The Art of Living Other People's Lives Read online

  “I’m familiar with great writing, creativeness, and passion, and I know that’s what I can offer you,” I responded. He perked up in his chair, then asked the question I knew was coming all along: “Why underwear, Greg?”

  I looked around the apartment one more time, taking in all the extravagant home goods and furniture I’d never seen before in real life. If that was what caring about underwear could get a person, then underwear was what I’d dedicate myself to.

  I don’t remember most of what I said, but the opening line of my response was, “Because underwear is at the core of every man.” From there I spoke about how underwear, unlike other fashion items, is the first and last article of clothing a man interacts with in his day. I added that like a man, underwear could be so many things at once; soft and comfortable, yet sturdy and ready for whatever grueling tasks may come along. It was shocking how quickly I was able to throw the false sentiments together and how many metaphors came pouring out of me. It must have worked because Nicholas stood up and asked me to follow him into the other room.

  He pulled two chairs up to a desk with a computer on it and asked me to join him in taking a look at the website. Bobby brought us bottles of sparkling water from the kitchen and set them down on two white coasters. It was clear Nicholas had loosened up almost immediately after my impromptu underwear monologue.

  “You’re going to love the design,” he said, giddy for the page to load.

  Once the website loaded we were greeted by a large image of an oiled-up man with a ripped six-pack and nothing on except for a type of underwear I’d never seen. The back resembled a woman’s thong and the front looked like the mesh bags high-school gym teachers use to carry around balls. As Nicholas scrolled through the site, more images appeared of chiseled men in underwear that looked like nothing I’d ever come across in stores. Some looked like speedos and others were practically see-through.

  “A lot of images on the homepage,” I said.

  “Well you’ve got to give the men what they want,” Nicholas responded. “Draw them in with the bulge then inform them of the style and fit.” He laughed.

  “The gist of the job,” Bobby added, “is actually wearing and reviewing the underwear, but also writing feature stories, securing interviews with the models, and sourcing the images.”

  My lack of immediate enthusiasm must have been obvious because Nicholas turned to me and asked, “You’re gay, aren’t you?” as bluntly as he’d posed his earlier questions.

  Once again, my answer turned into something much more philosophical than it needed to be. I explained that I wasn’t gay, but that the beauty of fashion, and especially men’s underwear, is that it transcends gay or straight.

  “But my cousin is gay and we talk about fashion and men’s underwear all the time,” I added at the end. The first part wasn’t a lie, but my cousin and I have never had even one conversation about fashion, and certainly none about men’s underwear.

  I could see the concern on Nicholas’s and Bobby’s faces. “And you’d be okay with creating this kind of content and finding these kinds of pictures?” Nicholas asked.

  I could have told him no and parted ways. If I had gotten any other responses to job applications that morning, I may have; but as it stood, I was days away from rent being due and had an opportunity in front of me. I was too afraid to say no. I looked Nicholas straight in the eyes and said, “Yes, completely comfortable.” Besides, if I got the job, I could just tell people I was a men’s fashion writer and never send them samples of my work.

  I was sent back out to the white couch while Nicholas and Bobby deliberated in the other room. After a few minutes passed they came out and Nicholas threw a pair of black underwear in my direction.

  “If you’re really as interested in underwear as you seem to be, get me two hundred words on this pair by tomorrow afternoon. They’re the new Under Armour briefs, not out on the market yet. Work out in them and make sure you sweat.”

  With that said, we shook hands and I was back out on the street, texting my roommate that I was not only alive, but the owner of underwear that had yet to be released to the public.

  Back at my apartment I studied the underwear in my hands as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, trying to figure out how to make its stitching and spandex-polyester blend sound sexy yet reliable. I spent most of the night writing and rewriting lines about the underwear’s athletic and durable material and masculine waistband. I struggled to seamlessly use adjectives like bold and sleek. I looked up product descriptions of what I imagined to be similar underwear and assumed that the pair I was holding also had antiodor qualities and temperature-controlling fabric.

  I tried the underwear on and paced around my room. I made sure to note that they didn’t bunch up. The breathability seemed good as well. I was too nervous to take any time away from writing to actually work out in them, so I did a few push-ups and ran in place to get the effect.

  I finally shut my laptop at around three in the morning. The two short paragraphs I had written haunted me as I tried to fall asleep. I’d jump up from bed every ten minutes or so to tweak a sentence about the mesh pouch or do more research on the purpose of stretch mobility. It was like forcing myself to speak a new language without knowing what any of the words meant.

  In the morning I woke up groggy and dazed from the night spent staring deep into my computer screen. I immediately opened up my laptop to my underwear review. I read it over once and cringed at the words I’d thrown together. It wasn’t that the review was poorly written. In fact, it sounded great, as if I really knew what I was talking about. This false authenticity made it even worse. After a night of realizing how much I disliked writing about underwear, I now felt like I was mocking Nicholas’s passion by faking my knowledge about what he had built his professional life on.

