It's been a little while since my last post, and the reason is that things have been busy, and will continue to be so for the rest of the month. A week ago, my SO and I rented a van and got most of the rest of her stuff over to our new place. She's here for good now, and we are both comfortable and haven't gotten on each other's nerves yet. :)
I spent most of the rest of the week at a conference here in town, which was enjoyable but also challenging as there was plenty of work I needed to do and none of it was getting done at the conference. (Indeed, things at work have gotten quite busy again.) This week coming up I will only be in the office three days, and then two days next week before a presentation I have to give here in town, and then travel and another presentation Thursday. Friday I come home and after that things seem pretty open, which is good.
This weekend is a long one, thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. But I spent essentially all day Saturday doing work to make up for what didn't get done during the past week, and yesterday various errands including helping to clean my SO's apartment. Then a few too many drinks last night left me fairly unmotivated to do much of anything today, beyond lots of reading (though there's something to be said for just reading - I'm nearly through with David McCullough's 1776, which has been pretty engaging). I am going to attempt the gym a little later (won't be my first time hung over at the gym), and then we need to make our weekly trip to the store.
I've been doing decently on my novel, with about 9,200 words currently (word count is really the only way I can think of to assess progress). That's about 450 words per day since the beginning of the year, though I haven't written every day. Some days I write 1,000 words, and other days I just toy with what I've already got. But I do try to at least open up the file and look it over each day.
I have begun looking for jobs but have yet to send my resume out.
I've been doing decently with the gym, though last week I only got there twice. Still, I have set myself the goal of going four times a week, so today being the 21st means I should have gone 12 times this month. If I actually do go today, it'll be the tenth time since December 31st. So not too bad.
Clearly, I've been slacking on blog posts.
All in all, there's a lot going on, but I am hoping for a relatively calm February where I can focus more on my novel, this blog, and my job search. We'll be completely moved in, these presentations will be done, and work should settle back into some kind of routine.
So this was a pretty boring post, I admit. But that's what's happening. I'll try to do one or two more substantive posts this week.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Catastrophe Narrowly Avoided, An Update, And Books About Science
"Catastrophe" may be a bit much, but "major inconvenience" is about right. My SO went to see a movie with a friend tonight, so I came home pondering how to spend my evening: should I go to the gym? cook a nice dinner? read? write? drop some Nyquil? Arriving home at around 6:15 (thanks to a slow Metro ride) I turned the key in the door, only to find that it was still locked. This would have been a complete mystery, except even though I've only been in this apartment for slightly more than a month, I've lived in this building for two and a half years.
I knew exactly what the problem was, and I knew I was probably screwed.
The doors have two locks. Both downstairs and up here, I've only used the bottom lock. However, every two weeks exterminators come through to spray for roaches (all the apartments in the building), and they have a tendency to super-lock everything when they leave. This was quite confusing when it happened to me the first time downstairs because the key to the upper lock was also a building key (i.e. I didn't have a separate key and only by desperately trying all my keys did I get into the apartment).
Well, they must have been here today (I thought they were coming last week, and even left a note for them asking them not to lock the top lock). The problem is that our top lock key is not a building key; our new landlord only gave us one top lock key, and my girlfriend has it.
I muttered a fair number of expletives and then considered my options, which were three:
1. Find the nearest pay phone (since I don't own a cell) and call my girlfriend, hoping her movie hadn't started, and ask her to come home and let me in, thus ruining her evening (and putting a serious crimp in my own). Not a likely course of action unless there was an emergency.
2. Most likely option: go kill some time somewhere and then just meet her at her place when she got out of the movie. I couldn't go to the gym unless I wanted to work out in suit pants, but I could have gone to a restaurant or coffee shop or something (too bad SS is so lacking when it comes to bars - what a perfect excuse). But really, my most likely destination would have been her apartment, and if she hadn't brought her laptop to work I could at least keep myself semi-entertained. It was raining and I wasn't too hot on this option, but I figured this is what it'd be.
3. Get the condo manager to let me in. But this seemed extremely unlikely to happen since the office closes at 6 pm.
I literally ran down to the condo office and was pleased to see the lights still on. Until about a year ago, our condo manager was a bitter, mean old lady who took a personal dislike to me from the get-go because my landlord hadn't explained about the move-in fee. The first time I went in there, she snapped at me for about five minutes before it finally dawned on her that I was ignorant, rather than malicious. Ever after, I would go in there meekly, bowing and scraping, even if just to pick up a package, hoping I could get away without getting barked at.
I didn't meet the new manager until a few weeks ago, but when I did I was extremely impressed. She was polite, professional, and ultra-competent. Thankfully, she was still there at 6:15 tonight, and she sent me back with the key I needed and permission to keep it over the weekend to make a copy. So, evening salvaged. (And I decided in favor of cooking and writing and against the gym - I've been doing pretty darned well with the gym lately and am still on track to go three times this week.)
You know, I actually considered trying to kick the door in when I first encountered the resistance. Rationality quickly prevailed, plus that upper lock is pretty heavy duty - I would have lost the battle. I did kick in the door of the house where I lived my first year of grad school one night, also because I was locked out and no one was home. There the lock was flimsy and it took only two or three tries. It fucked the door up a little, but just a little (the landlord never noticed). Later my housemate told me she'd noticed the damage and assumed I'd done it because I was angry, which to this day I think is a bizarre statement since I got along with my housemates just fine and wouldn't have taken the chance of doing damage without a good reason.
My last year in grad school, when I got locked out, I pulled the screen off the front window and climbed in. Of course this means anyone else might have done so as well, but I shared that apartment with a grad student from Slovenia and between the two of us we had about $84.32 worth of stuff to steal (seriously).
In between I lived in a house with seven people and even if you were locked out the chances of no one being home were minimal. In fact, I vaguely remember being woken up myself once or twice to let in drunken housemates who had misplaced keys (nothing specific, though - I was probably out of it myself at the time).
Anyway, what else is going on?
The Move: We are in the home stretch. A work acquaintance of mine comes Saturday morning to take a good chunk of the furniture out of my SO's apartment. We are taking the day off and renting a van on Monday to move the rest of it. Then it will just be some boxes, lots of clothes, and some cleaning of her old place before the end of the month. I know I'm not alone when I say that I'm looking forward to having this done. But we're both really happy with the new place so far.
SO Family: My girlfriend's grandmother died about a week ago. Her mom was with her grandmother at the time and has just returned home. Everyone, SO included, seems to be handling it very well. I've offered to listen to (or read) anything she wishes to express, and that offer of course extends in perpetuity.
She also needs to inform her family that we are moving in together. The timing is clearly not optimal, but she thinks her mom strongly suspects already that this is about to happen: she keeps asking what my SO will do when her lease expires at the end of the month. My guess is that this will not lead to significant strife. Why? Because her folks frigging love me, that's why!
Work: The situation at work is moving toward a resolution. There is a new player on the scene, and there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. The upshot of those two vague sentences is that things are picking up already, which is sort of too bad because I was enjoying my little breather. Nonetheless, I also enjoy my job, so it's not the worst thing in the world. I am also now officially looking for a new job. (And the reason for the apparent conflict between liking my current job and looking for a new one is that I am term at the current job.) What this means (beyond that I have a resume ready to go and am starting to troll websites) I don't know yet. I may want to send out a string of "hey, how's it going?" e-mails to a few contacts of mine to let them know if they hear of anything, the time for me is now. Everyone says finding a job in D.C. is about who you know, and I do know plenty of folks, so I guess I ought to put them to work.
Writing: I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished so far in terms of writing. I did indeed start my novel, and as of right now I have just under 6700 words. (Not to mention that this is my sixth blog post of the month, and they've all been fairly weighty.) Perhaps more important than quantity is that I feel like the quality so far has been pretty good. I say "perhaps" because it may just be more important to get everything down, finish a "shitty first draft" (with props to Anne Lamott, though I generally thought Bird by Bird was annoying), and then revise the hell out of it. As it is, I've been going sort of slowly and reworking things several times before moving on, plus I have a tendency to go back to things and rework again in the days immediately after I write them. So I guess I'm trying to strike a balance, though my overall approach here has really been to try to let go of my expectations and desire to control things and just let intuition take over. That is not easy for me.
But let's face it: this fairly amazing start owes much to two slow weeks at work. And the slow times at work are ending. Now comes the real time-juggling challenge that I had anticipated. But I feel like slow and steady wins the race. For years I've been trying to cram too much into my days, and whatever I do accomplish it's never enough. I finish things, but never at the unrealistic pace I first anticipate. And that's OK. So if I can find a half-hour or an hour at work to write the novel (or a post), that is great. If I can only find a half-hour or an hour at home one day, that's OK too. If I go to the gym only three times one week and write a little more, that's great. If I go four times and write a little less, that's great too. I just feel like if I try to be too perfectionistic right now, it would be bad.
I was really worried before I started that I would lose momentum: that marathon sessions on the weekends followed by no activity during the week would mean I'd be writing a somewhat different book each week and ultimately get nowhere. I was also worried that transitioning from any other activity to writing would take so long that half hour or even hour sessions would be useless. I was envisioning having to light candles, meditate, listen to some particular music, have a drink, or go through all kinds of peculiar contortions before I'd be ready to write anything.
Now granted, we're less than two weeks in here, but so far this has proven to very much not be the case, and I've been happily chatting away with a co-worker one minute and writing the next, with no transition in between except pulling the file up. And the time passes and I don't even notice - if that's not the best indication you're lucky enough to be channeling the muse, then I don't know what is.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is fiction that involves science. There was a review in today's Nature of three works of fiction by scientists, as well as some lamentation about how the gatekeepers of the publishing world don't like reading about science. Maybe true, maybe not. And honestly, I thought long and hard about how to talk about science (to the extent it's even involved) in my book without either just pouring on the jargon or else using the fakery of dialogue that is actually just exposition of facts.
"What do you mean: the Paleozoic Era?" asked Joe.
"You know," answered Sue, "The geologic time period that means 'ancient life' and extends from about 550 to 250 million years ago, and that ended with the Permian extinction event, the biggest extinction event in the history of the Earth. Archaic invertebrate groups like brachipods and trilobites dominated marine ecosystems during this time."
"Wait, trilobites?" asked Joe. "You mean the extinct arthropods that appeared in the Cambrian and left an extensive fossil record with some 17,000 known species?"
