Nervous is good
Dateline: in the Shire, Indy, 31 August 2005
God I love this apartment and how my "office" is just inside the front door and within reach of the "dining room" table. The one-ness with my family is priceless when I'm trying to work.
And then there's the need to take all my business calls out on the balcony, because my cell phone doesn't cut in and out all the time out there, plus we've got these really cool folding camping chairs out there and if you sit them just so in the sun before you come out, it's like having a heated chair.
Yes, yes, I will be sad to leave all this for the new house.
Already got the huge antique oak roll-top all ready, along with the oak antique library table (for the new Mac I will buy eventually), plus two oak antique file cabinets. All bought with just this office space in mind, and all scouted out by my mother-in-law, scavenger extraordinaire of antique stores across the midwest.
Until then, my 2x2 built-in laminate desk will have to do.
Frankly, I almost never work there, because the sectional couch beckons and I love my Mac a whole lot more than that XP nightmare that is the shared family PC (I will never buy another PC in my life).
Spent three hours today cleaning up all five separate desktops of various debris, spyware, etc. Got to the point of almost tears, and then I realized how ill I was feeling. No cross country today, but I did take daughter for more golf ball whacking (our first joint lesson tomorrow night) and by the time I got home, I was feeling like the flu. So I finally gave in and took a Zyrtec, and I must admit, it's some pretty nice stuff. Perked me right back up and I was back at it.
Long multiple phonecons today with various people, where I find myself explaining simultaneously: 1) where I'm going vision-wise, 2) what it is that Enterra does (I get better with each swing of the bat), and 3) what we're proposing in this "America Resilient" book idea. It's frustrating, because it's all a new stretch for me, and that makes me nervous.
But nervous is good. Steve DeAngelis is a full-time scrambler, and his 24/7 sales mode is a real lesson to me in how you sustain something so much larger than yourself.
Last night on the last of four bumpy flights (three commuter jets) I was reading BFA intently (my theory: I can't possibly die in a plane crash while reading my own book--my sheer self-absorption is like a magic shield!) and after we landed and I was walking through Indy's empty airport late at night, I just felt sort of exhausted in that way you can only feel after four flights in one day. But it felt worse than that (and the allergies were getting me then too): I felt my knees buckling from under the weight of all of BFA's content.
I mean, sometimes I put down the book and say to myself, "Just who the hell are you to be proposing all this stuff? You're still the snot-nose from Boscobel Wisconsin!"
As opposed to, say, Lancaster or even Platteville.
Then I think of what my Dad would say at moments like this. He'd say, "I really have to hand it to you: you've really gone out and done something with your life. So more power to you, I say!'
Dad always said that with a slightly wistful tone, as though he felt like he had done little with his life. But what I would always say in reply was, "You did plenty Dad, and you're still doing it through all of us [my four brothers and two sisters]."
And he'd say, "Yes, yes, you're all doing good things, and your mother and I take real pride in that. We really do."
And that's how I get myself through moments of self-doubt like that. I replay favorite exchanges with my Dad.
And I love to tell them here again simply because I get to write the words "my Dad."
Sometimes I think the worst part of losing my Father is that I will never get to address anyone ever again as "Dad." He took the word with him to the grave, so now I must subsist on hearing that word directed at me.
And whenever I think of that new reality (and it still seems new more than a year later), I think, "we're all going to China next time--all of us."
Still working the wife on that one. But I know she likes being called Mom, so maybe there's room for one more.
Just not in this apartment . . .
And don't worry. My wife never reads anything I write. "I don't have to," she says, "I lived it."
Anyway, just contemplating trying to answer every challenge/question/criticism of this book in a host of mass media venues in a non-stop blitz of appearances is very intimidating. I think this sort of dread mixed with intense anticipation is about as close as I will ever come to the feeling of pregnancy (don't get me started on my kidney stones!): you want it to come and yet it's something you don't mind staying in the future for as long as possible.
Last time, with PNM, I would find myself feeling tense weeks before it came out, and I would say to myself, "This is all going to work out great. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just believe that for a minute and learn to savor the anticipation of this great ride!"
And I would try. I really would, because I naturally prefer to live in the future given my mindset--and yet I couldn't. It was like trying to relax during a track meet in H.S. where I ran the first (110m high hurdles) and last (4x400m relay) races: there was just never a moment where I could simply feel relaxed about it.
Later, after the first few shocks were absorbed, I really got into it: like after catching your first reception in a football game, all of a sudden you want the ball all the time and you're certain you can do no wrong. But enjoying the build-up--that was impossible.
What helps this time is the simultaneity of the China piece going to print in the November issue of Esquire, plus all this next-book talk with Steve and others. It's like I've already starting shooting my next film and I don't have to just sit around getting too nervous over the debut of the last one.
Plus, the thinking through of America Resilient is becoming it's own great synergy: to figure the book is to figure the joint brief with Steve and to figure that is to figure out how I fit with Enterra and how Enterra fits with me.
So here I thought my wife and kids were undergoing the big adjustment with the move, and it's me who seems the most ajar with all these adjustments.
But again, nervous is good. Steve Deangelis is patient, and he provides (like helping me bring in an old colleague to join Enterra--one of my favorite content mentors). But push must come to shove, and I will have to take this proposal, this brief, and this relationship by the horns and make it work for me. I have to master this material and figure out where it's going to take me and the vision.
Early indications are solid, as the more I explain it to people whose opinion matters to me, the more exciting it becomes--and yes, more nerve-wracking.
But this is what I asked for, so I cannot complain. I did not want to sit in my office in Newport and increasingly be treated with kid gloves as the emerging "great thinker." I wanted a scrum. I wanted a scramble. I wanted that fear factor of running just beyond the defensive line looking wildly for the ball zipping through, knowing that if I have to stretch for it some linebacker may snap my back in the process.
I wanted to feel my heartbeat in my throat again.
I wanted that nervousness.
And I've got it--along with a date to testify in front of the House Armed Services Committee next Wednesday morning. Seems that the HASC is running a red-team effort on the Quadrennial Defense Review, which is interesting, since it's a congressionally-mandated review! I'll be curious who the other two testifying with me will be. We'll all go 10-15 in statements (which I will write over the Labor Day weekend in WI), and then take questions for 2+ hours.
I'll have to remember not to coffee-up too much beforehand, but I'm expecting to be pretty bright-eyed simply from the crowd factor (it's a good-sized room in Rayburn, if I remember).
Yes, nervous is good, and sometimes it's just enough to get by on.