Interpreting Veiled Encouragement

These days, Lucky Bastard and I spend alot of time talking about our prospective projects.

He is struggling with his position as the head of a start-up. Contacts are not yielding what he anticipated, and his boss has mandated that he take a couple of days for vacation.

I am dogged and obsessed with achieving something right away--for making up for lost time. Sometimes I'm obsessed to the point of losing proper perspective on eating and sleeping. I forget there is such a thing as vacation.

We talked about people and contacts and networking. His rolodex of networking contacts is probably the size of one of Rafael Palmero's biceps. And he is pretty with summer-tanned skin and shaggy sunbleached hair...kahki trousers, crisp white shirt and emerald green tie. He wears a new cologne. I can smell his presence before he enters the bathroom.

He is the poster boy for Success.

I told him I'd achieved alot in collge, yet feel unprepared for a new kind of career... " you know how it is, sometimes when you go for a job, what you achieved when you were in college really doesn't matter as much as what you are doing right now," I said, and ran a comb thru my wet hair.

"True. and sometimes what you achieved professionally in the past doesn't matter either....not at our age..."

Point taken.

"I don't know why my professors were on me about going to graduate school," I mentioned, "all I kept hearing was how I should go to Harvad Div. That it would make my writing better. I guess my undergrad writing wasn't good enough..."

He could hear my anger. "What they were telling you really wasn't a bad thing," he said..."look at it this way...think of where they were telling you to apply. Harvard. They had the confidence in you to tell you to go to Harvard. I'm sure they didn't say that to too many other students."

It never occurred to me that urging me to go further in education was a vote of confidence--it always seemed to me that it was a vote of no-confidence. A vote of "well, she tries hard but she just won't make it in the world unless she's just a bit smarter...a bit more educated...because right now she's just not quite educated enough." It's the frustration of getting an A and being yelled at for not getting an A+ -- of knowing I can fly and never being allowed to try.

"I guess you can tell I'm angry," I said, "I just want what I do to be enough without always having to go that extra mile."

He sighs. I know he's feeling the same way these days--feeling that nothing of what he's doing is enough. He is an accomplished, highly successful businessman; but he promised to make something happen on a certain time table, and it isn't happening. I think he heard the boss's vacation suggestion the way I heard my professor's graduate school suggestion--as a no-confidence vote.

So with a bit of stolen time, we disappear into each other, into a place where we can appreaciate the simplest aspects of human nature within each of us. We can revel in our shared unique athleticism. Here, we can be confident.

I tell him I'm interviewing someone for an article I'm working on.

"good luck, kiddo," he says, hoisting his briefcase and laptop over his shoulder, and kisses me softly.

"you too, sweetie...have a good day..." I smile and close the door...go back to my desk, obsessing a little less, and trusting that he had a point about the grad school thing. Maybe that time, I had been wrong. But how could I be right when I didn't really understand the subtleties of language?