I read Lena Dunham’s book over the holidays, not because I’m a huge fan of Lena Dunham’s or anything but because I’d been having difficulty reading for months (see: my illness) and had assumed the book would be fairly simple to read and percolating with mildly interesting observations and, hopefully, some laughs. I like Lena Dunham, more than I sometimes want to admit to myself. I like the work that she does. Tiny Furniture, for example, is a terrific New York movie. I also admit that it’s impossible for me not to feel jealous, even resentful towards Lena Dunham sometimes. She’s a kid (28) who writes for The New Yorker, has a successful HBO show, and gets to work with Judd Apatow on a regular basis. All I’d have to do is find out that she also has a large, beautifully shaped penis which she uses to pleasure the 1981 version of Cheryl Tiegs and I’d seriously consider hanging myself. Somehow Lena Dunham has turned her talent for over-sharing—no small task distinguishing yourself in that realm, considering that everyone over-shares now (including me)—into a stable, successful career. 

As for the book, it sounds silly and a little unfair to admit this but I was hoping for this: “David Sedaris-esque” essays from a woman’s point of view. That’s exactly what I was thinking when I first opened Dunham’s book. I feel like a jerk for wanting that now. Instead of Sedaris-esque essays, what I got was a series of overly confessional, half-written (or overwritten) celebrity-style “scrap-bookings” that didn’t add up to much. 

Maybe I set the bar too high for Lena Dunham. I probably did. David Sedaris is a supremely talented, older (58) gay man who is generally a lot of fun to read, though never so much fun that you feel guilty for reading him. Lena Dunham is not the “woman version” of David Sedaris. She’s Lena Dunham—and that’s enough for most people, I guess, but still not enough for me. Maybe if she was a man I wouldn’t expect so much. Or, maybe I would. And I can always watch Girls, which always makes me happy that I sold my Brooklyn apartment 15 years ago. Sure, I lost money on the deal—I missed the “Great Brooklyn Renaissance/Jerk-ification” by about five years, I guess—but at least I don’t have to live in the same borough as the self-absorbed (though entertaining) jerks on the show.

I also read Amy Poehler’s book over the holidays—look at me, reading so much!—which is better than Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, though it has the exact same faults as Dunham’s book: half-written bits that feel like a marginally fleshed out to-do list written by a busy, successful woman (or, possibly the busy woman’s personal assistant) who doesn’t obviously want to write the book that she’s writing. I was hoping to love Amy Poehler a little bit more by reading her book. I don’t. If anything, I think a little less of her now, for taking $32.95 of my money (Canadian price, roughly) and giving me so little in return. Also: I think we’ve all been giving Parks and Recreation too much credit for far too long. It’s thin and easy to watch but somehow completely forgettable and pointless. Give me 30 Rock any day.

On the brighter side, I read Roz Chast’s Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, which I just loved. It’s a comic book-style memoir—an easy read, even for my addled brain—about her elderly parents’ final years. Which, as my own parents age and experience steps forward and back, is something I can relate to. It’s sad. It’s funny. It’s profound and honest. I read it in two days—I bought it at the Barbara’s Books in the United terminal at O’Hare—then thought about it for weeks afterwards.

I’m still thinking about it now, today, which really says something, you know? If you are looking for something good to read, and I mean really good, skip Dunham and Poehler and try Roz Chast. She’s something.

*

I spent time in five North American airports over the holidays: Vancouver, Chicago, Syracuse (New York), Washington D.C., and Manchester (New Hampshire). I hadn’t flown at all in 2014 until the holidays, and therefore had somehow completely forgotten how much I enjoy the bits of stasis between flights, a.k.a. layovers. Why do I enjoy layovers? Well, to get annoyingly philosophical and somewhat Dr. Suess-ian, I enjoy them because I am neither here nor there, and there is nothing much that I can do about that. (Note: The weather was mild during my travels, and therefore my layovers never exceeded an hour or two.) I felt calm, and contemplative on my layovers, and strangely energized. I love the feeling of being surrounded by people in airports while also still feeling lonely and invisible. People are usually emotionally charged in airports, but they are even more emotionally charge over the holidays. There’s more happiness, and sadness, and relief.

During my layovers, I scratched down notes in my small but still extremely masculine notebook. (It has a leather cover!) I drank oversized coffees—always black as night!—from Dunkin Donuts. One note I made was presumably an “idea” to rename all airport restrooms from their usual names—Men’s and Women’s Rooms—to “Men’s Log Closet” and “Women’s Log Closet.” I don’t know why I felt that this worth writing down, because it’s not funny or interesting, yet I wrote it down anyway. This is what happens on layovers; you get excited about mundane things. Another note I made:

“Old people always peer so EARNESTLY  and so INTENTLY at their phones. Part of it is obviously because of their failing eyesight. And part of it is because of the ways that their phones utterly mystify and frustrate them.”

This is true. My mother, for example, got an iPhone in December but did not have any confidence whatsoever when it came to operating it. She held the phone two or three feet from her face, squinted at the screen, then touched the touchscreen not as if her fingertip was a tiny raindrop landing gently on a maple leaf but as if she was the president pressing the red button that launches a hundred nuclear missiles at Russia.

