writing furiously to you, trying to... what? Stop it all from happening to you? Better I should never have you at all, then believe I have that kind of power. Maybe I'm just trying to lie to myself, weave a magical incantation over us with the power of my mind, believing that if I write enough down, it'll all be better--at least better. We'll stand up on the blasting bow of a white boat and wave silk handkerchiefs into warm wind and orange sunset skies. You and me, kid, me in my fluttering linen dress, you in yellow dungerees. Every single day, breathing salt and clean sky, the rest of the world nothing but a blue dream in the mist behind us. Each wave, nothing but a buoy into a perfect life.

Oh, god, I doubt it, kid. At any rate, I doubt it would be all that satisfying after a week or two.

I really don't know what to tell you.

I love you.



C.

Look

Hey Kid,

Recently I read about the scientific variants for determining human beauty. It turns out that beauty isn't really just a social mindgame, but can be objectively measured and understood.

Attractiveness, I learned, is three things:

1) Bilateral Symmetry. No big surprise here. If your face shows lateral symmetry, (that is, the right side more or less perfectly mirrors the left), you're more attractive. This has to do with not looking diseased.

2) Secondary Sexual Characteristics. Again, no surprise. The more your face exhibits the qualities of virility or fecundity common to your gender, the more sexy you appear. It's so obvious, you can't even describe it without being redundant. But the third one fascinates me:

3) Facial Averageness. The more closely your facial features display the average size and shape of all others in your cultural net, the more attractive you are. Apparently this has to do with looking as though you are a composite of as many different parts of the gene pool as possible. Heterogenity is good for offspring.

I love this. I find myself looking at everyone through the lens of averageness. I LOVE the opportunity to momentarily wrench my brain away from my subconscious and just LOOK at what's in front of my eyes as an objective series of facts, devoid of intrinsic meaning.

It's also made me feel better about how I look. I can look at myself in the mirror and use a series of vague mathematic estimates that PROVE there's not much that's particularly deformed about my face. More importantly, what this means is that "pretty" is not about being SPECIAL, (which is a terrifying thing to have to be), it's about being absolutely mundane.

The best part is that even if you DON'T think you're attractive on any given day, that may well mean you have one of the universe's ever-slimming chances of actually being unique. And if you can hack being unique, that means you're also very brave, and if you're brave, that means you might have the opportunity to actually contribute something new and good to this world.

But all of this starts with being able to see what's in front of your eyes. That's really the point of this letter.

One of the things I want to try to teach you as we go is to stop and really look at what you're seeing. The first thing a good teacher tells any young artist is to draw what they really see. You grow up drawing trees like lumps of mashed potatoes on sticks, but there's never been a tree in the world like that. Every time you draw a tree that way, it's like pulling on blinders. Once you know you've been brainwashed by easy labels like "tree = mashed potatoes on sticks" or "beautiful = that tingly feeling in my crotch" you're completely blind. Since it's unlikely that you will give yourself a tingly feeling in the crotch, you may think you're not beautiful. You begin to separate all experience into crotch-tingle and not-crotch-tingle. You can't see the point of portraiture galleries, or old people.

Hopefully you're not like this. But enormous swathes of the population really see the world this way. Maybe they separate everyone into other kinds of categories: "Useful" vs. "Not," or "Exciting" vs. "Boring," "Me" vs. "Everything else," or anything else you can think of. But, as with any labels, as soon as you start relying on them you stop being able to see a thing. And then you miss out. You start to hate and fear people at random, and desire them at random too.

I want you to be able to see the truth. I hope you'll really look at the world around you. Carry a camera to school, put frames around every wonderful thing. Expand your definition of "wonderful" until you can see the unique personality in a blade of grass, until the cornices on a bank fill you with awe. Look and look and look until you can see everything in everyone. It's all there. I swear to God, it's all there.

I love you,



C.

Good Times

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Liiiiiiiiiive!

Hey Kid,

Today I made myself throw up with nothing but the power of my mind.

You know, sometimes I ask myself if you'll be proud of my choices, proud I'm your mom. In this case, today, I'll let you off the hook.