  I did some research on Nicholas and found that he’d started a number of successful fashion websites prior to his underwear venture. There were pictures of him with celebrities and models all over the Internet. He clearly knew what he was doing. You don’t end up with a bear rug in your apartment by faking your way through life and pretending to be passionate about something as specific as men’s underwear.

  I closed out of my review and opened up Craigslist and a few other job-search sites. Their pages were filled with a ton of brand new listings since I’d looked a couple days ago. I then checked my funds and began crunching numbers. I realized that if I adhered to a strict-enough budget, I’d have just enough to pay the month’s rent and shop sparingly at the grocery store. I’d be able to extend my job search by a week. Two if I gave up a meal a day. It was a risk, but it seemed more realistic than lying my way into a job I had no interest in. Besides, the painstaking hours it took just to make two paragraphs about a pair of underwear I knew nothing about sound authentic left my head spinning.

  When I finally sat down to send an e-mail to Nicholas, I decided I’d be honest. I told him that after sleeping on it, I didn’t feel I was the person he was looking for. I thanked him for the opportunity and the pair of really cool underwear I assumed he didn’t want back. I also sent over the final version of the review I’d written and let him know that if there was anything worth using, he could.

  I decided I’d go for a run to clear my head before diving back into job-search mode. Halfway out the door, I turned back and changed out of the boxers I had on and into the brand new pair I’d spent the night trying to get to know so intimately. I at least had to work out in them and sweat. I owed Nicholas that much.

  Perhaps that made-up Hemingway quote isn’t, “A good writer can fake being an expert in anything.” Maybe instead, it’s something more along the lines of, “A great writer knows when not to fake being an expert.” Either way, underwear would remain to me what it had always been in my adult life: something hidden away in a drawer that I put on and took off and washed without a second thought.

  #Mom

  I always figured the day I started guiding my parents through lif
e would come with old age, when one of them required a diaper or couldn’t be trusted driving at night. But my mother jump-started the process with her interest in social media. I imagine she saw the closing window of opportunity to understand the world’s new mode of communication and made the leap. It was either that or end up like the other half of her generation, driving to the post office twice a week to send something that could have easily been e-mailed. That’s the path my father has chosen. His contacts will forever be a grueling and arduous phone call away, and not the click of a send button on Facebook.

  When my fifty-three-year-old mother first attempted to use social media, it was as if she’d been handed a stack of textbooks written in hieroglyphics and asked to learn their contents. She had no idea where to begin, so she’d call me each night with a long list of questions, such as “What’s the difference between twittering and tweeting?” or “Do I have to be friends with strangers on Facebook?” I’d go through the basics the best I could, though each call would end with my getting frustrated, and her getting frustrated that I was frustrated.

  “I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” she’d groan. “It’s stupid anyway.”

  We’d hang up on each other, agitated and fed up, knowing we’d pick up right where we left off the very next day.

  “I don’t know how you do it every week,” I confessed to my girlfriend, Brittany, a kindergarten teacher. “I can’t even handle a half hour.”

  Despite her frustrations, my mother would pull out her ancient-looking laptop each night and labor tirelessly over her digital identity. She’d sit in the same chair with one finger hovering hesitantly above the keyboard and her eyes scrunched behind reading glasses. My brother, Cole, would text me pictures and we’d laugh together at her struggles. It took her one full week to successfully create a Facebook account, and after all the effort, she forgot the password.

  Eventually, she figured out how to set her profile picture and find friends. Marie Dybec was officially an online presence.

  “But why isn’t anybody liking my statuses?” she’d ask, genuinely hurt.

  “In time they will,” I’d assure her. “Babies don’t come out running.”

  Soon, my mother’s commitment paid off and she showed real progress. I called Cole in shock the day she tweeted her first hashtag.

  “Did you teach her that?” I asked.

  “No. She did it on her own!”

  We were proud, the way parents must be that first time their kid poops in the toilet without help.

  Within the next few months, my mother—the woman who once asked me if the Internet shuts off at night—was managing a personal Facebook page as well as one for her business, a beauty salon she’s owned since she was twenty-three; a Twitter account with a hashtag in almost every tweet; and an Instagram account with a #throwbackthursday photo, guaranteed, each week.

  What started as a stream of blurry pictures of the family dog had transformed into strategically taken selfies with captions like, “Woke up like this,” and updates about “hanging with her bestie.” My friends, mostly the girls, took notice.

  “Your mom is, like, really living life in her twenties right now,” Brittany noted one day. “She’s kind of the perfect millennial.”

  My mother did seem to have more energy. Her jokes were getting funnier. She even acquired two gay best friends that taught my dad how to dance without leaving his stiff, Frankenstein arms at his side. It was as if my mother was growing younger before my eyes.