"That right, Joe!" said Sue, "The very same creatures that had three lobes - thus the name - and whose body was divided into the cephalon, thorax, and pygidium."
Do you get my point? Do I have to continue? Because I'm about to upchuck on my keyboard.
My business is not to try to teach people science or bore them with arcana. Indeed, the way I'm doing this seems fairly idiosyncratic, but I think that's probably good.
Interestingly, one of my biggest concerns is getting scooped on my basic idea. If you asked me whether the idea is original, I'd say: well, sort of. Yes and no. It's such a simple premise, and it's something I know lots of people think about at some level. (It being such a simple premise is part of why I think it might be successful.) But on the other hand, no one has actually played it out.
Even today, with one of the books reviewed by Nature (and self-published), I thought hmmm and went to dig up as meaty a plot summary as I could before realizing I was OK. (And that's not the first time this has happened - where I've been sure someone's book is exactly about what mine is going to be about.) And I worry that I'm covering old ground, and even if I cover it in a new way I'll have nothing new to say. Yet the biggest part of me says what I'm doing is new, that the perspective will be valuable. And that's why I continue.
And on a minor digression, another of the books was by Karl Iagnemma, whose story "Zilkowski's Theorem" showed up as one of the Best American Short Stories of 2002. The story was extremely well-written, and the math part - I mean, whatevs, it was peripheral to the point. But the characters annoyed me so much, and their actions made so little sense, that I forced my SO to read the story. I said, "Look, this was chosen as one of the best short stories of the year. And I want to be a writer, and have been writing some short stories, and this is the sort of accolade I would strive for in my wildest dreams. So please tell me I'm missing something here. Please tell me where I'm wrong about this story. Please tell me these characters make sense to you. Please tell me they are deliberately designed to come across as completely fucking pathetic...or better yet, please tell me someone in real life would act this way." But she couldn't do any of that. In fact, she agreed with me wholeheartedly.
Anyway, there is no point to the above paragraph except that the story is still stuck in my craw five years after the fact (maybe that by itself makes it a success - it's still hard for me to conclude Iagnemma didn't know what he was doing here), and I won't be buying the new book until someone explains it to me!
I knew exactly what the problem was, and I knew I was probably screwed.
The doors have two locks. Both downstairs and up here, I've only used the bottom lock. However, every two weeks exterminators come through to spray for roaches (all the apartments in the building), and they have a tendency to super-lock everything when they leave. This was quite confusing when it happened to me the first time downstairs because the key to the upper lock was also a building key (i.e. I didn't have a separate key and only by desperately trying all my keys did I get into the apartment).
Well, they must have been here today (I thought they were coming last week, and even left a note for them asking them not to lock the top lock). The problem is that our top lock key is not a building key; our new landlord only gave us one top lock key, and my girlfriend has it.
I muttered a fair number of expletives and then considered my options, which were three:
1. Find the nearest pay phone (since I don't own a cell) and call my girlfriend, hoping her movie hadn't started, and ask her to come home and let me in, thus ruining her evening (and putting a serious crimp in my own). Not a likely course of action unless there was an emergency.
2. Most likely option: go kill some time somewhere and then just meet her at her place when she got out of the movie. I couldn't go to the gym unless I wanted to work out in suit pants, but I could have gone to a restaurant or coffee shop or something (too bad SS is so lacking when it comes to bars - what a perfect excuse). But really, my most likely destination would have been her apartment, and if she hadn't brought her laptop to work I could at least keep myself semi-entertained. It was raining and I wasn't too hot on this option, but I figured this is what it'd be.
3. Get the condo manager to let me in. But this seemed extremely unlikely to happen since the office closes at 6 pm.
I literally ran down to the condo office and was pleased to see the lights still on. Until about a year ago, our condo manager was a bitter, mean old lady who took a personal dislike to me from the get-go because my landlord hadn't explained about the move-in fee. The first time I went in there, she snapped at me for about five minutes before it finally dawned on her that I was ignorant, rather than malicious. Ever after, I would go in there meekly, bowing and scraping, even if just to pick up a package, hoping I could get away without getting barked at.
I didn't meet the new manager until a few weeks ago, but when I did I was extremely impressed. She was polite, professional, and ultra-competent. Thankfully, she was still there at 6:15 tonight, and she sent me back with the key I needed and permission to keep it over the weekend to make a copy. So, evening salvaged. (And I decided in favor of cooking and writing and against the gym - I've been doing pretty darned well with the gym lately and am still on track to go three times this week.)
You know, I actually considered trying to kick the door in when I first encountered the resistance. Rationality quickly prevailed, plus that upper lock is pretty heavy duty - I would have lost the battle. I did kick in the door of the house where I lived my first year of grad school one night, also because I was locked out and no one was home. There the lock was flimsy and it took only two or three tries. It fucked the door up a little, but just a little (the landlord never noticed). Later my housemate told me she'd noticed the damage and assumed I'd done it because I was angry, which to this day I think is a bizarre statement since I got along with my housemates just fine and wouldn't have taken the chance of doing damage without a good reason.
My last year in grad school, when I got locked out, I pulled the screen off the front window and climbed in. Of course this means anyone else might have done so as well, but I shared that apartment with a grad student from Slovenia and between the two of us we had about $84.32 worth of stuff to steal (seriously).
In between I lived in a house with seven people and even if you were locked out the chances of no one being home were minimal. In fact, I vaguely remember being woken up myself once or twice to let in drunken housemates who had misplaced keys (nothing specific, though - I was probably out of it myself at the time).
Anyway, what else is going on?
The Move: We are in the home stretch. A work acquaintance of mine comes Saturday morning to take a good chunk of the furniture out of my SO's apartment. We are taking the day off and renting a van on Monday to move the rest of it. Then it will just be some boxes, lots of clothes, and some cleaning of her old place before the end of the month. I know I'm not alone when I say that I'm looking forward to having this done. But we're both really happy with the new place so far.
SO Family: My girlfriend's grandmother died about a week ago. Her mom was with her grandmother at the time and has just returned home. Everyone, SO included, seems to be handling it very well. I've offered to listen to (or read) anything she wishes to express, and that offer of course extends in perpetuity.
She also needs to inform her family that we are moving in together. The timing is clearly not optimal, but she thinks her mom strongly suspects already that this is about to happen: she keeps asking what my SO will do when her lease expires at the end of the month. My guess is that this will not lead to significant strife. Why? Because her folks frigging love me, that's why!
Work: The situation at work is moving toward a resolution. There is a new player on the scene, and there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. The upshot of those two vague sentences is that things are picking up already, which is sort of too bad because I was enjoying my little breather. Nonetheless, I also enjoy my job, so it's not the worst thing in the world. I am also now officially looking for a new job. (And the reason for the apparent conflict between liking my current job and looking for a new one is that I am term at the current job.) What this means (beyond that I have a resume ready to go and am starting to troll websites) I don't know yet. I may want to send out a string of "hey, how's it going?" e-mails to a few contacts of mine to let them know if they hear of anything, the time for me is now. Everyone says finding a job in D.C. is about who you know, and I do know plenty of folks, so I guess I ought to put them to work.
Writing: I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished so far in terms of writing. I did indeed start my novel, and as of right now I have just under 6700 words. (Not to mention that this is my sixth blog post of the month, and they've all been fairly weighty.) Perhaps more important than quantity is that I feel like the quality so far has been pretty good. I say "perhaps" because it may just be more important to get everything down, finish a "shitty first draft" (with props to Anne Lamott, though I generally thought Bird by Bird was annoying), and then revise the hell out of it. As it is, I've been going sort of slowly and reworking things several times before moving on, plus I have a tendency to go back to things and rework again in the days immediately after I write them. So I guess I'm trying to strike a balance, though my overall approach here has really been to try to let go of my expectations and desire to control things and just let intuition take over. That is not easy for me.
But let's face it: this fairly amazing start owes much to two slow weeks at work. And the slow times at work are ending. Now comes the real time-juggling challenge that I had anticipated. But I feel like slow and steady wins the race. For years I've been trying to cram too much into my days, and whatever I do accomplish it's never enough. I finish things, but never at the unrealistic pace I first anticipate. And that's OK. So if I can find a half-hour or an hour at work to write the novel (or a post), that is great. If I can only find a half-hour or an hour at home one day, that's OK too. If I go to the gym only three times one week and write a little more, that's great. If I go four times and write a little less, that's great too. I just feel like if I try to be too perfectionistic right now, it would be bad.
I was really worried before I started that I would lose momentum: that marathon sessions on the weekends followed by no activity during the week would mean I'd be writing a somewhat different book each week and ultimately get nowhere. I was also worried that transitioning from any other activity to writing would take so long that half hour or even hour sessions would be useless. I was envisioning having to light candles, meditate, listen to some particular music, have a drink, or go through all kinds of peculiar contortions before I'd be ready to write anything.
Now granted, we're less than two weeks in here, but so far this has proven to very much not be the case, and I've been happily chatting away with a co-worker one minute and writing the next, with no transition in between except pulling the file up. And the time passes and I don't even notice - if that's not the best indication you're lucky enough to be channeling the muse, then I don't know what is.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is fiction that involves science. There was a review in today's Nature of three works of fiction by scientists, as well as some lamentation about how the gatekeepers of the publishing world don't like reading about science. Maybe true, maybe not. And honestly, I thought long and hard about how to talk about science (to the extent it's even involved) in my book without either just pouring on the jargon or else using the fakery of dialogue that is actually just exposition of facts.
"What do you mean: the Paleozoic Era?" asked Joe.
"You know," answered Sue, "The geologic time period that means 'ancient life' and extends from about 550 to 250 million years ago, and that ended with the Permian extinction event, the biggest extinction event in the history of the Earth. Archaic invertebrate groups like brachipods and trilobites dominated marine ecosystems during this time."
"Wait, trilobites?" asked Joe. "You mean the extinct arthropods that appeared in the Cambrian and left an extensive fossil record with some 17,000 known species?"
"That right, Joe!" said Sue, "The very same creatures that had three lobes - thus the name - and whose body was divided into the cephalon, thorax, and pygidium."
Do you get my point? Do I have to continue? Because I'm about to upchuck on my keyboard.
My business is not to try to teach people science or bore them with arcana. Indeed, the way I'm doing this seems fairly idiosyncratic, but I think that's probably good.
