Manwatch

I’m at a cafe, pretending to work, as one does these days. Normally, I enjoy people-watching in public spaces, and normally, I focus only on women. There’s no reason for this except that I find the inner lives of men to be wholly uninteresting. I have never been tempted to pierce that opacity, never really yearned for insight or tried to make ethnographic observations, the way I do when I watch women and children.

I don’t feel normal today though, so I am watching men. My life has been a clown show lately. I pride myself on being resourceful and responsible. I don’t usually drop balls. My taxes are always done on time, my children are never late for school, and 99% of the time, I clean the kitchen before I go to bed. I pay my rent on time, I automate my bills, I have spreadsheets to organize summer camp registration. I floss. I show up for my scheduled Pap smear and take my kids for their annual eye exams. I don’t relate to Hot Mess Millennial content, and dislike it as a genre.

It turns out that this level of successful adulting is meaningless in the face of discriminatory, inadequate-by-design systems.

The men at the cafe today are fascinating. Creatures of the system. Creatures for which the system works. They are all white and upper-middle class. They all dress exactly the same. Such an abundance of checked button-down shirts dry-cleaned at Sunshine Cleaners, Patagonia quarter zips and tasteful office swag branded with names of universities and biotech firms. I can’t figure out what is drawing me to pay so much attention to them, except that I want to pull up a chair next to one of them and ask for advice about opening a 401k. Their lives seem impeccably together (even if-especially if-there is a woman in the background, keeping it that way).

Have I ever made staying alive look so effortless?

Will staying alive ever be so effortless?

I am leaning out of my functionality lately, and fully into my weirdness. If I’m going to be the sort of person who throws a menopause party and howls at the moon fifteen years from now, so be it.