As a result of a conversation with a friend:
The Founding Fathers and Social Media
Franklin would have loved it.
Adams would have been appalled.
Jefferson would have tweeted under a fake name.
Washington would have used it to meet women.
Meanwhile, Abigail would have been blogging for the Huffington Post.
At midnight last night, we rang in the new year with a group hug and good wishes. The turn of the year is my favorite holiday, as we take the arbitrary and make it sublime.
I don’t have many resolutions, but there is a direction I want to go in. Tendencies I want to encourage, and a mindset I’d like to buy into. I think concrete declarations of intent are important, but perhaps more lasting for me is the idea that I am heading toward balance in all things, and moving the tipping point to a place where I am taking care of myself more assiduously.
Creating, doing, caring, making, and loving. That’s what I want 2013 to be about.
We’re decorating for the holidays, my roommate and I, the best way we know how. (Sparked by a picture my aunt left on my Facebook wall.) It leans a bit to the left, but all great trees are lopsided. I don’t know how many books are in it, I forgot to count as it went up. It’s not bad at all for a first effort, if I do say so myself.
I think this is a fine tradition. It’s a multi-denominational booktree, with many different genres represented. There are many wonderful books in the tree, that now shall not be read until after New Year’s. A bunch of them were either presents or recommendations from friends, family, and loves, and something about that just makes it feel like the holidays.
We’re going to decorate it more, with twinkle lights and ribbon, and presents underneath. But for now, here she is! The 2012 Book Fort Bookmas Tree!
(Donations to future trees will, of course, be gratefully accepted.)
I am deep in the throes of NaNoWriMo. It’s been a number of months since I had the time and the discipline to write every day, and I am wallowing in putting words on paper. You know the feeling of sitting down in a hot bath, or snuggling into a puffy white bed at the end of the day? That’s how it feels to be writing. Like looking over the most glorious vista you can imagine, drinking it in and knowing you’re part of it at the same time.
The draft I’m working on is pretty linear. I know I want to get the protagonist from known point A to known point K, and I know approximately how long that’s going to take in the timeline of the story. I also know where all the intermediate points are going to be, pretty much. That’s a lot of the bare bones of plottaken care of, which is unusual for me. My plot normally follows what’s happening emotionally with my characters, I fear I manipulate them terribly most of the time.
Not so, now. Now this draft is all about writing out the emotional journey that mirrors the physical one this character is taking. It’s a surprisingly nice way to work, I have to say. I know, Columbus discovers America. But each project is different. Most of the time, plotting beforehand is anathema to me because I will lose interest if I know what’s coming too far in advance. But for something like NaNoWriMo, where word count reigns supreme, structure is valuable. That remains one of the reasons I picked this novel to draft in the first place.
What is surprising me is how well I’m adapting my writing process to the organic structure of the story. It’s not boring me, it’s actually sparking realizations and epiphanies about what needs to happen next. The only downside to all of this is that sometimes things don’t fit because of the demands or the plot. And when they don’t fit, all I can do because of the word count demands is put CX LATER in brackets after the problem sentence and keep going. I don’t know what will have to bend in the end, the plot or the story, but I can’t worry about it now.
NaNoWriMo started yesterday. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, this is National Novel Writing Month. It’s 50,000 words in the shape of a novel in 30 days. I don’t remember how many years it’s been going on, but NaNo is ubiquitous on the internet these days. Are you writing? Do you think you’re going to finish? What are you writing? Are you planning beforehand or aren’t you? Did you (sotto voce) start early?
My answers, in order: Yes, yes, novel-shaped back story for the novel I need to revise starting in December, I know the general contours of things, and I did in fact start 500 words early. Mea maxima culpa.
Here are my thoughts going into it:
So, good luck to all of us! And how fortunate for me that my writing addiction is so productive.
So, I might not have mentioned this before, but I live in New York City. It’s a fine place, with many attractive features. It does have its drawbacks, though. Our current mayor is a condescending, if hilarious, weenie. One of the things he’s decided to do, like all Jewish grandparents, is pay attention to what we eat. In a striking blow against stereotype, however, he is very concerned about how much we’re eating, rather than how little.