Interestingly, one of my biggest concerns is getting scooped on my basic idea. If you asked me whether the idea is original, I'd say: well, sort of. Yes and no. It's such a simple premise, and it's something I know lots of people think about at some level. (It being such a simple premise is part of why I think it might be successful.) But on the other hand, no one has actually played it out.
Even today, with one of the books reviewed by Nature (and self-published), I thought hmmm and went to dig up as meaty a plot summary as I could before realizing I was OK. (And that's not the first time this has happened - where I've been sure someone's book is exactly about what mine is going to be about.) And I worry that I'm covering old ground, and even if I cover it in a new way I'll have nothing new to say. Yet the biggest part of me says what I'm doing is new, that the perspective will be valuable. And that's why I continue.
And on a minor digression, another of the books was by Karl Iagnemma, whose story "Zilkowski's Theorem" showed up as one of the Best American Short Stories of 2002. The story was extremely well-written, and the math part - I mean, whatevs, it was peripheral to the point. But the characters annoyed me so much, and their actions made so little sense, that I forced my SO to read the story. I said, "Look, this was chosen as one of the best short stories of the year. And I want to be a writer, and have been writing some short stories, and this is the sort of accolade I would strive for in my wildest dreams. So please tell me I'm missing something here. Please tell me where I'm wrong about this story. Please tell me these characters make sense to you. Please tell me they are deliberately designed to come across as completely fucking pathetic...or better yet, please tell me someone in real life would act this way." But she couldn't do any of that. In fact, she agreed with me wholeheartedly.
Anyway, there is no point to the above paragraph except that the story is still stuck in my craw five years after the fact (maybe that by itself makes it a success - it's still hard for me to conclude Iagnemma didn't know what he was doing here), and I won't be buying the new book until someone explains it to me!
Monday, January 7, 2008
Today's Commute, and Two Modest Proposals for Metro
[Added 2:30 p.m.: I got to work and realized this was the first weekday since Metro's large fare hike took effect yesterday. Talk about adding insult to injury!! Metro, you've got to do better.]
I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night because it was so warm. Yes, it's early January here in D.C., and we are expecting temperatures in the high 60s the next few days. Last night was warm and still, and even though I had the windows open there was little breeze. Combined with the radiators spewing heat (as they should at this time of year) and the naturally-warm state of our new top-floor apartment, my throat dried out some and I actually considered putting the AC on last night...if it was in the bedroom I probably would have. So I woke up sore from the gym and kind of grumpy and began my morning commute, which was a major clusterfuck in just about every way.
I left the apartment on time (shortly after 8 am), but I strapped on my backpack and hadn't even gotten out of the building when I felt something wet and cold on my back. (Cold would have been OK, but wet not so much.) I basically cart in all my food and beverages for the work day - soda and carbonated water, snacks, lunch, a bagel for breakfast, fruits and vegetables not often enough. This is partly to save money and partly because the food selection near where I work is basically nonexistent (unless you count government cafeterias, but I say no to those as a general rule and when I do find myself there have a tendency to wander around hopelessly for several minutes before settling on a premade salad). So on the days I don't bring enough to eat or drink, I usually find myself scavenging at the vending machines, which is never a good thing. I wrap the sodas and waters in a sweatshirt inside my backpack to keep them cool, protect my back, and protect any books and papers I have in there. Well, today something went awry.
I unloaded on the walk in front of the apartment building and saw that I had sprung a leak...or at least, one of the cans I'd packed had. Somehow it had punctured (or had just been defective to start with). I can't remember this ever happening to me before. Fortunately, little liquid had escaped and nothing in the pack had been damaged, but the outside of the pack felt slightly damp and the back of my pants was on its way. I repacked, sans defective can, and walked down the street, chugging what remained of the soda.
I decided to take the bus, largely because I didn't relish the 20-minute walk to the Metro with a damp backpack and because there was a bus about to arrive. As usual, the bus was pretty crowded and stagnant inside. I'd just drank a whole can of soda in about 3 minutes, so it took a minute to reequilibrate. Then there was an accident of some sort on southbound 16th Street, so the 16th St. and E-W Highway intersection was totally gridlocked and it took the bus nearly two full traffic light cycles to get through it. Looking at the vehicles blocking the intersection, I wondered if I might be able to drum up interest in some of my fellow bus-riders for a full frontal assault. Imagine: some asshole gridlocks an intersection so a bus can't get through. The bus stops because it cannot proceed. Sixty angry passengers get out and start attacking the asshole's SUV (of course) with all the weapons at their disposal. Personally, I had an umbrella, my remaining cans of soda, and - of course - my fists.
We made it to Silver Spring station at around 8:20 and there things were also very much awry - the platform was packed. I let one Shady Grove train fill without attempting to board. A second one arrived soon after, and behind it on the tracks was an empty train, which I decided to wait for. But the Shady Grove train - which wasn't packed but was pretty full - just sat there and after about 3 or 4 minutes, the loudspeaker came on with the most cryptic message I have ever heard: "Attention customers on the platform at Silver Spring - we are experiencing minor delays on the Red Line. It would be in your best interest to get on the train currently serving the platform. We are experiencing a minor delay." Well, no shit Sherlock on the minor delay, but it was the other part that really got me. This is verbatim: it would be in your best interest.
Well, I'll tell ya. I don't believe a word those Metro folks say. They're the ones who also say "there's a train directly behind this one" when anyone who can read can see it's 12 minutes behind. They're the ones who have advised me on more than one occasion when the Red Line was a mess to transfer to the Green at Ft. Totten to get downtown - only to have things totally clear up beyond Ft. Totten, making the two transfers such a move would entail for me completely unnecessary. I didn't take their advice then and I wasn't taking it now, not with an empty train sitting right there.
So finally the Shady Grove train moves off. And a minute later, the empty train starts coming up to the platform, and the voice on the loudspeaker says: "This train is not in service." The train does not slow to take passengers. Buh-bye. Next Shady Grove train: 7 minutes!!!
Alright, holy fucking shit! Yes, I didn't get on the train they advised me it would "be in my best interest" to get on, so I guess it's my fault. But how hard would it have been, instead of being all mysterious about it, to just come out and say: "The train you see behind this one will not be serving the platform."? Had they said that, I would have boarded and been long on my way.
I had seven long minutes to contemplate mass action by Metro "customers" - we could all fill the platforms and refuse to board until they sent adequate trains for all of us. I mean, where was that empty train going to, anyway?
Seven minutes later, the platform's a mess again. But fortunately there was another Grosvenor train behind this Shady Grove train, and that was my train. Also jammed, but I got a seat. Time at Silver Spring station: approximately 21 minutes. Lateness to work: approximately 13 minutes. People who gave a shit: zero. Well, one, actually. Me! The whole thing sucked. When your commute is the hardest part of your day, and you consider work "recovery time", something is wrong.
However, I would like to explore for a moment what may be puzzling to some readers: my reluctance to just throw myself onto the first train that could possibly accommodate me, hurling my body onto the train with the force of a kamikaze pilot slamming his plane into a battleship in a fiery moment of triumph before all goes dark. This, after all, is the strategy of so many of my fellow cattle...I mean, passengers.
Partly it's just wanting to phase in aggravation each day. I mean, I just left home. I'm not ready to be a human sardine yet. I want to ease into my day, not leap into its gaping maw. Eventually I'll get there. Because trust me, by the time I'm at Metro Center on my way home, I'm yelling "Bonzai!" with the rest of them. But it's true, I'm a relatively young, able-bodied guy. I could stand for 20 minutes. My reluctance comes from the necessity and difficulty, under these circumstances, of performing what I've come to think of as "The Maneuver".
Let's say your intrepid blogger wedges himself onto a crowded train at SS: usually where he winds up is against the doors on the right side of the train. This is a spectacular location, actually, because he is out of everyone's path - the train doors open on the left side at each stop, but he is safe and comfortable in the little cocoon of space he has carved out for himself next to the plexiglass. But wait, we have just left Union Station, the train is alarmingly full, and he is still in the same spot because he cannot move. Uh-oh! Now the train doors open on the right, on his side. This would be great if the next station were Metro Center, but alas.
"Next station, Judiciary Square!" says the conductor. (Actually, "Next station, JudicUary Square!" is what they usually say.) Well, JudicUary Square is no problem - just one or two people leaving the train and maybe one or two getting on. Worst comes to worst, your narrator steps out of the train for a second. No big whoop.
But then the next stop is the dreaded Gallery Place, where the vast zombie army will attempt to cram its way onto the train for the 1000 foot ride to Metro Center, where 95% of them will immediately disembark. Basically, your narrator is screwed. "The Maneuver" involves either somehow getting out of that spot by pushing farther into the train, or doing the get-off-the-train-get-right-back-on-the-train thing. But the get-off-get-on thing, which works fine at JudicUary Square, is notoriously difficult when the platform is so crowded - I have only successfully done this once or twice at Gallery Place, and the reward for my success was being at the very forefront of the horde, being the battering ram they use to besiege the fortress of the train. I am now being hurled at full force against the very same Metro customers I had, earlier in my ride, established an uneasy truce with (or at least snarled at to stay out of my space). So sometimes I get out and just go to the next door and get on last. Actually, if this works, it's a pretty good move, because then you're first out at Metro Center. Once, on a totally ridiculous morning, I got out of the train and just walked to Metro Center. Fuck this shit, I said.
Now of course, there are a few places to stand to avoid having to perform "The Maneuver". One delightful place to stand is wedged against the door between the train cars. Oh happy day when you can get that, but everyone else knows about this one too, so it's rarely available on a crowded train. Another are the little nooks and crannies at the end of some of the cars. Those of you who ride the Metro know of what I speak. But that one's a complete roll of the dice. Major props to anyone who can actually position themselves on the platform to be aligned with one of those - I don't even think most of the cars have them. The last, of course, is the much-heralded "center of the car", though I've found that a goodly number of my fellow commuters like to traverse this area (even on a jam-packed train) for no apparent reason beyond inconveniencing as many people as they can, since wading through 500 people to save about 30 feet of walking on the platform just generally does not compute.
So, to sum up, I would rather stand on the platform and wait for a train where I can get a seat than go through this holy hell just to get to work. (Going through it to get home is another story - there's beer and food waiting for me at home, after all. At work all I have to look forward to is government cafeteria food and...um, work.)
