Are You Mad At Me 2

They’re back, and this time they might really be mad at you, or maybe they're not

When I first started doing this newsletter, I said that every week I was going to write a mini-essay based off of the bigger main essay that I had written earlier in the week.

This turned out to not happen. Also, do people WANT two emails/essays a week? (If you’re a subscriber, and can make comments, this is a real question.)

Then, lo and behold, last week, after writing a longer essay on people being mad at me, I actually started this mini-essay further exploring people being mad at me.

Then I got busy doing other things: I wrote about Gen X for the New York Times. I also wrote about non-parenting for the Times. (I also wrote about having a dream about Kim Kardashian for The Paris Review website, a while ago.)

But eventually I picked up the mini-essay again. It is below. It is paywalled, so, if you want to read it, you will have to subscribe. I am sorry about this. I wonder if this makes people mad at me. Better to have an income than to be liked! Or in this world necessary.

ARE YOU MAD AT ME 2

I often feel like I have no sense of whether the things I ask people for are appropriate. I can’t tell if I am making reasonable requests or being a pain in the ass. Like for example if you go to a bar and you’re with a person and someone else is sitting alone can you ask them to move over to give you two seats together? If someone asked me it wouldn’t be a big thing, but maybe it is just rude and I don’t know it.

The other day I was at the gym and I was in the front row where you face a mirror. The mirror is helpful for me at this point in my workout life because there’s something wrong with my arm and I like to be able to see how much mobility it has and where it has this mobility and where it doesn’t. But it’s not crucial that I work out in the front row. If the row in front of the mirror was full I would not ask someone to move to a different row. That would be beyond the pale for me.

However, that day I was at this place right where the mirror has a long seam in it, like where one panel of mirror meets another. It’s kind of hard to stand in front of the seam. It bisects your reflection. The reflection is enough to deal with without bisecting it!