A ban on selling sodas in quantities greater than sixteen ounces, spearheaded by the mayor, was passed today. It will take effect in six months unless struck down by a judge. Since its existence was announced, a ton of people have become very angry about this. VERY angry. Their personal liberties! Their right to freedom of expression, as measured in beverage size! Their freedoms of choice! New York City is turning into Soviet Russia!
Full story on NYTimes.com here.
Now, bear with me. Technically, this is not a ban on buying soda in quantities greater than 16 ounces in certain outlets. It is a ban on selling soda in quantities greater than 16 ounces in certain outlets. (Specifically movie theaters and restaurants.) If there is a fight here, it is between city government and the outlets that sell beverages. But no. The public has been reeled in by a massive protest led by an industry-financed organization called “New Yorkers for Beverage Choices.” There are so many cognitive dissonances at play here, it’s insane.
(Beverage choice is, of course, a highly important part of any trip to a movie theater. “What kind of fake flavoring am I interested in? Not-at-all-like-an-orange-Fanta? Has-never-been-near-a-lemon-or-a-lime-Sprite? What-the-hell-is-this-shit-Dr. Pepper? Is-only-that-color-because-of-generations-of-pollution-Mountain Dew? How about the classic We-don’t-even-pretend-this-ever-tasted-natural-Coca-Cola?”)
Consumers have always had to operate within the limits that vendors set for them. Vendors in the US have steadily increased portion sizes for years because it boosts revenue, and we are all trained to be obsessed with our culture of choice, with having it our way, with the idea that what we buy is linked to our personal freedoms in some fashion. This is a calculated effort by the vendors who want to sell us things. They’re not giving us choices out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they respect us. They give us choices because the more options we have for what to buy, the more they make. If we don’t want the huge soda, maybe we’ll let ourselves have a smaller one. If we don’t want this piece of plastic crap made in a sweatshop overseas, maybe we’ll want that one. If we have the illusion of control, as measured in options, they will make more money. But the real beauty of this scheme is that we’re so programmed to think that these vendors are on our side, we’ll go to bat for them even when what they want is demonstrably against our better interests. They make their fights our fights, and oh, do we fight them.
This is a perfect example. The restriction would prevent the movie theater from selling you the huge jug of high fructose corn syrup and phosphoric acid at an astronomical markup. The movie theater does not want to do this, because they charge you several dollars more for the jug of soda bigger than your head than they do for the smaller jug, even though the cost increase on the huge jug is pennies, or fractions of pennies, per unit sold. So, seeing that source of revenue decline, they spring into action! Suddenly this is about CHOICE. PERSONAL FREEDOM. APPLE PIE AND THE AMERICAN WAY. THE COMMIES ARE COMING. Except…
Nothing is actually happening to us that we’re going to notice, in the long run. We will quickly get used to the smaller portions. Perhaps we will discover that the two quarts of soda, or even the quart of soda, per person was not really necessary to get us through sitting still for two hours in a movie theater. Maybe we’ll think back and realize we really used to feel gross after the movies. That maybe the sheer quantity of high fructose corn syrup and additives was masking how icky it tasted. Or maybe we’ll really, really miss it, and elect our next mayor based on his very important stance on the beverage-size question. (“Please, sir, may we have some more?”) I don’t know. But I do know that this overreaction is a manipulation by corporations who do not care, based on a mindset that we have been packaged and sold at great cost to our total well-being.
I don’t believe we’re staring down both barrels of a “First they came for the additive-laden, demonstrably unhealthy liquids, and I said nothing” situation. But what I don’t believe even more is that we’re all getting up in arms about large corporations being forced to sell us drinkable chemicals at alarming prices in smaller quantities than they did before. They have so thoroughly taken over the debate over what is right and good in this country it’s really no surprise to me that as a nation we’re overweight, unhealthy, and miserable.
A hundred years ago we needed the Progressives to mandate air shafts in tenement buildings and factory labor laws so that unscrupulous rich people would be forced to stop abusing those who could not protect themselves. Corporations have even fewer scruples than landlords and factory owners did a hundred years ago. And somebody has to make laws restricting how they may or may not fuck us over. Despite the propaganda, that really does have to be the government, as the government’s purpose is to make laws for the benefit of the citizenry.
Argue all you want about whether this ban is going to actually reduce obesity, as our condescending weenie of a mayor would have us believe. I don’t know, one way or another. Maybe the whole thing could have been avoided if Bloomberg had started out banning sodas larger than 32 ounces. Maybe we all would have been reasonable enough to say “Why yes, I don’t need to drink more than a quart of liquid! A cup of soda only as big, not bigger than, my head is quite enough, thank you!” I know. I’m a hopeless idealist.