And now, two modest proposals for my friends who run Metro:
1. There must be some way to relieve the congestion between Gallery Place and Metro Center, which are so close to together as to nearly constitute one mega-station. Here's an idea that would also have health benefits for all the fatasses who ride Metro and can't fit into one seat: provide an incentive for people to walk between the stations. For example, if I'm using a Metrocard and I leave one of those two stations and then enter the other within a certain relatively short timeframe (say, ten minutes) I should get a small discount on my fare. Ten cents, maybe, or a quarter. (This could add up over time. A quarter would be 50 cents a day, 10 bucks a month, or $120 a year.) Even better would be a pedestrian walkway underground between the two stations, perhaps with moving walkways (though these would need to be wide enough so that a couple of slack-jawed tourists or some idiot with a suitcase couldn't gum up the whole works, as so frequently happens on escalators). There could be an optional cardswipe for folks to slightly discount their fare (though by less than if they take the overland route I mentioned above) if they choose to walk between the stations. Honestly, if they put this option in, I'd probably get off the Red Line at Gallery Place and walk to the Orange/Blue at Metro Center each morning.
2. How about making your station announcements clear and honest? No more bizarre statements about what is or is not in "my best interests", OK? No more "directly behind this one" bullshit unless it's true. Just tell me the fucking train we can all see isn't going to service the goddamned platform, tell me it's 12 minutes if it's 12 minutes. Is that so hard?
I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night because it was so warm. Yes, it's early January here in D.C., and we are expecting temperatures in the high 60s the next few days. Last night was warm and still, and even though I had the windows open there was little breeze. Combined with the radiators spewing heat (as they should at this time of year) and the naturally-warm state of our new top-floor apartment, my throat dried out some and I actually considered putting the AC on last night...if it was in the bedroom I probably would have. So I woke up sore from the gym and kind of grumpy and began my morning commute, which was a major clusterfuck in just about every way.
I left the apartment on time (shortly after 8 am), but I strapped on my backpack and hadn't even gotten out of the building when I felt something wet and cold on my back. (Cold would have been OK, but wet not so much.) I basically cart in all my food and beverages for the work day - soda and carbonated water, snacks, lunch, a bagel for breakfast, fruits and vegetables not often enough. This is partly to save money and partly because the food selection near where I work is basically nonexistent (unless you count government cafeterias, but I say no to those as a general rule and when I do find myself there have a tendency to wander around hopelessly for several minutes before settling on a premade salad). So on the days I don't bring enough to eat or drink, I usually find myself scavenging at the vending machines, which is never a good thing. I wrap the sodas and waters in a sweatshirt inside my backpack to keep them cool, protect my back, and protect any books and papers I have in there. Well, today something went awry.
I unloaded on the walk in front of the apartment building and saw that I had sprung a leak...or at least, one of the cans I'd packed had. Somehow it had punctured (or had just been defective to start with). I can't remember this ever happening to me before. Fortunately, little liquid had escaped and nothing in the pack had been damaged, but the outside of the pack felt slightly damp and the back of my pants was on its way. I repacked, sans defective can, and walked down the street, chugging what remained of the soda.
I decided to take the bus, largely because I didn't relish the 20-minute walk to the Metro with a damp backpack and because there was a bus about to arrive. As usual, the bus was pretty crowded and stagnant inside. I'd just drank a whole can of soda in about 3 minutes, so it took a minute to reequilibrate. Then there was an accident of some sort on southbound 16th Street, so the 16th St. and E-W Highway intersection was totally gridlocked and it took the bus nearly two full traffic light cycles to get through it. Looking at the vehicles blocking the intersection, I wondered if I might be able to drum up interest in some of my fellow bus-riders for a full frontal assault. Imagine: some asshole gridlocks an intersection so a bus can't get through. The bus stops because it cannot proceed. Sixty angry passengers get out and start attacking the asshole's SUV (of course) with all the weapons at their disposal. Personally, I had an umbrella, my remaining cans of soda, and - of course - my fists.
We made it to Silver Spring station at around 8:20 and there things were also very much awry - the platform was packed. I let one Shady Grove train fill without attempting to board. A second one arrived soon after, and behind it on the tracks was an empty train, which I decided to wait for. But the Shady Grove train - which wasn't packed but was pretty full - just sat there and after about 3 or 4 minutes, the loudspeaker came on with the most cryptic message I have ever heard: "Attention customers on the platform at Silver Spring - we are experiencing minor delays on the Red Line. It would be in your best interest to get on the train currently serving the platform. We are experiencing a minor delay." Well, no shit Sherlock on the minor delay, but it was the other part that really got me. This is verbatim: it would be in your best interest.
Well, I'll tell ya. I don't believe a word those Metro folks say. They're the ones who also say "there's a train directly behind this one" when anyone who can read can see it's 12 minutes behind. They're the ones who have advised me on more than one occasion when the Red Line was a mess to transfer to the Green at Ft. Totten to get downtown - only to have things totally clear up beyond Ft. Totten, making the two transfers such a move would entail for me completely unnecessary. I didn't take their advice then and I wasn't taking it now, not with an empty train sitting right there.
So finally the Shady Grove train moves off. And a minute later, the empty train starts coming up to the platform, and the voice on the loudspeaker says: "This train is not in service." The train does not slow to take passengers. Buh-bye. Next Shady Grove train: 7 minutes!!!
Alright, holy fucking shit! Yes, I didn't get on the train they advised me it would "be in my best interest" to get on, so I guess it's my fault. But how hard would it have been, instead of being all mysterious about it, to just come out and say: "The train you see behind this one will not be serving the platform."? Had they said that, I would have boarded and been long on my way.
I had seven long minutes to contemplate mass action by Metro "customers" - we could all fill the platforms and refuse to board until they sent adequate trains for all of us. I mean, where was that empty train going to, anyway?
Seven minutes later, the platform's a mess again. But fortunately there was another Grosvenor train behind this Shady Grove train, and that was my train. Also jammed, but I got a seat. Time at Silver Spring station: approximately 21 minutes. Lateness to work: approximately 13 minutes. People who gave a shit: zero. Well, one, actually. Me! The whole thing sucked. When your commute is the hardest part of your day, and you consider work "recovery time", something is wrong.
However, I would like to explore for a moment what may be puzzling to some readers: my reluctance to just throw myself onto the first train that could possibly accommodate me, hurling my body onto the train with the force of a kamikaze pilot slamming his plane into a battleship in a fiery moment of triumph before all goes dark. This, after all, is the strategy of so many of my fellow cattle...I mean, passengers.
Partly it's just wanting to phase in aggravation each day. I mean, I just left home. I'm not ready to be a human sardine yet. I want to ease into my day, not leap into its gaping maw. Eventually I'll get there. Because trust me, by the time I'm at Metro Center on my way home, I'm yelling "Bonzai!" with the rest of them. But it's true, I'm a relatively young, able-bodied guy. I could stand for 20 minutes. My reluctance comes from the necessity and difficulty, under these circumstances, of performing what I've come to think of as "The Maneuver".
Let's say your intrepid blogger wedges himself onto a crowded train at SS: usually where he winds up is against the doors on the right side of the train. This is a spectacular location, actually, because he is out of everyone's path - the train doors open on the left side at each stop, but he is safe and comfortable in the little cocoon of space he has carved out for himself next to the plexiglass. But wait, we have just left Union Station, the train is alarmingly full, and he is still in the same spot because he cannot move. Uh-oh! Now the train doors open on the right, on his side. This would be great if the next station were Metro Center, but alas.
"Next station, Judiciary Square!" says the conductor. (Actually, "Next station, JudicUary Square!" is what they usually say.) Well, JudicUary Square is no problem - just one or two people leaving the train and maybe one or two getting on. Worst comes to worst, your narrator steps out of the train for a second. No big whoop.
But then the next stop is the dreaded Gallery Place, where the vast zombie army will attempt to cram its way onto the train for the 1000 foot ride to Metro Center, where 95% of them will immediately disembark. Basically, your narrator is screwed. "The Maneuver" involves either somehow getting out of that spot by pushing farther into the train, or doing the get-off-the-train-get-right-back-on-the-train thing. But the get-off-get-on thing, which works fine at JudicUary Square, is notoriously difficult when the platform is so crowded - I have only successfully done this once or twice at Gallery Place, and the reward for my success was being at the very forefront of the horde, being the battering ram they use to besiege the fortress of the train. I am now being hurled at full force against the very same Metro customers I had, earlier in my ride, established an uneasy truce with (or at least snarled at to stay out of my space). So sometimes I get out and just go to the next door and get on last. Actually, if this works, it's a pretty good move, because then you're first out at Metro Center. Once, on a totally ridiculous morning, I got out of the train and just walked to Metro Center. Fuck this shit, I said.
Now of course, there are a few places to stand to avoid having to perform "The Maneuver". One delightful place to stand is wedged against the door between the train cars. Oh happy day when you can get that, but everyone else knows about this one too, so it's rarely available on a crowded train. Another are the little nooks and crannies at the end of some of the cars. Those of you who ride the Metro know of what I speak. But that one's a complete roll of the dice. Major props to anyone who can actually position themselves on the platform to be aligned with one of those - I don't even think most of the cars have them. The last, of course, is the much-heralded "center of the car", though I've found that a goodly number of my fellow commuters like to traverse this area (even on a jam-packed train) for no apparent reason beyond inconveniencing as many people as they can, since wading through 500 people to save about 30 feet of walking on the platform just generally does not compute.
So, to sum up, I would rather stand on the platform and wait for a train where I can get a seat than go through this holy hell just to get to work. (Going through it to get home is another story - there's beer and food waiting for me at home, after all. At work all I have to look forward to is government cafeteria food and...um, work.)
And now, two modest proposals for my friends who run Metro:
1. There must be some way to relieve the congestion between Gallery Place and Metro Center, which are so close to together as to nearly constitute one mega-station. Here's an idea that would also have health benefits for all the fatasses who ride Metro and can't fit into one seat: provide an incentive for people to walk between the stations. For example, if I'm using a Metrocard and I leave one of those two stations and then enter the other within a certain relatively short timeframe (say, ten minutes) I should get a small discount on my fare. Ten cents, maybe, or a quarter. (This could add up over time. A quarter would be 50 cents a day, 10 bucks a month, or $120 a year.) Even better would be a pedestrian walkway underground between the two stations, perhaps with moving walkways (though these would need to be wide enough so that a couple of slack-jawed tourists or some idiot with a suitcase couldn't gum up the whole works, as so frequently happens on escalators). There could be an optional cardswipe for folks to slightly discount their fare (though by less than if they take the overland route I mentioned above) if they choose to walk between the stations. Honestly, if they put this option in, I'd probably get off the Red Line at Gallery Place and walk to the Orange/Blue at Metro Center each morning.
