I mentioned how much of an insensitive clod I am before, but here’s another example. I hid this away for many weeks, but the guilt became too great for me to keep it a secret.

I arrive at the airport over two hours before my flight to California to visit the Doolies. There was a time before when I arrived at the airport at the last possible minute, sprinting to the gate moments before they closed the doors. I can’t seem to do that anymore. I somehow acquired a quite retched anxiety problem, probably something to do with too much caffeine and not enough sleep.[1]

I stop at the computer kiosks outside of the ticket terminal to print out my boarding pass for the flight. I think how much it’s going to suck when Normals figure out how to use the kiosks to change their airplane seats. As it is now, there is usually space to move my seat to the front of the plane (the front is always better, since you receive service first, and leave the airplane faster after landing) using the difficult-to-use up arrow to scroll through the airplane’s seating map. After printing the boarding pass for seat 7F, I head toward the escalators leading to the gates.

An old man stops me. He wears a fedora and an old-fashioned gray suit, and carries a small black carryon bag in his left hand. Gray stubble covers his cheeks and chin. “Excuse me,” he says. “Do you by any chance happen to have a pen I can borrow?”

Regular readers know that I most certainly do have a pen. I carry my Moleskine and a pen[2] with me everywhere I go to provide the illusion of writerhood. After thinking for a moment, I shrug and apologize, informing the old man that, actually, I do not have a pen.[3] After brushing off the old man, I make haste to the escalator to ensure that I get to the gate at least an hour and a half before they board, the only sure way to avoid any anxiety-based issues.

It doesn’t take me long to question why I lied to the old man. He didn’t seem the thieving type, and, given how much time I had to spare, I was not in that much of a hurry. Clearly, I have some serious issues when it comes to helping people. I trace most of those issues to growing up and living in NYC. There has been much written about how impersonal the city is. There are good reasons for this. NYC is very small and many people live there. If you don’t create space for yourself, the city quickly swallows you. What this means practically is that you divide the world into two parts: those people you know and those people you don’t. The people you know, you are polite and kind to. The people you don’t know, you ignore.[4] There’s an entire world out there of people who are kind and helpful to strangers, i.e., people they don’t even know!

So, this experience with the old man got me thinking: Do I really want to be the type of person who lies to an old man about a pen? I haven’t hit upon an answer to that question, but by calling myself an “insensitive clod,” I am moving in a certain direction.

[1] As an embarrassing example of this, the Doolies and I visited Dallas over the Christmas weekend. At the end of the weekend, Doolies drove us back to the airport, with her middle sister and grandmother in the car. She had driven her parents to the airport that morning, and she said it had only taken her fifteen minutes. We left about an hour before our flights, and there was an unexpected traffic jam. As we sat waiting for the cars in front of us to move, I glared at the Doolies, continuously pointing out how if we had left earlier and left ourselves more time, I wouldn’t be sitting in the back seat, anxiously staring at the clock and the traffic and back at the clock, slowly growing insane with worry, my mind endlessly spinning on fantasies of missing my flight and being stuck in Dallas overnight (I’ve found from experience that the fantasies of missed flights are always worse than the reality—but this wasn’t a rational fantasy). I was quite rude in front of the Doolies’ sister and grandmother, and when we arrived, I didn’t give her a goodbye kiss, instead choosing to run through the terminal. I made it in plenty of time (even having fifteen minutes to grab food), but, thanks to my anxiety, I was a monster during the ride. The Doolies brought up NEQID often after that, and I’ve since added controlling my anxiety it to my list of things that’ll make David better.

[2] The Doolies provides me with ample free medical-sample pens to choose from. Finding the perfect pen is a more difficult process than it sounds. There are two major considerations in reviewing pen freebies: First, there is the writing quality of the pen. I prefer thin blue-ballpoint pens, and am very careful to avoid ballpoint pens that spot after continued use. Second, there is the size of the pen. Since I carry the pen in my pocket almost all the time, it has to be thin and short, with a good-size clip that keeps most of the pen inside my pocket.

In my pocket at the airport I carry a blue-ballpoint pen with a NuvaRing® advertisement. The scientific parenthetical provides the pharmaceutical description: “etonogestrel/ethinyl estradiol vaginal ring.” The website referenced on the pen (www.nuvaring.com) confirms my suspicion: NuvaRing, a female contraceptive, two inches in diameter, remains in the vaginal wall for three weeks and releases a low dose of hormones that prevent pregnancy. This has me thinking that maybe I should include a third step in the pen-selection process: reading the advertisement to ensure it’s not too disgusting or weird to carry it in my pocket.

[3] At the time, I did not wonder if he saw the pen sticking out of my pants pocket. I do wonder now, as my pen, depending on my choice of pants, sometimes peeks further out of my pants pocket, especially after sitting, which I had been doing while driving to the airport.

[4] When I arrived at college, one of the biggest surprises was how rude my friends thought I was. Their biggest example was that I would not hold the door open for the person behind me. If the door was closing, I either slithered through the opening or pushed it open only wide enough to fit. I never bothered to hold it open for the next person to get through. I had learned this growing up, and I had never questioned it until I was in college.