But people should stop flocking to the sides of corporations against the government without actually thinking about why the government might want to curtail certain actions of corporations as being against the public good. Just accept as an article of faith that a large, money-making corporation is going to do all in its power to keep making money, at your expense, and you have no control. And they are NOT on your side. These are companies that have to be forced, by regulation, to notify us when children’s toys are found to contain known chemical toxins. (This might bring up the question of how the already known chemical toxins got to be in the children’s toys in the first place, but I digress.)
You have a greater degree of control over your elected officials. Keep that in mind when you go to the polls in November.
Hi, teenage girl.
I remember that. Oh, my god, I was miserable. I felt like every other person wanted something different, and all I wanted was someone to love me. Me, for who I was right at that SECOND, and then a second later when I was somebody else.
It was a mess in my head. Sometimes I wanted to punch the wall, sometimes I wanted to break down and cry. I had all this power, and no place to put it. I wanted sex, I wanted rock ‘n’ roll, I wanted to throw myself onto a motorcycle and ride. I wanted to curl up on the couch watch a Disney movie, holding a stuffed animal.
I never knew if I was doing it right. Whatever “it” was. My parents didn’t understand, because nobody could understand what it was like in here. The confusion, the aching, the extreme joy and the bitter darkness. It was all in there, and I was so small. How could I hold it all? Where did it come from?
One minute I was a pretty happy kid, wandering along, and the next I was this freakish thing with body parts I didn’t know how I felt about, and desires I really didn’t want to think about, because who the hell was I, anyway? Suddenly I was careless and argumentative, and I didn’t call when I was supposed to, and I stayed out too late, and I kissed people because it seemed like a good idea at the time, even when I knew it wasn’t, and all the time it felt like someone was shrieking at me. Only that was me, too.
And all the time, the question, the brutal, endless question: Who was I going to be when it was over?
Because intellectually, I knew this was only going to last a few years. I was a teenager. My brain was crazy. But I was so alone. Sometimes it felt likeI was trapped in a box, only the box was still myself.
It was very lonely. I didn’t know how to talk about it, because it sounded stupid. Sometimes people were assholes to me, and it felt awful. But I thought if I said anything, my parents, or my teachers, or my friends would just tell me not to let it bother me. But it did. Oh, it did.
This is going to last a few years, babe. I’m sorry. I really am. We all go through it. Every adult around you was a teenager once, and honestly, they just want it to be easier for you than it was for them. That’s what they’re trying to say, whenever they give you advice you don’t want, or yell at you because you didn’t call when you were supposed to, or your grades dropped, or you started to scream at them when they asked you if you did your laundry.
They just want it to be easier for you. They just want you to avoid as much pain as possible, because they love you more than they ever thought they could.
But don’t listen to them. Listen to me. I did this ten years ago, and I was a lunatic. I have the chops.
You are lonely because you have realized the stunning, terrific weight that is your self. You are like no one else, but you are similar in a lot of ways, so you can build on that if you have to. Maybe you dance. Maybe you draw. You have things you love. Hold on to them. They’re going to save you.
Read books. Go to movies. Listen to music. Do your goddamn homework, do your goddamn laundry. You can be miserable and angry while you clean something. Work with that. Lie on your bed with the pillow over your eyes for five minutes every afternoon and listen to a song or two on your iPod, and just let it all go away.
You’re going to make mistakes and hurt people, you’re going to make mistakes and hurt yourself. Do not make any of these mistakes fatal. I’m serious. Do not drink too much. Do not smoke any pot you haven’t grown yourself. Do not trust the people who know how attractive they are. Band together with the confused ones like you, who are also driven by the things they love.
People are going to want you to do things. It’s okay if you don’t want to do them. Your cousin Miranda, who knows a thing or two, is here to tell you that you don’t have to do them. No matter where you are, or what time it is. Just pick up the phone, and call your dad, and tell him you want to come home. Tell him you need a rescue.
Even if they aren’t good at showing it the way you need them to, there are people who love you so much. Who want to help you more than anything. Who would throw themselves in front of this train if they could, but it’s your train, and your tracks, and I’m afraid no one can cut in on this dance. But they can help you. Let them help you. Let me help you.