2. How about making your station announcements clear and honest? No more bizarre statements about what is or is not in "my best interests", OK? No more "directly behind this one" bullshit unless it's true. Just tell me the fucking train we can all see isn't going to service the goddamned platform, tell me it's 12 minutes if it's 12 minutes. Is that so hard?
Sunday, January 6, 2008
My Dad's Philosophy of Life
My recent trip to NY and discussions with my brothers, in addition to a few things my dad has said on the phone recently, have gotten me thinking about the man's philosophy of life (at least while we were growing up - I'm not really speaking to his retirement life here). If you've been reading this blog, you know that I consider figuring out my dad an important step toward coming to grips with growing up controlled and moving on, as secure as I can be that it will not hold me back further or be reflected in my relationships with my SO and my own (as yet unborn and unplanned) kids. One question, of course, is why he became the kind of dad he was. But a separate question is: what was going on in his head? I've been thinking about this latter question lately.
Last month I was talking on the phone with my parents, and my dad mentioned that he'd been having back problems lately and had recently thrown his back out. He'd gone to a masseuse and a chiropractor to try to work it out, but in the meanwhile it was sort of bad - he couldn't even play tennis, which is the primary focus of their social life down there in Del Boca Vista. My dad claimed that all his back problems (chronic pain for years before this, evidently, though I never heard much about it) stemmed from a single incident, which he didn't describe in detail, but where he did something in an awkward position. "You do one stupid thing," he said, "and it follows you for the rest of your life."
That statement stuck with me because in a sense it seemed to encapsulate an important part of his philosophy of life. Every little thing you do has consequences, and the consequences can be dire if you screw up. By itself, this is not an unreasonable philosophy. But there are problems if you extend this philosophy too far, as he did.
1. The first problem comes in when you scale this philosophy down from the big stuff, or the stuff that can have the worst of consequences, to every action a person takes. It can be paralyzing as a kid to have all your decisions scrutinized in this light (and makes me wonder, again, where this line of reasoning in my dad ultimately originated). The other part of this is that there was no proportionality. Selling drugs and not holding your fork correctly were met with the exact same brutal response. Lucky for my dad, none of us got anywhere near the "selling drugs" stage. And I say lucky because with YB and his troubles, which far transcended the ticky-tack stuff he'd terrorized us over previously, my dad's arsenal ran out almost immediately and he quickly became an old lame dog with nothing more than a ferocious bark - totally ineffective at dealing with my brother in any meaningful way.
I used to think about my dad's and my own responses to things graphically. The x-axis is the degree of provocation (basically, how much happens to make us angry). The y-axis is our response. For my dad, the plot looks like a line leaving the origin at about a 75 degree angle, and then quickly becomes vertical (or nearly so) and launches off the plot. My own curve, I thought, was a line leaving the origin at a very low angle (maybe 20 degrees) and extending farther than my dad's, but then also very quickly (at some threshold) becoming near vertical. The difference in thresholds shows that I can go longer without losing my cool, which is good. The low angle shows that my response is - at first - less than proportionate, which is not so good because it indicates a tendency to allow myself to be taken advantage of. The rapid transition to near vertical shows that I have no idea how to appropriately respond, which is bad. Ideally, it seems to me, the line would leave the origin at a 45 degree angle and simply continue on that path (you get angry in direct response to the provocation).
2. The second problem is that everyone make genuine mistakes in life. Mistakes are part of life. Of course some mistakes can be very costly and should be avoided, but none of us gets through life without making some mistakes, and they can provide valuable learning opportunities. As a parent, there are some mistakes you can help your children avoid. For example, not every kid should learn by touching the hot stove that if they touch the hot stove they will get burned. But every kid is going to have some level of conflict with other kids, teachers, etc. Every kid is going to fall down and scrape their knee. This is not unusual, and shouldn't be unexpected. Kids should be empowered to go ahead and test things out and make the occasional mistake. I mean, isn't that what childhood is for?
After my grandfather's funeral, the family was at my grandma's and my uncles starting telling stories about some of their fuck-ups as teenagers and 20-somethings and how grandpa had saved them. It was notable that none of those stories involved my dad. Then my uncle with kids (and those kids are all in their late teens and early 20s now) started telling equivalent stories about his own kids. Finally, he asked my dad why there were no such stories for us. I thought it was one of the weirdest statements of the whole weird time. Could my uncle truly be so ignorant? Or did he think the stories must be there, but my dad was just embarrassed by them? I have no idea. If I ever get to talk to him about this stuff, I should ask.
3. The third, and maybe the biggest problem, is when you attribute deliberate agency to everything. A vital part of my dad's philosophy of life is that he doesn't believe in the second problem above. He doesn't believe that there can be such a thing as a genuine mistake. Every action a person takes must be deliberate, even if they have no control over things. And if the action or set of circumstances winds up having consequences, it is labeled "stupid".
This is sort embarrassingly melodramatic, but it's true: when I was a kid, I sometimes used to think about my dad as Darth Vader. (That Darth Vader was actually Luke Skywalker's father made those movies essentially unwatchable for me for a while, and in general I hated watching anything with fathers and sons interacting. I never enjoyed Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example, because of the one character who had to stand up to his dad.) Why did I think of my dad like Darth Vader? Because Darth Vader punished his underlings for things even if they had no direct control over what happened. Darth Vader did not believe in mistakes either.
You know, my dad wanted to be a lawyer until Vietnam and the draft board persuaded him to be a teacher instead. And when I picture the alternate reality in which he got to become a lawyer, I just can't see him as a corporate tax attorney or a constitutional law expert or (never in a million years) a defense attorney. In fact, the only picture I can summon is him as the bull-in-a-china-shop district attorney. A law-and-order Rudy Giuliani type (minus the personal quirks) who thinks all perpetrators committed their crimes solely out of disrespect to him personally and whose only response to every case is: "Throw the book at them!" And, maybe this is a low blow given current debate on waterboarding, but my dad was not above using physical punishment on his kids until they "confessed", sometimes to things they didn't do.
Here are some great examples of my dad's inability to acknowledge that genuine mistakes were possible from my experience growing up:
*Never once, before the age of 18, did I accidentally spill a glass or drop something on the floor. Every single time it was because I wasn't paying attention. Yet what kid, even if he lifts his glass with Dalai-Lama like focus, is never just going to slip a few times?
*Once, during a family get-together, my grandfather - while passing a dish - accidentally spilled a little gravy on my brother. It was hot and he started crying (he wasn't seriously hurt). My dad said nothing to my grandfather (who was mortified, of course) then, but later in front of all of us blamed my grandfather's carelessness for causing the accident. He remembered this incident for years and years.
*When my mom came down with diverticulitis, my dad strongly insinuated it was her fault for not eating right (which is ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical).
*If any of us got a cavity (we very rarely did), it was because we were eating too much junk food and not brushing right, case closed.
*I had a case of head-lice when I was in eighth grade. Not only was it my fault for having lice (he whipped YB into a frenzy, saying he'd have to throw out his favorite stuffed animal because it might be infected, and it was all because of me), but my dad seemed to believe I had gotten it during the week I'd spent over the summer with my grandparents, so it was their fault too.
*My dad had the bad habit of yelling at his kids' friends when they came over (which, you might guess, wasn't often, not that my mom ever figured out why we didn't invite kids over more), and the worse habit of criticizing his kids after their friends left for their behavior. So our friends' behavior was our fault. Meanwhile, you can't blame our friends for sometimes holding our dad's behavior against us (and yes, they did). We also had a pool and would sometimes hear it from the other kids because we never invited them over. We just couldn't win.
*I see I haven't told this story yet on here, and it illustrates so well my dad's take on things: This is, word-for-word, from a journal entry I wrote in 1994, and it's one of the first times I tackled the impossibility of my dad head-on in something written:
"Anyway, my youngest brother was home alone, and I guess he had eaten some donuts or cake or something (all of which is fat and cholesterol free, mind you). My mom noticed and told him he really should be more careful what he eats, especially since he's going to be going to a summer program soon. There. Done. Right? No, wrong. Because dear old dad is sitting there. And you know he always has to get his two cents (or million dollars) in. If you don't eat right at that summer program and we notice, he says, and we WILL notice (note: they won't) you won't be having any dessert here. And if you get a cholesterol count from the doctor that's high, that's IT for dessert. You will never eat dessert again. So my mom told him that threatening wasn't the way to go. YES IT IS, BECAUSE HE NEVER LISTENS. HE NEVER LISTENS. NEVER NEVER NEVER LISTENS. That's what he always says. We "NEVER LISTEN". NEVER LISTEN. Those words are so ridiculous given the tyranny under which we live it's unbelievable. But why am I so pissed off? Two years ago, my mom had cholesterol tests done on myself and my brother, 17 and 14 at the time. My dad did not leave her alone for a week, saying how wasteful those tests were considering that they weren't supposed to be accurate until a person was 18. So now he's going to cut off all desserts to my brother if a cholesterol test comes back high. The kid is 12, and the stuff he was eating was cholesterol free. Even more ridiculous in light of the fact that if he knew anything about which foods are the highest in cholesterol, and if he really cared about my brother's health and not just about hearing his own voice, he'd cut out red meat long before he thought about touching desserts."
4. The final problem, and I alluded to it above, was that he took everything personally. It was all about him. Here's a more recent story: I've mentioned before that YB has problems with alcohol and tried to kill himself twice (though the second time, I think, was more theatrics than serious intent). One of the last times I visited the house in NY (in 2003), YB, a friend of his, and I went out to a nearby bar and YB had two drinks very fast. The next day my dad asked if we'd been drinking and - not having been told to keep my mouth shut by YB and seeing no reason to lie - I said yeah. My dad blew up and said my brother wasn't "supposed" to be drinking after all his problems. He was going to confront my brother and ask him if he'd been drinking "to see if he lies to me". I said "seeing if he lies to you" was pretty irrelevant to addressing my brother's real problems, and told him this put me in a bad spot as a tattletale. He didn't care, and I spent the bulk of the day aimlessly wandering the public library, trying to stay away from the house.
