Fun-Scary

by Betsy Aaron

Maybe it’s the influence of Mercury in retrograde, when things from the past purportedly pop up, or perhaps it’s my current search for work, which compels me to waste time daily by checking out my horoscope on as many sites as it takes until I find an affirming message, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my early days when I worked as a freelance writer/producer for many cable networks.

I worked most happily at Nickelodeon as part of a stellar creative team and what made it so rewarding–believe me, it was not the money (I wrote one :30 for Nick-At-Nite that ran for a year and I was paid $300 for it!)– was that I always asked to think and do my best.

One of the writers there shared his formula for success: happy-sad. Everything he did made viewers laugh but also invited them to connect in a heartfelt way. Since then, I’ve often used happy-sad to inform my commercial work and whenever appropriate, I’ve passed it on.

I am re-entering the world of broadcast media after a hiatus and the process has been daunting. I’ve had to do a lot of soul-searching about the choices I’ve made and what I want to be doing next. In the course of this exercise, I’ve been able to identify my own personal formula — which I call fun-scary.

More often than not, I’ve lived without a safety net. I’ve said yes to lots of risky projects and ventures and I’ve had to wonder whether or not I am allergic to security and routine. What propels me is curiosity, challenge, the desire for experience, the same things that get me to sit still long enough to enter the fiction zone.

Writing is probably the most fun-scary of experiences. To the list I would add: launching new cable networks with crazy deadlines, and sometimes for crazy people. Swimming in the ocean is fun-scary too. One minute you’re floating on your back, the next, you narrowly miss taking a pounding in a crashing wave or you suddenly notice that you’ve been carried out by a riptide. Delight, meet terror. The first time I did a headstand in yoga was fun-scary, and it made me laugh out loud. First-time experiences often deliver the jolt of fun-scary. Some people call this beginner’s mind, it’s a state of focus, clarity and open-mindedness that guides you — without the negative expectation that might come from past experience, towards a successful outcome.

I recently had a new sexual experience, which, at this point, I didn’t think was still possible. I don’t mean to be a tease but further details would definitely be a case of over-sharing. It was completely fun-scary– but alas, in this context, newness has the shortest of shelf-lives.

I would have to add India to the top of my fun-scary list. I had no frame of reference for it and no expectations; every second of it was new and beyond my imagination.

The first day of kindergarten: fun, not scary. A life-threatening disease: scary, not fun. Putting stuff out there on this blog: fun-scary.

Caretaking

by Betsy Aaron

Situations-Wanted Ad: Non-abstemious agnostic wants to live like Agnes Martin—but not during that spell when she had to work as a dishwasher. I’ve already done the shit jobs: picking out pubic hairs from motel bathtubs, selling marked-down bras and girdles to jumbo-size women, working overtime for coke fiends who used the business of documentary film production for cover.

Art History

by Betsy Aaron

My neighbor is an artist and I’ve been walking my dog Vera past her door daily looking for evidence of how she lives. I’m new here now but no longer young. When I was, I lived in the same neighborhood but it was different, so even though my first address in this city was only a few blocks from my current sublet situation, things feel foreign. I find comfort in still being able to hear Ukrainian spoken at newsstands, in the exchanges of landlords who greet the day by stepping out to sweep their portion of sidewalk clean, and on church steps that are crowded each Sunday, despite the growing population of atheists who sleep into the late afternoon and then emerge to observe their ritual of brunch.

The prevailing street style is Ramones meets vintage, just as it was when Joey could be seen skulking around, though there was no street named for him and if there had been, I would not have explored it because even though this neighborhood is now full of bars and boutiques and salons manned by young Japanese hairstylists, I first knew it as a place safe only for drug dealers. Like so many others, I’d come from a different culture, in my case, via Long Island Railroad. I was a recent college graduate, numb over the death of my father. Though he often told me that I had common sense, I had no idea how to care for myself. I loved my father but I often wished that I had been born into a family of artists like that of my neighbor.

In the time that she has resided at her present address, I’ve had seven— excluding an all expenses-paid summer-long residency at a five-star Italian hotel courtesy of a client whom I despised, nine months in a corporate flat in London that caught fire twice, and the six months I spent sleeping on a friend’s living room couch while I gave Los Angeles a go.

Let Me Know

by Betsy Aaron

What makes a man,
who becomes a woman
with no biological clock,
tick?