You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You’re funny. You’re silly. You’re big. You’re little. You’re graceful. You’re clumsy. You can hurt. You can help. You’re the world. You’re an insignificant speck on a planet that is itself an insignificant speck. But you are the world. And you can make the world better by smiling whenever you can find it in yourself.
You’re going to make it through this. You’ll stop feeling so raw. And you’re going to have fun, too.
Love,
Miranda
Nora Ephron died this week. Our long-suffering correspondent broke the news late Wednesday night, reading it off the BBC app on his phone. He didn’t really know who she was, only that she was a writer and I’m a writer, so maybe I would care. He didn’t expect to have his arms suddenly full of soggy girlfriend, firing quotes at random through her tears.
“Men and women can’t be friends! Don’t cry, shop girl! You were the only person I knew in New York… She wrote my favorite movies,” I wept. Concerned and off-balance, (suddenly crying girlfriends are, I am assured, the worst kind of crying girlfriends) he did the only thing he could think of: he tried a joke.
“Yeah, but she also wrote You’ve Got Mail.” Only too quickly did he realize his mistake.
“That’s one of my favorite movies!”
He says he was about to start in on me about my bad taste in movies, but decided to hug me instead. There was nothing for it. One of my teachers was dead, and I needed to cry.
Nora Ephron taught me about love. She taught me about being a woman in a complicated, post-feminist world that doesn’t know what to do with you, but has a lot of ideas about what you ought to want. She taught me about being a good friend, having lunch, eating ice cream, talking, laughing, but always understanding that another person’s heart is ultimately unknowable, and you can’t really make anyone change. She taught me that being independent was the basic expectation. That you don’t need a relationship, you only want one very very much. You have to be hopeful, and smart, and aware of your choices, and you have to laugh. It’s not all a joke, but most of it can be really fucking funny if you let it.
She also told me you had to write it all down. I can’t say she made me a writer, but she taught me that you have to tell the truth, you have to borrow from life, and she helped me see that you can write the pain and it’ll get easier, that you can write through the joy and let more people share it.
She taught me that you have to pay attention to who drives you crazy and who makes you feel at home, because someone who does both at the same time might be the trouble you don’t want to get out of. She taught me that love is always a possibility, that if you have the feeling it might be love, you get on a plane and fly three thousand miles to find out.
All of these lessons were hidden in her movies. (Some more obviously than others.) Maybe she didn’t intend to teach anybody anything. She was writing for her contemporaries and for the women coming up just after them. Maybe she had no idea that a little girl would watch You’ve Got Mail, Mixed Nuts, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle a hundred times while she was growing up, that she would pore through them for wisdom, because these men seemed like men she wanted to be with, and these women seemed like people she wanted to be.
That girl watched those movies on the couch with her mother, talked about them, quoted them all the time. Each one was a right of passage. (Except Mixed Nuts, which was a fluke, but one of the best flukes in the world.) When she was about to go to college in New York City, she and one of her best friends went into the city for the day and she decided it was the right decision when she saw the Washington Square Arch and realized where she was. She was where Harry and Sally fell in love, where Joe and Kathleen had their bookstores. It was home.
When her mother had cancer and they sat on the couch in more dire straits than they ever thought, out came the Nora Ephron movies. They laughed and cried through them, too, and knew it was going to be okay.
And when I was a young woman in a relationship and realized that I was thinking of these movies as nice fantasies instead of possibilities, I left. And when I was on the edge of something and had the feeling it might be love, I got on a plane and flew three thousand miles to find out.
You need to believe in love, Ms. Ephron told me. That you have power, that you can change your life, and that your life matters to the people who know you. Maybe love is flying three thousand miles, maybe love is carrying a Christmas tree, maybe love is hiding a body disguised as a Christmas tree. But you have to believe that even if it isn’t easy, it can be yours.
I am so sad that this is the end. Sad for the people who actually got to know her, sad for the writing we won’t get to read, and see. But so grateful that she was… that she was. Because she gave me so much. And there’s not much more you can ask of a person than that.
My father is an electrical engineer by training, a computer programmer by profession, and a seriously nerdy man the rest of the time. I mean it, he is the Uber-Geek, the King of the Wonks, the apogee of the odd. If you ask this man for the time, he may very well spend the next twenty minutes explaining how clocks work and segue neatly into a discussion of the adoption of the Julian calendar. It will be Interesting. You will be Informed. You will walk away saturated with facts and mildly dazed.
