WORD WARRIOR

Glenn and I debated last night about what yesterday’s blog was really about. We don’t argue; we debate and spar and if we disagree it’s OK. It’s pretty fabulous actually. I totally disagreed with him and went and took a bath and that was fine.

He felt I never finished my original thought about my mother, and I felt I had made the point, that there are all these things our parents did or did not do that we proclaim we will either do or not do depending on the situation and then lo and behold we grow up, are faced with the same circumstances and we wind up doing exactly the opposite of what we said we would and we do what our parents did. I thought that was very clear. I still do.

And I think we carry with us so much of what we took in as children and that so much of who we are whether we like it or not is a direct result of the way we were raised, the quality of love we received or didn’t and many times the continuum of that relationship keeps going into our adulthood. I think it’s very clear.

Glenn is far better educated than I am and is very picky about commas, grammar and things I toss around willy-nilly. Like I said, I opted for Green Acres and he was reading Virginia Woolf.

I have another habit of my mother’s that has gotten much worse the older I have gotten.  My mother has always as long as I can remember written bold, sometimes mean, accusatory, scolding letters to people.  She used to mail them.  Then when the fax machine came out she was a faxing fool. The fax line would ring at two am and you would wake up to reams of paper all over the floor, filled with either helpful hints or pointed arrows depending on her state of mind.

Then of course came email, which she took to like you can’t believe. The send button became her trigger finger and she had great aim.

Now I’m not actually criticizing this, it never bothered me unless it was directed at me.  Sometimes I felt she over did it with her neighbors and they did too. But as long as I wasn’t the target she could write all she wanted. She was a Word Warrior.

Well, guess who else tuned into one? Yours truly.  I’m not crazy for face to face confrontation, in fact if I’m really mad at you, like I really never want to have anything to do with you again, I just disappear quietly. I will never answer a call, a note or an email; I won’t have a knock down drag out screaming match with you unless you work at Time Warner Cable or something.  I will slink away, but often times I will fire off a nasty note to let you know what I really think before I disappear into the mist.

I’m really a very good Word Warrior, I trained under a master and I have some fine examples of my craft.  But I would say in the absolute it has not served me well. Telling people off is not really the way to go.  I have learned this by watching Glenn, my agent Ed Victor and others who get their way by being strong, firm and polite, sometimes even courteous. They don’t piss people off, they get their point across and more importantly they walk away with what they set out to achieve.

Calling someone an asshole in five different languages and pointing out all their faults seldom gets you what you want.

So this New Years as I was standing over the Chao Phraya River bringing in 2010 I made only one resolution – I would try and put down the “send sword” on my computer and be a Word Warrior no more.  Unless of course my life was being threatened, then I would have no choice.
This sounds much easier than it is. When you have been well trained and spent many years on the front lines thinking of zings and zangs to somehow get your way, your point across or just send some misplaced anger in the wrong direction, it’s a real habit and can be a momentary high. But I was and am committed to breaking it.

Glenn will say to me “Do you really think your opinion will change the world or anybody’s life?  No one really cares what you think about these things.”

But if it makes me feel good I would respond. Until of course it backfires on me, which it has many times. How can it not?

I started winding it down around the time Blake died, though I did fire a few off in the fall.

I was tempted over the summer to send a mean missile in the direction of an old friend; at least I thought they were an old friend. I was on the phone with them when I found out Blake had died. I screamed out, I yelled for Glenn to go online, I told them what happened, my oldest friend had just died.  I had to get off the phone.   I never heard from them again. I couldn’t quite believe it. I thought maybe my terror scared them.  Now this person is in their sixties so it shouldn’t, but who knows what someone’s fright meter is?  So I – get this I wrote them an email a week later, after I had caught my breath and apologized for losing it on the phone but explained what had happened. I never heard a word back.

Now my instinct there would have been to send a Word Warrior email like you can’t believe.  And I wrote one in my head on and off the rest of the summer. But Blake was dead and Taylor was headed to college and what was the point?  If that was the kind of friend they really were, then well, they weren’t a friend and my taking them to the carpet would not change things. That was the beginning of my realizing it was a habit with few benefits.

So when the New Year arrived and I made it official. I really had to stick to it.

As the universe will do it sent several situations my way where my Word Warrior inclinations and skills would have come in very handy. There is one that started the end of 2009 I won’t even discuss, as even discussing it could cause me harm. I wanted desperately to tell someone what I thought and how they had dissed me, but I was held back and blessedly through the nimble work and friendship of several people and my keeping my fat mouth shut and my speedy fingers off the keys the whole thing worked out in my favor.