Here's another story: before they moved to Del Boca Vista, my grandparents lived in NY (but far from us), and when we visited we all (seven of us with my grandparents and my whole immediate family) had to share two bathrooms. So getting everyone showered in the morning took some time. MB and I slept in the basement. So one morning I walked up the stairs and seeing the bathroom empty went in and showered. When I was done, I opened the door to be faced with a very angry dad, who barked something to the effect that he'd been waiting for someone else to finish and then it was his turn to go, and strongly insinuating that I had somehow deliberately done this. I was in college, or maybe grad school, by this time, and doing a better job of standing up for myself, so I said to him something like: "Honestly, knowing how you fly off the handle at the smallest thing, do you think I would deliberately cut ahead of you to use the bathroom? I'm sorry I took your turn, but I didn't know it was your turn - the bathroom was empty and no one was waiting. Do you really think I'd cut ahead of you given that you'd treat it as a total hanging offense? Is it worth it for me to have you on my case for the rest of this trip to avoid waiting 20 minutes for the shower?" It was infallible reasoning and it shut him down because he knew it was true. But I should have added: And why, after so many years, do you still act like your kids are demonic and out to disrespect you at every turn when we have demonstrated again and again and again that nothing could be farther from the truth and we are all cowed and petrified by you?
Neubarth says that one of the hallmarks of a controlling parent is that the entire household is focused around maintaining that one person's comfort and exists to serve that one person's needs, rather than everyone having an equal (or at least subequal) stake in things. This was one of the statements that I thought really hit the nail on the head for our family. Neubarth also relates control to some level of narcissism. I never thought of my dad as a narcissistic man, since that word conjures elements of people admiring themselves in the mirror or singing (like Bart Simpson): "I am so great! I am so great! Everybody love me - I am so great!" But in responding so personally to everything we did, there may be some truth to this. He really did think it was all about him. Even when he set out to "solve" problems for his kids, he solved them to his own satisfaction rather than to ours. He could make us do whatever he wanted and our feelings were irrelevant (e.g., piano lessons forever and ever), but when we wanted to do things he wasn't enthusiastic about (for example, I wanted to join the Cub Scouts) he would sulk like a kid or just use it as an excuse to get angry and make us feel dumb. He lacked empathy for us, assuming everything we did was deliberate and focused on him, and also assuming we knew everything he did, even though we were just kids. I know parents and kids don't have a relationship of equality, and I don't think they should. But it can do a lot of harm to ignore your kids' feelings entirely. What does it hurt to let them have their way once a while? Once you've established dominance over the kids who are only a fraction of your body mass, know so much less than you, and are reliant upon you for everything, what is the need to continually reestablish that dominance again and again and again, never letting anyone forget for a second that yes indeed, you are in charge and not us?
All of the sentences I've been writing in the last paragraph have made me think of more (unpleasant) stories, but I am growing weary of this for now. I do think it's valuable to get this all out there, as tough as it can be. And most of it serves, if nothing else, as a great lesson for me on how not to treat the people I purport to love.
A final thought, as I proofread this: could my dad's inability to recognize a genuine mistake - that is, something truly out of your control - and his own need to control everything be linked?
Last month I was talking on the phone with my parents, and my dad mentioned that he'd been having back problems lately and had recently thrown his back out. He'd gone to a masseuse and a chiropractor to try to work it out, but in the meanwhile it was sort of bad - he couldn't even play tennis, which is the primary focus of their social life down there in Del Boca Vista. My dad claimed that all his back problems (chronic pain for years before this, evidently, though I never heard much about it) stemmed from a single incident, which he didn't describe in detail, but where he did something in an awkward position. "You do one stupid thing," he said, "and it follows you for the rest of your life."
That statement stuck with me because in a sense it seemed to encapsulate an important part of his philosophy of life. Every little thing you do has consequences, and the consequences can be dire if you screw up. By itself, this is not an unreasonable philosophy. But there are problems if you extend this philosophy too far, as he did.
1. The first problem comes in when you scale this philosophy down from the big stuff, or the stuff that can have the worst of consequences, to every action a person takes. It can be paralyzing as a kid to have all your decisions scrutinized in this light (and makes me wonder, again, where this line of reasoning in my dad ultimately originated). The other part of this is that there was no proportionality. Selling drugs and not holding your fork correctly were met with the exact same brutal response. Lucky for my dad, none of us got anywhere near the "selling drugs" stage. And I say lucky because with YB and his troubles, which far transcended the ticky-tack stuff he'd terrorized us over previously, my dad's arsenal ran out almost immediately and he quickly became an old lame dog with nothing more than a ferocious bark - totally ineffective at dealing with my brother in any meaningful way.
I used to think about my dad's and my own responses to things graphically. The x-axis is the degree of provocation (basically, how much happens to make us angry). The y-axis is our response. For my dad, the plot looks like a line leaving the origin at about a 75 degree angle, and then quickly becomes vertical (or nearly so) and launches off the plot. My own curve, I thought, was a line leaving the origin at a very low angle (maybe 20 degrees) and extending farther than my dad's, but then also very quickly (at some threshold) becoming near vertical. The difference in thresholds shows that I can go longer without losing my cool, which is good. The low angle shows that my response is - at first - less than proportionate, which is not so good because it indicates a tendency to allow myself to be taken advantage of. The rapid transition to near vertical shows that I have no idea how to appropriately respond, which is bad. Ideally, it seems to me, the line would leave the origin at a 45 degree angle and simply continue on that path (you get angry in direct response to the provocation).
2. The second problem is that everyone make genuine mistakes in life. Mistakes are part of life. Of course some mistakes can be very costly and should be avoided, but none of us gets through life without making some mistakes, and they can provide valuable learning opportunities. As a parent, there are some mistakes you can help your children avoid. For example, not every kid should learn by touching the hot stove that if they touch the hot stove they will get burned. But every kid is going to have some level of conflict with other kids, teachers, etc. Every kid is going to fall down and scrape their knee. This is not unusual, and shouldn't be unexpected. Kids should be empowered to go ahead and test things out and make the occasional mistake. I mean, isn't that what childhood is for?
After my grandfather's funeral, the family was at my grandma's and my uncles starting telling stories about some of their fuck-ups as teenagers and 20-somethings and how grandpa had saved them. It was notable that none of those stories involved my dad. Then my uncle with kids (and those kids are all in their late teens and early 20s now) started telling equivalent stories about his own kids. Finally, he asked my dad why there were no such stories for us. I thought it was one of the weirdest statements of the whole weird time. Could my uncle truly be so ignorant? Or did he think the stories must be there, but my dad was just embarrassed by them? I have no idea. If I ever get to talk to him about this stuff, I should ask.
3. The third, and maybe the biggest problem, is when you attribute deliberate agency to everything. A vital part of my dad's philosophy of life is that he doesn't believe in the second problem above. He doesn't believe that there can be such a thing as a genuine mistake. Every action a person takes must be deliberate, even if they have no control over things. And if the action or set of circumstances winds up having consequences, it is labeled "stupid".
This is sort embarrassingly melodramatic, but it's true: when I was a kid, I sometimes used to think about my dad as Darth Vader. (That Darth Vader was actually Luke Skywalker's father made those movies essentially unwatchable for me for a while, and in general I hated watching anything with fathers and sons interacting. I never enjoyed Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example, because of the one character who had to stand up to his dad.) Why did I think of my dad like Darth Vader? Because Darth Vader punished his underlings for things even if they had no direct control over what happened. Darth Vader did not believe in mistakes either.
You know, my dad wanted to be a lawyer until Vietnam and the draft board persuaded him to be a teacher instead. And when I picture the alternate reality in which he got to become a lawyer, I just can't see him as a corporate tax attorney or a constitutional law expert or (never in a million years) a defense attorney. In fact, the only picture I can summon is him as the bull-in-a-china-shop district attorney. A law-and-order Rudy Giuliani type (minus the personal quirks) who thinks all perpetrators committed their crimes solely out of disrespect to him personally and whose only response to every case is: "Throw the book at them!" And, maybe this is a low blow given current debate on waterboarding, but my dad was not above using physical punishment on his kids until they "confessed", sometimes to things they didn't do.
Here are some great examples of my dad's inability to acknowledge that genuine mistakes were possible from my experience growing up:
*Never once, before the age of 18, did I accidentally spill a glass or drop something on the floor. Every single time it was because I wasn't paying attention. Yet what kid, even if he lifts his glass with Dalai-Lama like focus, is never just going to slip a few times?
*Once, during a family get-together, my grandfather - while passing a dish - accidentally spilled a little gravy on my brother. It was hot and he started crying (he wasn't seriously hurt). My dad said nothing to my grandfather (who was mortified, of course) then, but later in front of all of us blamed my grandfather's carelessness for causing the accident. He remembered this incident for years and years.
*When my mom came down with diverticulitis, my dad strongly insinuated it was her fault for not eating right (which is ridiculous, not to mention hypocritical).
*If any of us got a cavity (we very rarely did), it was because we were eating too much junk food and not brushing right, case closed.
*I had a case of head-lice when I was in eighth grade. Not only was it my fault for having lice (he whipped YB into a frenzy, saying he'd have to throw out his favorite stuffed animal because it might be infected, and it was all because of me), but my dad seemed to believe I had gotten it during the week I'd spent over the summer with my grandparents, so it was their fault too.
*My dad had the bad habit of yelling at his kids' friends when they came over (which, you might guess, wasn't often, not that my mom ever figured out why we didn't invite kids over more), and the worse habit of criticizing his kids after their friends left for their behavior. So our friends' behavior was our fault. Meanwhile, you can't blame our friends for sometimes holding our dad's behavior against us (and yes, they did). We also had a pool and would sometimes hear it from the other kids because we never invited them over. We just couldn't win.
