Personal essays
On moving past a first encounter to a regular thing.
Pilots
To be fair, it was probably an awful first date for her as well.
I set my coffee cup down and sat across from her.
She squinted at me and asked two quick questions and I knew before I had taken my first sip that she was incredibly wrong for me.
It seemed to take her another half hour to figure out that I was not at all what she was looking for.
That’s probably not true. Most likely, she knew that right away but was deciding if she could hold her nose to the things she didn’t like.
Fortunately, for both of us, she couldn’t.
As I slip into my mid to late sixties I question the decision to shrug and swipe right and end up here in the first place.
Maggie told me I definitely shouldn’t talk about that date or any date here - and I won’t - I just was thinking about first dates.
Maggie will sometimes recommend a television series to me.
“Don’t just watch the pilot,” she’ll say.
It’s not that she dislikes pilots, she just doesn’t find them to be a good representation of the show.
Unlike Maggie, often if I don’t get past those first few minutes in a pilot, I’m not staying for the show.
The Engine
For someone who watches a television series, a pilot is kind of like a first date.
You know pretty quickly whether you’re coming back to watch more.
Are the characters likeable, is the world believable, and do you enjoy spending time immersing yourself in the story?
Sometimes it can be a very small thing.
There’s something you bump on. That is to say, there’s something that takes you out of the story and makes you drop your suspended disbelief on the floor.
For the showrunner, the pilot isn’t the first date.
When they have an idea for a show they go out on many first dates to try to sell the show to someone who will put up the money to make the show.
They stand in front of a room filled with executives and paint a picture of the look and feel of the show.
They might describe the first episode in depth.
Someone in the room will ask them about the arc of the first season.
It’s a television show. It will be binged or released weekly for some number of episodes. What is it that keeps the viewer coming back each week? What about the second season? The third? The fourth?
They’re asking, what is the engine of the show. What is it that propels the show from episode to episode and keeps viewers coming back?
I talk to my friend Kevin three mornings a week. We have coffee together while we FaceTime so long as neither of us is traveling.
I met him forty-five years ago. I think I walked into his dorm room one day when he and his roommate David were playing backgammon and listening to a Monty Python record.
I may be misremembering.
It doesn’t matter. That was the pilot. It wasn’t typical of where the show would go.
Well, maybe it was for a while, but after forty years there’s a bigger engine that keeps our relationship moving forward and fills three episodes a week.
Not much left
I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.
Today is my sixty-seventh birthday.
It is the second time my birthday has fallen on a Tuesday since I started writing these weekly newsletters. It’s the first time my age has been a prime number since I started writing them.
I thought of the book “4000 Weeks”.
We can’t think in big numbers. It doesn’t mean anything to say that we live, on average, until we’re eighty years old.
Whether or not that’s true, who can picture what eighty years means?
But we can all imagine a week. Every time I write a newsletter, another week has gone by.
So this small thing known as a week, using a back of the napkin estimate of 50 weeks a year, we have about 4000 of them.
It’s not a huge number.
I calculated how many weeks I’ve lived so far. It’s 3493.57.
I have just over 500 left to live. Even using 50 weeks a year, that’s 3350 gone and 650 left to live.
I’ve written 340 newsletters. I have less than twice the span of this newsletter left to live.
Does that change the way I live? Should it?
Here are my plans for my birthday.
I’m meeting a friend I’ve known about fifteen years for coffee. Then I’m meeting a friend I’ve known about forty years for coffee. Then I’m going to yoga with one of my favorite teachers.
This afternoon I’m making pizza to bring over to a potluck at a friend’s house. This is a new friend. Someone I’ve known for less than six months.
Television has gotten better since I was younger - much better. I’ll continue to watch it more than I should.
Dating has gotten much worse than when I was younger. I somehow thought dating in my sixties would be easier. I’ll continue to swipe right more than I should.
But mostly, I’ll continue to take time for friends.
I reconnected with two friends this week that I haven’t talked to in way too long. I reached out and we picked up like no time had passed.
That’s what a solid engine does.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 340. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe