On Boring Problems

A Birthday Letter to My Sister

I enjoy complaining as recreation and entertainment, so in writing my half-sister a birthday letter I thought I’d favor her with some fascinating and delightful complaints about my life. But lately, I find, I’m embarrassed by my own problems—not because they’re trivial luxury problems, or because they’re largely optional and self-inflicted, but because they’re so boring. I’m currently having my house rebuilt (see?—already your finger reflexively twitches to click away to anything more interesting), and although to me my enmity with my contractors is the stuff of grim Icelandic sagas, whenever I try to vent about it—their confident ignorance, their blustering incompetence, their stonewalling, prevarication, and lies—it just sounds like a list of tedious grievances about drywall and grout. Listening to myself deliver yet another tirade about the years-long, multi-phase fiasco of the folding doors, the clumsy attempt to foist off the cost of the trim coating error onto me, the $828 invoice for a shower curtain rod, I want to do the same thing I would’ve done at age twelve when I was forced to listen to such stupefyingly dull adult conversations: ask if I can please be excused and sneak off to read about Alien or Blade Runner or some other cool movie I wasn’t allowed to see.

But I don’t get to be excused anymore, ever again, because the people who used to have those conversations I fled from are dead now, and it’s my responsibility to deal with the dull, depressing things they used to discuss, like insurance and taxes and real estate. Most of what defines being a grownup, it turns out, is not the newly licit privileges of drinking or having sex or finally getting to see Alien, but forcing yourself to pay attention to extremely boring and unfun things, with the only tangible reward being the tepid satisfaction of crossing those things off a list. Which, if you’re really on top of things, you’ll accomplish just as the next wave of administrative bullshit you have to contend with comes crashing down upon you.

I find myself missing the problems of youth—interesting problems, cool problems. Fun problems! Angst, not ennui. Finding yourself instead of being sick of it. I’m almost never hung over anymore, but I always feel like I am. It’s enough to make me wish I were in the grip of some sordid addiction or entangled in an illicit affair, that my liver were cicatrizing or my polycule disintegrating. So much art is concerned with the dramatic, exciting problems of youth—choosing a vocation and wondering whether you have what it takes to pursue it, finding a mate via sleeping around, learning by humiliating trial and error how to be a person in the world. You and your peers all careen drunkenly into adulthood with your childhood issues unexcavated and your pathologies untreated and thriving, like a bunch of windup toys set loose to bonk repeatedly into one another or topple off the edge of the table. Not to mention that you still have very poor judgment and so spend a lot of time doing wrong things with unwise people in extremely sketchy places. I have a friend, now a respected poet, who got kidnapped in Serbia while she was working as a Jägermeister Girl. Ah—now those were problems!

Of course a life that makes for good stories does not necessarily make for a good life; quite a lot of things are more fun to hear about than experience. My wistful envy of my young self’s problems is like the vicarious interest long-married couples take in their single friends’ dating lives, with their unsolicited genital portraits, ghosting and STDs. Now that I think about it, a lot of the people I knew who had the really interesting problems all died. Or else, less interestingly. they got their shit together, went to rehab or therapy, found someone who could put up with their bullshit, or just blithely wrecked lots of other relationships while keeping their own miraculously intact and carried on into safely unsexy old age. Your reward for solving the exciting problems of youth is graduating to the boring problems of middle age. Unless you choose to have children, in which case you get to re-experience all the problems of childhood and adolescence from a new, nonfun managerial perspective.

But then maybe the problems of youth are only interesting in retrospect, once they’re safely solved or obviated, the way the past looks “simpler” from the vantage point of the blind and terrifying present. Were they ever really all that interesting? What problem could be more boring than addiction? (Doing this thing is ruining my life! Well could you possibly stop doing the thi—NO THE THING IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING et cetera forever.) It’s easy for adults, lying rigid with three AM anxieties about layoffs and biopsies, to look back on childhood as a time when life was mostly taken care of for them and all their problems were trivial—weeping with rage because, e.g., the cheese on your spaghetti melted or you have to wear a jacket out because it is chilly. But I still remember childhood, and its problems were just as serious as the ones I have to deal with now, if not more so. I may not know whether this house is ever going to be finished or I’m ever going to write another book or if this is the last year of democracy in America, but at least in adulthood I never, ever have to worry that someone I see every day is going to sit on me and pull my hair ‘til I cry and make fun of me for it, or suborn me into being accomplice to the stoning of a toad. Our problems remain exactly as serious throughout all of life’s stages: just barely greater than our ability to meet them, or else they wouldn’t be problems.

None of this perspective really consoles me when, e.g., I’ve finally dredged up some opinion about bathroom tiles from the bottom of my soul and my contractor then asks what color grout I want, plunging me into a Gethsemane of homeowning indecision and despair. But there are some compensations: in the course of encountering these tedious new problems, I’ve also discovered some tedious new pleasures—vices subtler and more sophisticated than the whip-its and handjobs of youth, appreciable only to the jaded tastes of middle age, like the decadent pleasure of cc’ing your lawyer. This turns out to be like casting a high-level spell in Dungeons & Dragons: suddenly people who have casually conned and bullied you for years start frantically scrambling to appease you, gibbering that your satisfaction and happiness is their only goal. The exultant, Conan-like feelings of conquest and domination this discovery engendered in me was like the boring grownup equivalent of a speedball.

If I were to deliver a birthday blessing to my beloved sister it would be the opposite of that apocryphal Chinese curse about interesting times: May all your problems be boring. Her birthday and mine come around the same time of year, but she’s twenty years younger, so as I am sliding inexorably into let’s call it late middle age she’s coasting into the long, placid plateau of the thirties and forties, a couple of decades when, barring fluke disasters and crises, life is relatively stable. We should appreciate, if not exactly enjoy, these boring grownup problems while we can. They are, at least, the problems of engaging with the world and all its bullshit—its errands and paperwork, administrative scams and hassles. Because I’m already getting uneasy twinges and intimations of the next set of problems, which are far graver and even more boring. Long conversations are coming, quite a few of them, about chronic pain and conditions, injuries that never quite heal, aches and edemas and discolorations, tests and specialists and diagnoses, stretches and exercises and prescriptions. There will be sciatica, arthritis, restless leg syndrome, melanoma, hip replacements, mastectomies, diseases named after Germans, and medications with long prickly names much less cool and euphonious than the fun, dangerous drugs of youth. Complaining about your disintegrating body seems to be like recounting your dreams or describing TV shows from childhood: stupefying when other people do it but fascinating when it is you. It must be, in its way, as fascinatingly repulsive as the transformations of adolescence, the hair and sweat and stench and discharge, a Cronenbergian horror story of which you are the unhappy protagonist. Until the day comes when they put you in a home and take your pants away and you’re no longer allowed what you’ll only realize too late was the privilege of having your own problems to solve.

Somone with an interesting problem. (Alien Cubed, 1992)