What Would Jackie Do?

Sibling Two-of-Six and I are having a leisurely, sisterly post-dinner chat.

We’ve exhausted our travel schedules, work woes, friends’ and relatives’ forthcoming babies.

We’re tired of family gossip. (You never exhaust that one; it exhausts you.)

I do a little riff on tango and blogging.

Two-of-Six looks caring. And exasperated. I love it when she does that. She is the only person I know who can deliver a direct hit of reality so softly it feels like a caress.

"Sweetie, do you ever get tired of being in your own head?" she asks.

Well. It’s not like I live there.

I do have a job. Friends. Books. Family. I watched two movies last week. This week I am house-and-cat-sitting.

Still, blogging has to be the most self-absorbed activity in the universe. If you add the hours I spend spent in self-observation to the hours spent contemplating my perceptions and experiences to the hours shaping my stories and crafting my prose to the hours spent lost in my thoughts or daydreams …

You could say I spend most of my life inside my head.

"Is it so interesting in there?" she asks.

Well. It’s not like I'm the only one in there.

There are all the tangueros, near and far. Music. History. Poems. Gossip. Stories and more stories unfolding and interlocking in ways that can only plausibly happen in real life. MilongaCat and Shane and Melinda and Miss MerryPeri and The Pajama Gardener and the rest of that lot.

And let’s not forget The Man on the Wall.

It’s a three-ring circus inside my head!

But when you get down to it, it all revolves around me, doesn’t it? I am the ringleader and the main act.

It’s not that I find myself soooo fascinating. It’s that the rest of the world is not all that real. My imagination…

“Let’s go,” Two-of-Six says.

She needs a cigarette. And a book.

She’s a pack-a-day smoker, a book-a-day reader.

* * *

Barnes and Noble devotes yards and yards of shelf space to self-help, including

• gettingmore wealthy
• gettingmore beautiful
• gettingmore powerful
• gettingmore love from a man
• gettingmore self-esteem
• gettingmore out of life
• gettingmore of this
• gettingmore of that
• gettingmore

Apparently, I am not the only self-absorbed one.

Two-of-Six has vanished without a word. This is how we do it. Later I will drift through her favorite stacks--geography, history, biology, mystery, sociology, anthropology, forthcoming babies, memoir, international economics, chick lit, philosophy, home decor, humor, romance, classic fiction, nature, travel, linguistics, pop culture, and boats, particularly sailing--until I find her.

Meanwhile, I am standing before the Wailing Wall of self-help, scanning the titles.

It’s hard to imagine there would be a book about shyness. What's to say? I hope to find something tangentially related, so I can adapt it to my plan:

Distill 10 tips, try them out one by one, report the results here.

Fun!

And useful!

I could write a book!

!!!

Uh-oh.

I am a cliché. No, worse: I am a buzz word.

There are—I am not kidding, I counted—more than two dozen books on shyness or, in the current parlance, Social Anxiety. They occupy four feet of shelf space.

Four feet. This stinks of snake oil.

Two-of-Six has a point. The book on shyness need make only one point: Get Out of Your Head!

I wander off in search of my sister.

* * *

Four days later...

If I could get out of my head that easily, I wouldn’t be here.

Here is the Tattered Cover, 10 p.m. Friday night. I have fled the Merc. Again.

For books on shyness, the clerk leads me to the Psychology section, to a shelf labeled:

Schizophrenia … Self-Esteem … Smoking

Serious scholarly works on the worst mental disease going share the shelf with



Elsewhere I find a series of titles that arrange themselves nicely into proverbs on a theme:
.

What Happy Women Know

.

Eating in the Light of the Moon

Everything Is Michievous

.

More Sex Is Safer Sex

Never Knit Your Man a Sweater (Until You Have the Ring)

.

When Panic Attacks

Don't Shoot the Dog

.

The Audacity of Hope:

Deer Hunting with Jesus

.

Crashing Through

... Everyone Deserves a Second Chance in Golf and in Life

.

The End of the World As We Know It

What Would Jackie Do?

.

* * *

(I buy the last one.)

* * *

What Happy Women Know; Eating in the Light of the Moon; More Sex Is Safer Sex; Never Knit Your Man a Sweater (Until You Have the Ring); When Panic Attacks; Don’t Shoot the Dog; The Audacity of Hope:; Deer Hunting with Jesus; Crashing Through; … Everyone Deserves a Second Chance in Golf and in Life; The End of the World As We Know It; What Would Jackie Do?