  I was home for Thanksgiving the night she blurted out, “I’m such a hashtag slut.” Cole and I nearly choked on our food. My father stood speechless behind us, thoroughly confused.

  “My goal is twenty hashtags for one photo,” she continued, the words natural and instinctive.

  I had the urge to cut her off right then and there, making her delete all her accounts and vow to never again share her thoughts online. Though when Cole shot me a smile, I couldn’t help but laugh. Whether we wanted to believe it or not, she was speaking our language. At some point between her first tweet and hundredth selfie, she stopped being just our mom and started becoming a friend (and a guaranteed like on every photo and status we posted).

  Her new knowledge of social media and things like trending topics and viral videos also allowed her to understand my career a lot better. Before her journey into the virtual world, she, like so many baby boomers, had a difficult time understanding how I was supporting myself by doing “Internet things.” Most of her friends and older clients assumed my job as the managing editor of a website was just a hobby, and would inquire about what I actually did for money. Before she understood it herself, her answers would sound like cop-outs, but now she had the ability to give it to them straight. She’d brag about my being verified on Twitter and tell everyone that I basically had full control over what people read online. Of course, mothers are naturals at making their kids’ responsibilities sound slightly grander than they actually are.

  Mothers are also naturals at embarrassing their kids, regardless of how many likes they rack up on Instagram. My mom, in particular, would post at least one naked baby picture of me a month. That might be fine, but for reasons I’ll never understand, a handful of my business acquaintances and friends had begun to follow her. It’s nice to know the guy who interviewed me for a podcast the night before, asking me just hours earlier about being a young professional in digital media, got to wake up to my butt crack on his newsfeed the next morning.

  The day she hashtagged “lumbersexual” under a picture of my dad standing outside, I considered not going home for Christmas. If you’re unaware, lumbersexual is the term used to describe attractive, rugged men who do things like wear flannel and tackle bears in their spare time. In the picture, my father, the fifty-eight-year-old nurse manager, was wearing the only flannel shirt he owned.

  Absurdity became part of my mother’s online brand, though of course she had no clue what a brand even was or that she had one. My mom’s being so active online was as unexpected as it was entertaining for the people who knew her best—mainly because she was truly good at it. She possessed the same lack of self-consciousness that allows children to learn languages so quickly, and people loved it. Soon, she’d become synonymous with social media in my family and throughout her circle of friends.

  One of my good friends, a well-known New York City fashion designer, texted me one night asking if Marie Dybec was actually my mother.

  “Yup, that’s her,” I replied.

  “We’re each other’s Instagram fans,” she wrote back. “Very modern mama.”

  This was coming from a woman who’s been featured on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, and whose job it is to reinvent the concept of modern and turn it into something people can wear. It was the first time I feared my own mother might understand the whole social-media game better than I did.

  I decided to call my very modern mama one night after she posted a picture of her new white leather Chuck Taylors and a long cape-like shirt she purchased after I said it looked like something Kanye West would wear. I felt compelled to tell her how cool she was, and I really meant it.

  She laughed it off. “Trust me, I’m really not trying to be cool. Though, I have to say, it is difficult to find other people my age that really get social media.”

  “So how are you so good at it?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I’m good,” she replied. “To be honest, the only reason I got into it was to connect with you more.”

  It was only a few months earlier that she had called me, doing her best to fight back tears, and explained that building my own life was important, but pointless if I pushed family aside. Admittedly, I’d gone through the first couple of years living on my own using the excuse “sorry, I’m just too busy” more times than the term “broken record” could ever apply to. It was shortly after that conversation that I pulled my head out of my ass and that she showed an interest in social media. I like to think she woke up one morning an
d thought, “Well, if my son’s gone missing I may as well look for him on the Internet. That’s where his kind spend most of their time anyway.”

  “You know, I miss the days when you were oblivious and needed my help,” I told her. “It feels like just yesterday you had trouble turning your computer on. Now you’re completely independent. I think I’m experiencing empty-nest syndrome.”

  “Don’t worry,” she laughed, “I’ll never really understand any of this. No matter how much it seems like I get it.”

  I was home visiting for Christmas a few weeks later when she pulled me aside like she had a burdening secret to get off her chest.

  “This social-media thing is starting to scare me,” she admitted.

  She told me that she had just learned that morning that an old friend had separated from her husband a few months back. It wasn’t so much the tarnished wedding vows that disturbed her, but more so the fact that she never would have known based on this person’s seemingly happy and frequently updated Facebook page.

  For the first time, social media wasn’t the fun, relationship-building activity it had always been for her. It had become something far more complex. Something as capable of dishonesty and deceit as any person walking the streets. In that moment, as she stood in front of me disappointed and confused, moments away from a wave of family members walking through our front door chock-full of Christmas cheer, I felt for her. I had experienced this sort of Internet fallout countless times, and it can take you by surprise.