don't knock it till you try it: mediocrity

I got a copy of my college alumni magazine the other day, featuring a story about wine making alums who are "lighting up" the California grape business. I felt exhausted just looking at the cover photo of a woman (class of '99) kicking back with a glass of wine while perched on a barrel.

Of course, this is standard fare for the alumni mag--if it's not a bunch of ex-students making wine it's a story about that guy who started Surly Brewing, or a graduate with an organic farm, or some couple who started out as soulless stock brokers but then launched a web company and quickly sold it for tons of money and now they still look very chiseled and Scandinavian.

In other words, I'm tired of hearing about all this stylish and progressive-appropriate success. It's not that I disapprove--I'm actually glad this stuff is going on. Someone should put a green roof on City Hall--yes, that's definitely a good thing. Hats off to the immigration lawyer who works primarily with seasonal farm laborers. I'm totally on board with educational investment programs in low-income countries.

But as a failure-oriented sort of person who is more interested in weird interpersonal situations and gossip, these empowering, occupation-driven stories of "alums on the make" leave me cold. Where is the story about the guy who always meant to leave St. Paul, but ended up dating that local girl for a few years and even though that didn't work out, the job at Medtronic kept paying the bills, and when it comes to Korean food on Snelling Ave. isn't Sole better than Mirror of Korea?

Those are the kinds of stories I want to read about in the alumni magazine. Seriously, what's so bad about mediocrity? Isn't success actually kind of boring?

I suppose this desire for stories of inertia and ordinariness is strongly influenced by my own experience. Because let's admit it--I'm really pretty mediocre, at least when it comes to the work I do. It took several years for me to "warm up" to that realization. I spent plenty of time thinking that I really "should" do something more meaningful with my life than proofreading the fine print in credit card offers or ghostwriting emails for the CEO of a Big Agriculture corporation.

Other people have also emphasized the importance of doing something else--anything else. Well, maybe not anything, but something better.

I recently told an acquaintance about some of the freelance writing work I've been doing. I was actually feeling pretty okay about my work for once, when I realized he was stifling a look of pity. "You're a pretty good writer, Shannon," he said. "Shouldn't you be doing journalism? Wouldn't it be more fun to write articles?"

I had the sudden realization that I was a loser in his eyes. This has happened before, too.

Several years ago I was at play with a friend and she ran into someone she knew in the lobby. "Shannon, you've got to meet Mary--she's a writer, too!"

It turned out that Mary was a 30-year veteran of the Twin Cities journalism scene, currently holding a high post at Minnesota Public Radio. My friend enthusiastically announced that I was a writer.

"Oh, really?" said Mary. "Where do you work?"

I could tell right away this wasn't going to end well. I informed her that I was editing a trade magazine about window treatments.

"Oh, of course--trade magazines," she said, as if I'd initiated a conversation about hemorrhoids--embarrassing, disgusting and definitively indicative of one's low status. "I've never worked in that field."

The message is always the same--why are you wasting your time with that? I suppose it could be taken as a compliment, that these people think I have more to offer the world than a well-worded and persuasive brochure about heat pump upgrades.

don't knock it till you try it: body dysmorphia

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don't knock it till you try it: expecting brilliance from your child

Billboards have really been getting me worked up lately. For example, a pro-life advertisement in my neighborhood recently caught my eye. The billboard in question featured a grainy snapshot of a toddler on a sled. The "don't get an abortion" message? "Your child could grow up to be an Olympic bobsledder!!!"

This pretty neatly sums up what I hate about that striving, desperate brand of parent who observes some normal, everyday kid thing and immediately equates it with future impressive achievements. Your daughter grabbed a wooden spoon and waved it around? Obviously she's a budding gourmet who will one day run her own farm-to-table restaurant! Your son clocked another kid at the playground? The next Muhammad Ali, no doubt!

I suppose some of these pronouncements are meant to be humorous, but I still think they betray an underlying anxiety about the pronouncer's child. Just under the surface of "mommy's little neurosurgeon" is the possibility that the kid will be disappointingly normal--a clerk at Home Depot, perhaps.

Recently some people came over to my house for lunch. My daughter (just over one year old) was in attendance, and one of my guests entertained her for awhile by encouraging her to drop some coins into a cup. She became quite adept at placing the coins in the cup. I was so proud! "My baby's gonna grow up to work on an assembly line!" I exclaimed.

Although I thought this was a hilarious joke, I later learned that one of my guests did not agree. Evidently he thought that I really was afraid that Lydia would grow up to work on an assembly line due to the putting-things-in-cups skills she was developing that day. Perhaps we weren't encouraging her cognitive development as aggressively as we should have been? Maybe some baby sign language could have been incorporated?

I'm trying to imagine being part of the intended audience for that pro-life billboard--pregnant, not so sure I wanted to be pregnant, weighing the options. But then, the sudden realization: "If I keep this baby, he or she very well might grow up to have some kind of impressive profession or skill that could reflect positively on me!"

Because isn't that the whole reason to have kids? If people knew the truth--that their cute baby would one day turn into a teenager who would take hallucinogens and climb under the Lake Street bridge, then get depressed and graduate from an expensive liberal arts college in preparation for a job as a receptionist a community newspaper--I imagine more ladies would be checking the correct placement of their diaphragms.