Little Boxes

I've been traveling a lot lately, and one of the few positive things I can say about it, is that it's given me more time for reading. Of course, once the captain tells us that we can use all approved electronic devices, it's time again to go back to the coal mines, but those glorious moments between shutting the hatch and then, have been priceless.

Now I'm not one to read celebrity autobiographies. In fact, I don't think I've ever voluntarily picked up an issue of People. But one actor that I really like wrote a book that I decided to read. It's called "Life's That Way" by Jim Beaver. I know him as Bobby on Supernatural, but he also had a major role in Deadwood. The book is wonderful, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you've lost someone special. It's about his wife's battle with cancer and death, and then the months that followed. Which was compounded by the fact that he had a 2-year-old autistic daughter.

Anyway, the book isn't completely depressing. He's got sort of a raw, sarcastic sense of humor, which comes through, especially when it comes to some of the bizarre things that happen during times like these.

One in particular has to do with all of the necessary paperwork. I laughed, because I remembered how awkward some of this was, and believe me, the government does nothing to make it easier. For example, on most of the forms, you have to indicate your marital status. But there are only two boxes -- married or single. Beaver had the same reaction that I did. I didn't get unmarried, so that seems like the appropriate box to check is the married one. But in the eyes of the law, the other party is gone, so I'm not married anymore. But I certainly didn't feel single. Single denotes some type of carefree, dating person and that clearly wasn't me. It wasn't like I had any choice in the matter, but nowhere on any of the docs was there room to explain this.

And it's not just awkward for people who have lost their spouses. I have a friend who was legally married in California before Prop 8 kicked in. They had an official ceremony, have a marriage certificate, rings and even a video of their wedding. But here in Texas, the government doesn't recognize that. So does he have to answer "single" when he completes forms?

I sort of get that you have to have ways to categorize people. After all, part of my job is creating personas that take a mass of information and boil it into one particular segment, thus destroying all the individual bits of a person in the name of trying to understand what a group of these people have in common and how you would want to talk to them. And I suppose for a census, it's good to know how many men, women and children, there are in a specific country and what ages they are. But when you reduce the categories so that not everyone fits into one, that seems more than a little lame. People are way more complex than a series of little boxes.