when everything feels like the movies

Last week while talking to my favorite doppelgänger I glanced at my phone. Incoming text.

“Oh, no. It’s my brother.”

“I knew it. Your voice only drops to that register when you talk about siblings.”

We were in the middle of a wild work day. I replied that I was not able to call him, as requested. So he reminded me of the three-hour time difference, and asked me to call in the morning, but not too early.

At about noon my time the next day, he texted again. “Awaiting your call.”

I girded my loins and phoned him. “It’s good news,” he’d said in the text.

When he asked “how ya doin’,” I could hear him deflate at “migraine.” He was revved up and ready to dish.

About a week after we’d received our inheritance checks in January, our father’s attorney had called to say there had been an error, and those funds were needed to pay outstanding bills. Three of us sent our money. Our sister refused.

The good news part was this—additional funds were found and the debts on our father’s estate had been paid. We kids will likely get a slightly larger small inheritance than we’d anticipated.

Also, if my sister doesn’t pay up, a warrant will go out out for her arrest.

(Good news.)

Have you ever heard gleeful malice? That’s how he sounded when he told me about the warrant. He spat the word thievery a few times when he’d mention our sister.

To his credit, he kept the call brief.

It was at about this time that my friend AJ alerted me to a brilliant and insightful article about why corporations use “garbage language.”

From the article:

I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.

Now, I’m in the middle of reinventing my life, coming to the end of twenty years in a job rut. That’s a deep rut. So this bit stood out to me:

When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

AJ mentioned that he couldn’t get over the vacuity, and I’m with him on this point.

Years ago I was asked to serve on a sustainability advisory committee. I left many meetings with smoke coming out of my ears—because I am a slow learner. It took me far longer than it should have to realize the point of the committee was to appear as if the organization gave two shits about sustainability, when, in fact, there were zero shits given.

That committee work was my only real-life encounter with vacuous corporate speak, which I find so deeply offensive.

What does garbage language and vacuity have to do with my siblings?

Vacuity and duplicity anger me. And I am not a mental healthcare professional, but surely that anger is rooted in our parents’ Cluster B personality disorder issues. Our mother is textbook borderline and our father was a classic narcissist.

When our father died, there was… a lot of drama. Cruelty. Chaos. I do not typically have any contact with my family, but each time I do, I am surprised by the need for chaos, the driving, almost controlling need, for emotional noise.

When your parent or parents lack a sense of self, when the self is shifting, a role, rather than rooted in an authentic and deeply alive core, vacuous, the chaos, I suppose, is how a child might find where the amorphous parent ends and she begins? Possibly. Is the chaos a “self-marketing asset”?

The day after that conversation with my brother, I realized my brain radio had been playing the old song by the Goo Goo Dolls.

When everything feels like the movies, you bleed just to know you’re alive.

Each time a text comes in, I wonder if it will be about the money, and I’m relieved when it’s my staff or a friend. And I’m thankful that even in this time of upheaval and change in my own life, I don’t need to bleed to know.

In the last few years, my garden has gone to heck, and sometimes I look out at the weeds and invasive plants and feel overwhelmed. There’s your chaos, right there. But this year, the daffodils were early, and I’m enjoying the sunshiny color on the dining table.

And yesterday I learned that scientists were paid actual cash money to again prove the obvious, that reading classic novels is better for your health than self-help books. And Hilary Mantel’s third novel in the Wolf Hall trilogy comes out next week on my birthday. I mean, her books aren’t classics yet, but her writing is the opposite of garbage language.

Oh, boy.