That, in a nutshell, is my childhood. Anything I wanted to know about, I asked Dad. He read books about longitude, (that’s where the clock info came from) about pencils, about screwdrivers. Walking the dogs late at night, he would point the stars and the planets out to me. I asked him questions about anatomy, submarines, space, nuclear reactors, Batman. He answered them all.
He is a font of information, and as he will be the first to tell you, anything he doesn’t know he will cheerfully make up. (I hasten to add, his guesses are very educated.) Dad has weaponized these tendencies in recent years with the acquisition of an iPad, with which he is able to become an instant expert on anything at all.
As I’ve gotten older, my questions have become more complicated. I want to know how the heart works, but in a less practical, more philosophical sense. Even my dad doesn’t pretend to have the answers to those. It’s been scary, growing up past the point where Daddy could tell me how everything worked. Also, realizing that I know more about poetry, art history, and the publishing industry than he does was something of a shock. (An embarrassingly recent shock, at that.)
My father isn’t perfect, obviously. He’s rough around the edges. We all are. But he has the best heart. He would drive anywhere for me, for one of my friends, for our family. I have always known that he loves me.
When I was little, he read me books at bedtime. He read me the first three Dragonriders of Pern books, he read me the Narnia books, he read me Sherlock Holmes stories, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He read me Chapter 7 of The Once and Future King approximately six hundred times. (I loved Chapter 7 the best.) During a few very memorable, very special months, he read Lord of the Rings out loud to my mother and me. Gandalf will always sound like my father, no matter how many times I watch the movies.
He would discuss the finer points of steam trains with me for hours, courtesy of my sincere love for Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. The Way Things Work and Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections were as familiar and comforting bedtime-reading as those illustrated books retelling Disney movies. My dad knew things, and still does. He played Myst and Riven with me sitting on his lap. He played submarine commander simulator games with me hanging out over his shoulder, offering “helpful” suggestions like “Ping them!” Yes, give away your position to the enemy! I knew exactly what I was doing.
A lot of my life has been like that. I know exactly what I’m doing, and Dad just lets it ride. He knows that I’m going to make mistakes, no matter how much he’d like to shield me from them. So I’ll make them, and I’ll recover, smarter and stronger than before, because that’s who he trusts me to be.
When I was 13, we started going to the movies. Throughout high school, I think we saw every silly action movie and superhero flick that Hollywood could throw up onto the big screen. I don’t think I can put into words what that did. Maybe it’s a post for another day. But where so many girls I knew found their relationships with their fathers put under stress by adolescence and impending maturity, I went to the movies with my dad, and we talked in the car each way, and we sang songs. And while some things change, some things are always going to stay the same. He’s still my favorite date. I’m still his little girl. I’m just a young, independent woman at the same time. Because that’s who he trusts me to be.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. We have tickets to the midnight show of The Dark Knight Rises. I’ll even buy the popcorn.
I thought a little positivity was called for. Behold! My reading for the week:
I abandoned The Needle in the Blood, by Sarah Bower, halfway through. I just wasn’t in the mood for melodramatic, steamy historical fiction set in Pre-Medieval England, following the creation of Bayeux tapestry by way of one of its embroiderers. Instead, I turned to The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak. Melodramatic, steamy historical fiction set in Tsarist Russia, following the reign of Catherine the Great from the point of view of one of her spies. I’m liking it very much so far. I had a short, but passionate affair with the Empress of All the Russias last year, reading three biographies in quick succession. I enjoy historical fiction more when I know some of the source material.
Once this is done, I want to read Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. I couldn’t really get into those books as a child, I think they were a little bit too fantastical for me at that age. I loved whimsy, but it had to be a little more firmly grounded in reality for me. Or, at least, mythology I understood. I had the Greeks and the Romans down pat, but Celtic was out of my orbit.
After that, I think the last book I want to read this week is City of Light by Lauren Belfer. I’m about 15% through it, according to my Kindle. It’s this really interesting bit of historical fiction about Buffalo, New York during the Gilded Age years as electricity is becoming important. I like the characters.
That’s my stack for the week. I wish I’d thought to take a picture!