There was another incident where I wanted to climb on my mighty Mac and let someone know what a dumb f@#k they had been. But, again, I decided why bother? An incident happened at party with a bunch of kids, including Lucy. It wasn’t great, but in reality it wasn’t that big a deal, it was kids being kids and once I heard about it I spoke to Lucy, called the mother of the child and was overly sympathetic. Lucy and I both wrote nice notes apologizing for the incident even though I wasn’t even there, and Lucy lost American Idol privileges that week – which may not sound like a lot to you, but trust me for her it was. Well, we did the right thing and then the mom goes and tells the school. It wasn’t even a school issue and now the school knows and Lucy has to talk to the teacher about it. It was stupid behavior– the kind I love to point out to people. Plus,  I was soooooo mad and trust me I could Word Warrior this mom in oblivion.  But I held back, I said nothing. I was really getting better.

Then something came up day before yesterday (same night as the smoke alarm).  This is a situation where I have Word Warriored with this mom a lot.  It’s interesting isn’t it, it’s usually moms I do this with.  Moms, female principles at schools, other women, and once a hideous doctor that the girls used to go to. Female figures in authority, paging Dr. Freud.

Anyway, there is this mom– oh let me tell you, I cannot stand this woman in a way that is so profound writing these words the hairs stand up on my arms. We have had fights like you cannot imagine and she is as skilled – maybe even more skilled at it than I am. In her I have met my match, she is verbal, she is controlling and like me she tosses about misplaced anger at her own parents in every direction she can find. We have been verbally bitch slapping each other for four years now.

The problem is she has two kids Lucy happens to really like. The fact their mother behaves in the most inappropriate manner nine tenths of the time does not lessen Lucy’s fondness for these girls. And I don’t mean sexually inappropriate, I don’t have the time or energy to get into it, but let’s just say I’m not the only one she pisses off. I may be one of the few that sends her searing emails and texts letting her know what I think, but I’m not the only one thinking it.

So my big test of how willing I am to abandon my Word Warrior persona came this week.

Lucy is having a birthday party in ten days.  The subject comes up of the guest list, she gingerly, oh so gingerly approaches me with the thought of inviting them.  She knows my response to the mom, she’s seen it. She doesn’t like the mom either, but why should the kids suffer, and she’s crazy about them.  Why should she suffer? Can they come to the party?

She expects me to say no.  I say yes. But I tell her she has to invite them, as I can’t contact the mom. So she does, but she’s going to be ten and as capable as she is I’m not getting a straight answer.  The other problem I foresee is her party is dinner and a movie.

Now, this mom is so controlling about what her kids see I cannot begin to tell you. Look, we all parent differently and people can attack me for my choices and do. I happen to have a nine year old who grew up with a sister who is nine years older and has been surrounded by teens, she has very sophisticated taste, and her favorite movie last year was Defiance. She reads Herman Melville; The Chipmunks don’t entertain her at this stage. But I did draw the line at BRUNO…that’s actually a great story for another day. But I digress, so I realize I have to contact this mom. I send out a mass email (well, mass = six people) and invite the kids to celebrate Lucy’s birthday with dinner and a movie. Now I kind of know what’s coming, and I warn Lucy as she has already picked two movies, one of which we will see.

Everyone said yes, no one asked what the movies were.

Except…..but of course, I knew she would. So I emailed back short and to the point (also not my nature): either Dear John, a new Notebook type thing or When In Rome, some lame romance Brittany Murphy could have been in if she hadn’t done herself in. I get an email saying those are totally inappropriate and unacceptable. You’d think I had told her we were taking them to see a newly colorized version of Deep Throat.

The old me, the Word Warrior me would have used this to send off such a grand email, oh I can taste it, it would have been so fab and I admit like any addiction I would have gotten a half hour buzz off of doing it. But, my friends, I simply said, “Well, I guess they can’t attend. You know the films are PG13.”
Are you proud of me or what???? Huh??? Was I good?

NO MORE WORD WARRIOR HERE.

But could she drop it?

NO.

This bitch was messin with me. She was trying to lure me back into my Word Warrior ways.

She sends back one that says “the girls are nine and ten.” Hello….what planet are we living on here?

At this point I almost would have been justified to pick up my mighty Mac and take up the Word Warrior stance, but you know what I did then?  I deleted her email. That was it. I deleted, didn’t respond and went on with my day. Triumphant in an entirely different way.

Until now when I got to write this blog, which I must tell you has been deeply satisfying.

Thank you for listening.