I should amend: I threw up with nothing but the power of my mind and my overwhelming fear of swallowing toothpaste. I HATE toothpaste. I still use it, but I rinse and rinse and rinse and if I even suspect I might have swallowed the TINIEST wisp of minty paste, I usually dry heave until the stomach acid burns the flavor out of my mouth. This doesn't exempt you from using toothpaste, though. Sorry.

What's so disturbing about this, though, is that I don't actually know if I'm swallowing toothpaste or just minty spit, so sometimes, when I throw up like this, it's probably entirely in my mind.

The reason why I tell you this is because it's worthwhile for you to know that everything that happens to you, happens within your mind, and more importantly that I believe this idea and will probably warp your mind with it. While there may be an indifferent (or, as they say, "objective") reality, practicing outside your mind, you will never know it. Which is why you have to take care about the things you let yourself think. At a certain level, any assertion becomes a superstition, and people who believe in superstitions too hard can really freak themselves out.

Or vomit using nothing but the power of their minds.

One of the things I worry about, (AND I DON'T JUST WORRY BECAUSE I'M CRAZY, BELIEVE ME, WE'RE ALL FAIRLY NEUROTIC, ESPECIALLY MOMS), is that something awful will happen in my parts and I'll never have you. Or you'll be stillborn. Or brain damaged and never be able to read this. And what I worry after I worry that, is that the power of my mind has just reached into the future and created a dead baby.

But I don't write these letters to a dead baby, I write them to you. I can picture you in my mind: 15 years old, gangly, smart. If you've bothered to read this at all you're probably smirking or freaked out or both. I'm afraid you're a bit androgynous in my mind, because I'm trying hard to write these letters for either a boy or a girl. Hopefully you won't come out looking like a Hanson kid (look it up).

I just want you to know that I believe in you. You're going to be okay, because every one of these letters is a story I'm telling the universe inside my head, about how great you are.

I hope you believe in yourself too, but that's another letter.

I love you,



C.

Snowmen Built on the Heads of Volcanoes

Hey Kid,

Enthusiasm is tricky. The way I see it, most kids, if they're not horribly squashed, come out totally enthusiastic about life: they've never been here before, they've never done anything before, and by god they're ready for all of it! Hooray!

This behavior pattern is, at best, known as ADD--at worst, we call it "childhood."

I say "at best," because it seems to me that those diagnosed with ADD have a lingering excuse throughout adulthood to be eccentric, enthusiastic, and wildly themselves. The reason why "childhood" is the worst, is because there is only a limited number of years where that excuse will apply. I do encourage you to use that excuse well, by the way, although that might be the wine talking.

What happens after childhood is, of course, adulthood, and that, as I say, is where enthusiasm becomes tricky.

Adulthood beats the enthusiasm out of you. Years of drudgery, whether in school or work, teach you that the easiest way to get through life is to tune out of it. This syndrome of disillusionment and apathy is frequently referred to as "maturity." I don't mean to imply that there's no such thing as maturity, or that maturity is not a good thing to have, but I want to emphasize that disillusionment and apathy ARE NOT IT.

And yet, this is what the majority of adults will model for you as you grow up: that to be a mature grown-up you have to stop being so enthusiastic, stop bursting into tears over terrific songs, stop running to the ocean because a great paragraph filled you with the need to leap in, stop loving quite so hard--it's embarrassing. Your only excuse for enthusiasm is to ingest heavy doses of narcotics and hope you don't either A) die, or B) get interventioned.

If you want to fit in the adult world, if you want to make money and be taken seriously, in general, that is what you have to do. What I am experiencing right now, on the cusp of full adulthood, is the terrible feeling of wearing a mask almost all the time. It's a mask like a cup, that carries my raging, bouncy, boingy heart within its white interior, smooth, like the surface of an egg.

It's very hard to both love life and be like the other adults.

I don't know if I've found a good balance yet. The main reason I'm writing this is to remind me how it feels, and to tell you what's going on here. I hope it helps, someday. Both of us, I mean.

I love you.



C.