The one thing I learned from my Contemplative Layovers—that’s what I’m calling my website from now on, by the way—is that I need, above all else, to find a way to create this contemplative layover feeling (C.L.F.) in my daily life. I said as much to my therapist when I returned to Vancouver. I proposed going to the airport one or two days a week and seeing if the C.L.F. was there or not.

My therapist thought that might not work. Because I wasn’t, you know, actually traveling anywhere. Instead, he talked to me about a concept called “mindfulness,” then recommended a book called The Mindful Way through Depression, which is such a forgettable title that it may as well have been titled Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. It was our final session together. Therapy in Canada doesn’t work the same way therapy does in New York. In Canada, they try to get things done fast; in New York you can talk about your mother for 10 years. “I  happen to really love this book!” my therapist said, giggling a little to himself. I liked my therapist and was sad that our “work” together was ending. To me he looked like a plump little friendly owl wearing wireframe eyeglasses.

I went to the Chapters across from the skating rink after our last session and bought a copy of the book. I’ve had my copy of Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah since last Thursday. I have read zero pages so far. Instead of reading my new book over the weekend, I watched a lot of football, ate fried chicken and candy and went to bed early.

I’ll try to start reading the book this week, or, at the very least, start making notes in my “DayMinder 2015” that say “Read Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah” followed by a couple of asterisks (***) and the word “IMPORTANT!!!”

*

As usual, I sat next to some oddballs on my holiday flights. On my outbound flight from Vancouver on December 20th I sat next to a young man and his wife and their newborn child. The man was Russian and bizarrely thin. He looked like a long-distance runner. He had pretty formidable B.O. I wondered if he’d finished exercising moments before boarding the plane and then I worried that he was going to give me a cold or something. On the other hand, I was still convinced at that time that I had ringworm. So, while he was giving me his cold I was giving him ringworm, which all seemed fair to me.

To my great disappointment, I discovered right away that the man loved talking. Absolutely loved it. After the plane was airborne, he attempted to strike up conversations with me. During any idle moments, I could literally feel him trying to come up with a new topic of discussion for the both of us to hash out. His wife, who held the baby in her lap throughout the flight, would try to get the man’s attention once in awhile (always in Russian), visibly annoyed that he was ignoring her and the baby. At one point I pretended to be asleep for about 20 minutes, to give the wife a chance, and, more importantly, to give myself some much-needed privacy and solitude. I’d lowered my chin to my chest and kept my eyes shut tight. I could feel the man looking at my sleeping form, studying me. I could sense that he was trying to decide how “asleep” I actually was, and wondering whether or not he should wake me up. He let me sleep and proceeded to talk to his wife for awhile.

He was a nice enough man, and an interesting enough man, though I didn’t understand how or why this little Russian family was living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (the city they were eventually returning to), or how they were able to afford what sounded like an indulgent trip to the west coast of Canada. I never understood what the man did for a living (he was a travel writer, but also a business owner of some kind). Though their baby was extremely cute, I honestly wondered if these people were criminals. Once the plane landed in Chicago I wrote this in my notebook:

“Getting into a conversation with anyone makes me feel like a mole without arms trying to dig a hole. I seem OK at first, and I do my best to keep things going, but I never make it terribly far.”

And:

“Were those people criminals or maybe terrorists??????????”

On my return flight on December 31st from Syracuse to Chicago, which was once again my layover city (it’s my preferred layover city; see: Barbara’s Bookstore), I sat next to an oversized grandmother-type named Laura. It was very early in the morning, so early that it was still pitch black outside when the plane lifted off the ground. I could tell that the grandmotherly-type was nervous, that she didn’t fly often. She started talking almost immediately, even before the plane had leveled off (note for me to write in my notebook later: “Only people who don’t fly very often talk during the ascent”), our voices the only audible sounds on the entire sleepy plane.

And she didn’t stop talking until we parted ways in the United terminal in Chicago about two hours later.

Laura talked about beavers—how much she loved beavers, what special creatures beavers were, etc. Not once have I ever had an earnest conversation about beavers in my entire life. “If you want to see beavers, and I mean really see them, then you’ve got to go to their natural habitat,” Laura said. Then she laughed heartily to herself, then leaned in close and gave me a theatrical wink. Naturally, I assumed this beaver information was a joke of some kind—her crude but playful way of telling me that she was a lesbian.

It took me 20 minutes or so to realize that she was talking about actual beavers. She loved actual beavers so much—she said the sentence “I LOVE BEAVERS SO MUCH” at least 10 times—that she in fact had built a kind of sophisticated “beaver observation” platform high up in a tree next to a river behind her rural home. “If you ever want to see something really special, you need to see beavers building a dam,” she said followed by 1. a hearty laugh, 2. a lean-in, and 3. a wink.

When we got off the plane in Chicago, I wondered if I should give Laura my email address (I’d reluctantly given it to the Russian who had given me his) and I think she wondered if she should do the same for me. Instead of exchanging our information, we shook hands, told each other how grateful we were to have gotten to know each other, wished each other a happy New Year, then Laura and her beaver talk (along with her laughs and winks) went one way and I—along with my extremely masculine notebook—went the other.