*I see I haven't told this story yet on here, and it illustrates so well my dad's take on things: This is, word-for-word, from a journal entry I wrote in 1994, and it's one of the first times I tackled the impossibility of my dad head-on in something written:
"Anyway, my youngest brother was home alone, and I guess he had eaten some donuts or cake or something (all of which is fat and cholesterol free, mind you). My mom noticed and told him he really should be more careful what he eats, especially since he's going to be going to a summer program soon. There. Done. Right? No, wrong. Because dear old dad is sitting there. And you know he always has to get his two cents (or million dollars) in. If you don't eat right at that summer program and we notice, he says, and we WILL notice (note: they won't) you won't be having any dessert here. And if you get a cholesterol count from the doctor that's high, that's IT for dessert. You will never eat dessert again. So my mom told him that threatening wasn't the way to go. YES IT IS, BECAUSE HE NEVER LISTENS. HE NEVER LISTENS. NEVER NEVER NEVER LISTENS. That's what he always says. We "NEVER LISTEN". NEVER LISTEN. Those words are so ridiculous given the tyranny under which we live it's unbelievable. But why am I so pissed off? Two years ago, my mom had cholesterol tests done on myself and my brother, 17 and 14 at the time. My dad did not leave her alone for a week, saying how wasteful those tests were considering that they weren't supposed to be accurate until a person was 18. So now he's going to cut off all desserts to my brother if a cholesterol test comes back high. The kid is 12, and the stuff he was eating was cholesterol free. Even more ridiculous in light of the fact that if he knew anything about which foods are the highest in cholesterol, and if he really cared about my brother's health and not just about hearing his own voice, he'd cut out red meat long before he thought about touching desserts."
4. The final problem, and I alluded to it above, was that he took everything personally. It was all about him. Here's a more recent story: I've mentioned before that YB has problems with alcohol and tried to kill himself twice (though the second time, I think, was more theatrics than serious intent). One of the last times I visited the house in NY (in 2003), YB, a friend of his, and I went out to a nearby bar and YB had two drinks very fast. The next day my dad asked if we'd been drinking and - not having been told to keep my mouth shut by YB and seeing no reason to lie - I said yeah. My dad blew up and said my brother wasn't "supposed" to be drinking after all his problems. He was going to confront my brother and ask him if he'd been drinking "to see if he lies to me". I said "seeing if he lies to you" was pretty irrelevant to addressing my brother's real problems, and told him this put me in a bad spot as a tattletale. He didn't care, and I spent the bulk of the day aimlessly wandering the public library, trying to stay away from the house.
Here's another story: before they moved to Del Boca Vista, my grandparents lived in NY (but far from us), and when we visited we all (seven of us with my grandparents and my whole immediate family) had to share two bathrooms. So getting everyone showered in the morning took some time. MB and I slept in the basement. So one morning I walked up the stairs and seeing the bathroom empty went in and showered. When I was done, I opened the door to be faced with a very angry dad, who barked something to the effect that he'd been waiting for someone else to finish and then it was his turn to go, and strongly insinuating that I had somehow deliberately done this. I was in college, or maybe grad school, by this time, and doing a better job of standing up for myself, so I said to him something like: "Honestly, knowing how you fly off the handle at the smallest thing, do you think I would deliberately cut ahead of you to use the bathroom? I'm sorry I took your turn, but I didn't know it was your turn - the bathroom was empty and no one was waiting. Do you really think I'd cut ahead of you given that you'd treat it as a total hanging offense? Is it worth it for me to have you on my case for the rest of this trip to avoid waiting 20 minutes for the shower?" It was infallible reasoning and it shut him down because he knew it was true. But I should have added: And why, after so many years, do you still act like your kids are demonic and out to disrespect you at every turn when we have demonstrated again and again and again that nothing could be farther from the truth and we are all cowed and petrified by you?
Neubarth says that one of the hallmarks of a controlling parent is that the entire household is focused around maintaining that one person's comfort and exists to serve that one person's needs, rather than everyone having an equal (or at least subequal) stake in things. This was one of the statements that I thought really hit the nail on the head for our family. Neubarth also relates control to some level of narcissism. I never thought of my dad as a narcissistic man, since that word conjures elements of people admiring themselves in the mirror or singing (like Bart Simpson): "I am so great! I am so great! Everybody love me - I am so great!" But in responding so personally to everything we did, there may be some truth to this. He really did think it was all about him. Even when he set out to "solve" problems for his kids, he solved them to his own satisfaction rather than to ours. He could make us do whatever he wanted and our feelings were irrelevant (e.g., piano lessons forever and ever), but when we wanted to do things he wasn't enthusiastic about (for example, I wanted to join the Cub Scouts) he would sulk like a kid or just use it as an excuse to get angry and make us feel dumb. He lacked empathy for us, assuming everything we did was deliberate and focused on him, and also assuming we knew everything he did, even though we were just kids. I know parents and kids don't have a relationship of equality, and I don't think they should. But it can do a lot of harm to ignore your kids' feelings entirely. What does it hurt to let them have their way once a while? Once you've established dominance over the kids who are only a fraction of your body mass, know so much less than you, and are reliant upon you for everything, what is the need to continually reestablish that dominance again and again and again, never letting anyone forget for a second that yes indeed, you are in charge and not us?
All of the sentences I've been writing in the last paragraph have made me think of more (unpleasant) stories, but I am growing weary of this for now. I do think it's valuable to get this all out there, as tough as it can be. And most of it serves, if nothing else, as a great lesson for me on how not to treat the people I purport to love.
A final thought, as I proofread this: could my dad's inability to recognize a genuine mistake - that is, something truly out of your control - and his own need to control everything be linked?
Friday, January 4, 2008
On One Perfect Day: the Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead
On the day before Christmas, my girlfriend and I went to pick up a couple of things from the Wheaton Giant. Just some groceries and snackie foods for the next few days. The Wheaton Giant is on the outskirts of the Wheaton Mall - not actually attached to the mall but in the same general area. But as we approached the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Veirs Mill Road, it became clear that this distinction was not important. The traffic was backed up just to get into the mall area. It took 10 minutes to get to our usual turn-in, but the whole area was totally gridlocked and I decided to circle around to University Blvd. to get as close to the Giant as possible. But even the turn-in from University was insane, and the Giant lot seemed totally full even though it's nowhere near the mall itself. Everyone was out buying presents at the last minute, just as they've been culturally programmed to do. I had to think to myself that, at some level, people must actually enjoy the annual rite of being crammed like cattle on their way to being fleeced for useless crap as a demonstration of caring for the ones they love. Otherwise, why would they submit to it?
I have always thought that one of the most insidious ways corporations try to manipulate people is by manipulating culture itself. And one highly-effective way of doing this is by playing on people's ignorance and essentially creating traditions. Traditions often manifest themselves as societal expectations. And if the expectation happens to be that you'll spend money, well...there you have it. The holiday season is a great example of such manipulation. Many things about the holidays are clearly meant to hearken back to older times - be it Christmas trees, mistletoe, one horse open sleighs, "donning gay apparel" and "trolling ancient carols", you name it. Yet what was Christmas like here in the U.S. one hundred or two hundred years ago? We've all heard the story that Coca-Cola essentially created Santa Claus in his modern guise (though a little internet searching indicates this may be at least partially an urban myth). Who knows what the tradition is? So we just go along with what we're told. Of course I'm going to buy crap for my kids (when I have them) at Christmas (I'm just not going to wait until the last minute, and buy online when I can). Why would I want my kids to be the only kids in town who don't get good Christmas presents? How much of a fool would I be to think they'd somehow admire my independence?
Another great example is weddings in the U.S. In many ways, weddings also hearken back to earlier times, times when extended families lived together, community ties were much stronger, and a wedding marked a transition to independent adulthood, the beginning of active sexuality, cohabitation with the new spouse, and creation of a new family unit (often soon thereafter). It was also, for many people, a sacred vow before God. Some or all of these are still true for some people, of course, but I think it's safe to generalize that many of these things are now much less likely to be true for many Americans. Still, what were weddings like 100 years ago? What really are American wedding "traditions"? Who the heck knows?
Rebecca Mead's book One Perfect Day: the Selling of the American Wedding shows how the "wedding-industrial complex" has taken advantage of this ignorance in two main ways. First, by hearkening back to tradition when it suits their purposes; and second, by simply creating new "traditions" when the old ones won't do. The goal of both, of course, is to exploit the consumer potential to its fullest, and pressure - especially social pressure - is the industry's biggest ally.
Mead recounts how DeBeers successfully made diamond rings a part of almost every engagement in the 1950s and subsequently, where an earlier 1939 survey had indicated that one-third of brides had no engagement ring at all! Then the industry came up with the figure for how much should be spent (two months salary, and I'd love to know how they arrived at that number). Add to this the cruelty associated with the diamond industry, and it becomes more than just about dollars, anyway.
Mead's book is a witty, incisive dissection of how the industry has done this...and more broadly, on the state of weddings in this country. I'd recommend it to anyone planning to get engaged/married (prospective bride or groom) or who is just befuddled by the whole "wedding thing". She surveys the length and breadth of the industry - from "seminars" for brides in NY to drive-up Las Vegas chapels; from the Disneyworld, Jamaica, and Aruba wedding destinations to the Chinese factories where wedding dresses are made. It was an absorbing, enjoyable, and entertaining (if a bit disturbing) read.
The book made me think of a piece of a review of Michael Moore's movie Sicko that I read last summer:
When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.
I don't mean to argue that the state is actively in favor of people going into debt to throw extravagant weddings, but Mead presents data on how much people are spending (with appropriate caveats) compared to annual salaries that leads one to believe that many people are spending well above their means. She also shows that these kinds of data can be manipulated to convince people that such expenditures are expected. The industry's justification for these costs is partly about tradition, but these days it's also about the desire to emulate celebrity lifestyles, to be a celebrity for a day. Yet couldn't the money be more effectively spent on so many other things?
I have two minor criticisms of the book. First, the focus is almost exclusively on brides. I understand why this is - the industry is primarily focused on them, after all, and it's little girls and not little boys who are supposed to dream about their wedding day - but grooms must play some role. Surely if an otherwise-rational bride-to-be was strongly in favor of some of the exorbitantly wasteful or just plain embarrassing ideas in the book, the groom would have some reaction. Maybe just a short chapter devoted to grooms. As a prospective groom, I found the book utterly fascinating, but it was all about the brides; the grooms seemed like nothing more than cash dispensers located somewhere off-stage (personally, I'm happy to be a mostly off-stage actor, but far less enthusiastic about the cash dispenser role).
Second, I thought occasionally Mead would make unnecessary pronouncements about things. She did such an effective job portraying the absurdities, ironies, insanities, etc. of the whole deal in relatively neutral terms that these occasional opinionated sentences actually detracted from her case.
But these are minor quibbles. Most readers will probably bring a bit of themselves to this book's pages and I was no exception. In a serious relationship headed rapidly in the direction of marriage, I've had misgivings not about marriage itself, really, but all kinds of issues with any potential wedding: involvement of family, friends, costs, music, time, religion, etiquette. In my opinion, Mead really hit the nail on the head in the last chapter where she posed the deceptively-simple but actually-quite-thoughtful question: What are weddings for?
