“What do you mean ‘He’s Vanished’?” I asked.
“We just haven’t seen him,” came the polite but embarrassed reply.
“Do you mean since lunch — or for weeks?”
“It’s been days since he showed up. Honestly, we have no idea where he is or if he’s ever coming back.”
Fortunately, neither I nor the floor manager at Target — the person I was speaking with — were particularly concerned.
Having followed the website’s instructions, I was merely trying to track down the Consumer Cellular representative so my mother could switch cell phones.
Apparently, this was a specialized area no one else in the sprawling store was trained for, so we left empty-handed.
It had been that kind of day, right from the beginning.
The film Dune — the 1984 David Lynch version — begins with the Princess Irulan telling us:
“A beginning is a very delicate time”
I definitely agree, yet in my experience, more than being delicate, the more accurate adjective is “Awkward.”
That’s why I’ve made Awkward Beginnings the theme for this month’s new meditation HERE.
In some ways, I’ve come to anticipate this, even telling my graphic designer that every project I’ve uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing has invariably required several rounds of tweaks.
Somehow the trim is off by 1/32 of an inch, the spine too wide, or an illustration mysteriously too low in resolution.
You can’t order a print copy until the Layout Editor approves your upload — and then it takes hours, sometimes a full day, for a human to manually confirm.
Unfortunately, we didn’t even get that far, derailed by a comedy of publishing errors.
Part of the reason I chose Awkward Beginnings as this month’s theme is that I’m in the middle of launching several things.
Chief among them are my podcast and the wellness app, along with officially launching my mother’s Etsy store (if I can just find time to list enough items).
I’ve taken to heart a passage from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks where he asks the reader:
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
He goes on to say that:
”It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal.”
I think all of us know that feeling of waiting in the wings for that perfect cue to step on stage — a moment that, unfortunately, almost never arrives.
I had warned Tilman, my brilliant young designer, that the Amazon upload process always comes with a few snags and delays seemingly built into it.
We were, however, stopped by an even earlier hurdle: the ISBN number.
What is an ISBN?
An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a unique 13-digit identifierused worldwide to distinguish each version of every published book.
It’s basically the book’s fingerprint — except unlike your fingerprint it costs $125 from a website called Bowker.
A few days before we began setting things up, I was pleasantly surprised to discover I had unassigned ISBN — no doubt bought for some forgotten project I must have ghostwritten or edited years ago.
I entered all the new data, delighted at my good fortune — that is, until the next day when Amazon stopped me dead in my tracks.
Turns out it was actually assigned to a small project I did years ago, and therefore a totally new number was indeed required.
Editing the data for the old number and entering the new one took barely twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, getting the two systems to communicate can take anywhere from one to five business days.
Until then, we’re just hovering … an awkward beginning, indeed.
Given the theme, I can think of no better book for this month’s Transformation Book Club than Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.
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Bird by Bird is an almost infinitely quotable book about the human condition, often focused on taking those brave first steps.
Lamott shares how this idea inspired the book’s title:
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day.
We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.
Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said,
“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
Despite the fact that he told me it would take 1-5 days for the ISBN communication to get sorted out, Amazon rep #3 did offer me a useful hack.
If I temporarily selected the book as low content (meaning a blank book), the Layout Editor would work its magic.
Sure enough — those margin problems are there (see below), poetically described as “insufficient gutter.”
Have I mentioned… Beginnings are an Awkward Time?
Anne Lamott writes that:
“Almost all good writing begins
with terrible first efforts.
You need to start somewhere.”
What’s more unnerving is the thought, as Burkeman writes, that “You might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else.”
An Awkward Beginning, in other words, might just be a polite way of acknowledging that it’s really an entirely Awkward Journey from start to finish.
Still, if we’re willing to truly embrace that, it can be profoundly liberating.
The Target floor manager warned us that something similar had happened at the other two stores within a 20-mile radius, suggesting we might need to cross the state line to find a non-vanished representative.
Instead, the next day we set out determined to find a standalone Consumer Cellular store, one that was its own proud retail location.
Once we arrived — Vlad patiently waiting in the car — the heavily tattooed clerk surprised us by urging her not to switch.
The phone advertised as “senior friendly” was vastly inferior to her iPhone, plus she’d also incur an extra expense since she was already on my sister’s family plan.
Basically, there was no advantage to switching and two clear downsides.
Sometimes a non-beginning can also be a very awkward time.
Burkeman concludes that:
If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.
In short, everyone is more or less winging it — or as Indiana Jones says in Raiders of the Lost Ark:
“I dunno, I’m making this up as I go“
In the postscript following my signature photo with Vlad, I’m debating whether to include the link to pre-order the new journal at the supporter level.
You see, while writing this, my tech guy has sent me two emails with error messages about “establishing a database connection.”
Sigh …
I think it’s worth the risk, however.
After all, we live in a world where even fingerprint-level unique ISBNs get doubly assigned — and Consumer Cellular salesmen simply vanish.
Rather than living my life as a dress rehearsal, I’m willing to dance clumsily with uncertainty.
Even taking it bird by bird, I’m embracing that beginnings are always — and unavoidably — a little bit (and sometimes even very) awkward.
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