In an age where both my family and my girlfriend's are spread throughout the nation (and beyond, for her), where we have each lived in various places (one state but three countries for her; four states for me) so our friends are also scattered, where neither of us are religious nor have ties to any particular community institutions, where both of us have many other commitments in our lives and lack unlimited time for planning, and where we have both long since established financial and other independence and been engaging in sexual activity, what really does the wedding accomplish? Is the wedding for anything beyond simply getting us to the married state we want to achieve?
(Mead suggests that some are using the onerous and expensive wedding planning and execution process as a surrogate for some of the life changes that used to accompany marriage. I don't deny this is true in some cases, but my significant other and I surely would want no part in such a thing - neither of us is really into making life more difficult than it has to be.)
Here and now is not the place for our particular answers, but "what is your wedding for?" is a question all couples could use (in addition to a healthy dose of fortitude and excellent communication with their potential spouse) for avoiding the worst of the manipulations of the wedding industry. Mead has done us all - from the biggest of "bridezillas" to the most skeptical and reluctant of grooms - a service by so clearly articulating these issues.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Rundown on the Trip to NY
Over Christmas break, my girlfriend and I took a "vacation within a vacation" by taking the train up to New York to visit my brothers. Compared to flying, the train is a delightful way to travel (though unless you have unlimited time its geographic range of usefulness is limited). No security hassles, no checked baggage, relatively spacious and comfortable seats (with no dreaded middle seat), no beverage cart whacking you as it moves up and down the aisle, and no continuous yammering from the flight attendants, pilot, co-pilot, etc. (Interesting that my list of good points about the train seems to consist entirely of all the annoying crap involved with flying that the train lacks...but then again, that's sort of the point. You get on the train, you ride where you're going, no big whoop. They don't feel the need to micromanage you, and the atmosphere is visibly less tense than on a plane.)
The one downside is that people tend to show their ugliest side to the railroad tracks, and the ride between Union Station in DC and Penn Station in NY essentially provides a vista of continuous urban-industrial blight. Dumps, junk yards, chemical plants, factories, burned-out blocks of row houses that likely now function as crack dens. But even this has an upside. For one thing, it makes me really glad I don't live in Baltimore (as if that needed any reinforcing). For another, it gives my girlfriend and I an opportunity to play our favorite Amtrak game, which we affectionately call "Making Fun of New Jersey". This involves pointing out some atrocious sore on the face of the earth (in no short supply in the "Garden State") and making an allusion to something beautiful it's not. So I might point out a stagnant, litter infested brook and yell out: "Wild and scenic river!" Then she'll gesture at one of the innumerable "high voltage areas" around the tracks, and exclaim: "Playground!"
And so on. Is this mean and uncalled for? Of course. But, being from NY, it's my job to make fun of New Jersey.
So we spent about four days at middle brother's (MB). He's in the process of selling his house, so this might have been our last hoorah up there for a while. And this is how insane Long Island has become: my brother bought this house about three years ago. It's what's called a "starter home" - a small place, with one "master" bedroom and two smaller bedrooms (maybe half the size of the house I grew up in). Back when it was built, some returning WWII vet could have bought it and maintained it - even if his wife didn't work and he only did a blue-collar job. When the kids got bigger they probably would have moved on and made a nice profit, too. That was then, this is now. My brother couldn't have bought it without serious financial help from my parents, which means maybe he shouldn't have bought it at all. I say this because, even working two jobs for a combined income close to six figures, he couldn't maintain it and went into serious debt in the process. Now he owes my parents and my grandma huge sums of money (but that's better than owing lenders and credit cards, because there's no interest). He also owes me a couple of thousand too, actually. He's hoping to break even when he sells it, but every month he keeps it hurts him financially, and the market sucks right now.
He's made his peace with selling the house and seriously downscaling until he pays the debt back. Lucky for him, he has friends willing to take him in indefinitely. He says he is actually relieved, and I believe him.
But I'm getting side-tracked. The most interesting thing about the trip was that we didn't go into the city once. There were two reasons for this: 1) my girlfriend and I really just wanted to relax, do nothing, lay around, and eat...but at the same time, we wanted to get away from D.C.; 2) I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my brothers. We're close, but not that close, and the trip was sort of an evolving process.
The first day my other brother (younger brother - YB) came over with his girlfriend and cooked us all dinner. Again, there's a whole story here with her, but suffice it to say that she is 14 years his senior and used to work with my dad (does she get a kick out of fucking the boss's son, and especially one so diametrically opposed to him? does he get a kick out of fucking a co-worker my dad hated? I don't even want to think about it, really, but my guess is the relationship had its origins in some kind of mutual spite for my dad, but ultimately transcended this issue, and now even my dad accepts her); she and my brother were together for a while before he left NY and got together again as soon as he got back, so I hadn't seen her in something like five years; and she has a really good sense of humor and seems really good at keeping him grounded. So he was focused on cooking and the rest of us were really just kind of getting used to each other.
The next day we went to one of MB's workplaces for a few minutes. I don't want to give too much detail. But we were the first of the family ever to see it (though it's not like a cubicle farm - it's a performance-related job he does) and I really developed an appreciation for the skill he has and also for the amount of responsibility they've given him at this place.
YB came back the second evening (sans girlfriend) and we all went to dinner. We also had a long talk about the family. I saw it as inevitable this would happen, but I was afraid it wouldn't. I can't remember how it started, but it just seemed like it was everyone's expectation we would talk about this stuff for a while. The next morning was bright and warm - my head hurt just a little from a few too many Yuenglings (though in general I was pretty darned responsible with regard to drinking in NY and wasn't hung over once) - but a long walk back and forth down suburban streets with my girlfriend as we did a postmortem dissection of the conversation the night before totally cleared it.
All three of us agree on a lot (including most of the fundamentals), but right now YB and I seem very close to the same place and MB is not really there as much. This is likely because not only does he owe my folks a lot right now, but he has in essence gone into "the family business" and my dad can serve as much more of a career mentor to him than to either of us (also his view of kids may be more like that of my dad thanks at least in part to his job). It also, as my girlfriend elucidated the next morning, may be because he's not ready to be honest with himself about a number of issues, not just mom and dad. Anyway, the disagreements really come down to our individual approaches to the problem, and there of course it must be to each his own.
I felt like I steered a large part of the conversation, and given the reading and thinking I've done on this lately, that's perfectly OK. Also, I'm older and with more sophisticated memories of things that went on. When we were talking about the past, I felt like I filled in some gaps for both of them. A few themes emerged, and they're going to sound familiar if you've been reading this blog from the beginning.
One was introspection, or the lack thereof. Dad didn't have it...or, if he did, he was able to compartmentalize his life to be introspective about doing his job while not devoting much thought to his home life. This was someone's theory that night, and I'm not sure I fully buy it. After all, he was an elementary school principal, not a United States Senator - how much thought does it take? On the other hand, I'm pretty good about being really introspective about some parts of my life and lousy about others, so maybe there's something to it. Consensus seemed to be that introspection was key to breaking the cycle.
And that raises another theme, which was questions about grandpa's parenting style. Much as I would like to, I can't really believe that he was a particularly good dad to growing boys, but the key question in my mind is whether he was bad the same way my dad was. The reason this is important is to help me understand why my dad was the way he was. Both because this might allow me to develop some level of empathy with him and because it would help me avoid the same pitfalls. My dad has two brothers, one with kids, and that brother (my uncle) has raised those kids in a fashion so diametrically opposed to the way my dad raised us that it almost seems like a reaction to something. But whether it was a reaction to grandpa, my dad, or something else - whether he is ignorant of dad's parenting style at all - remained unknown. And we all agreed that sources of information were few and likely biased. Maybe one of my uncles, maybe the wife of one. It's something we need to keep working on.
Along the lines of family mystery, there is none greater than my mom, and we talked about her a bit too. Much unknown surrounds her childhood, the death of her father and its effects on her, her relationship with her brothers. She is easily cast aside and overshadowed in these discussions, but of course all parents are partners no matter how unequal. (In our conversation, I somewhat flippantly gave her 2% of the influence and dad 98%. It's probably not really that bad, but it's nothing like 50/50.) In some ways she actually may have compounded the bad things my dad did.
So I showed my brothers the If You Grew Up Controlled book. YB was extremely interested, MB visibly less so...though when I flat out said something like "Controlled doesn't necessarily mean hitting with belts and drinking and molestation" his face changed enough to indicate I'd scored a victory in having him take the idea seriously.
And that was the last issue, and the one where YB and I seemed closest together and MB farther apart, and that was the issue of now and the future. Talking about the past is only useful insomuch as it sheds insight on why we are the way we are now and what we might have to do improve in the future. MB still seemed to think the answer lay in some sort of confrontation, or at least conversation, with dad.
But my take, and YB agreed, was that at this point what's done is done and it's not really about dad anymore. There's nothing he could do to "make it right", even if he wanted to - even if he admitted to everything we accused him of and fell on his knees in tears (which is an image so unlikely as to be disturbing), how would it help? We can't have any serious expectations of dad or mom...or even grandma, our uncles, anyone (I went through that phase briefly earlier in the fall - pissed off at everyone, even childhood neighbors and family friends, for not ever at least acknowledging how bad we had it). It's about us now - making our peace, developing that introspection, taking steps to improve. Focusing on the present, not the past. MB evidently has been successful with a self-described "bull in a china shop" approach to work and personal situations, and maybe in the same career milieu as my dad used to be, that actually does work. But it didn't work in academia and it certainly won't fly in policy - plus, there's little to admire about bulls in china shops and much more to admire about people who can operate in a more sophisticated, nuanced fashion (even if it does occasionally mean emulating the bull).
The next day YB had to work, so MB, my girlfriend and I went out to lunch (and dinner), and spent most of the intervening time sitting around and swapping stories. My girlfriend and I told a lot of stories from the year or so after we met - while I was still in grad school. And I was thinking to myself: "This is how we talk to friends." So it was good.
I don't think we settled anything, but the trip more than met my expectations for family bonding, honest conversation, and relaxation...and I thought it was great. I'd love to host either YB or MB here in D.C. one day...even if all they want to do is sit around the apartment and shoot the shit for four days.
The one downside is that people tend to show their ugliest side to the railroad tracks, and the ride between Union Station in DC and Penn Station in NY essentially provides a vista of continuous urban-industrial blight. Dumps, junk yards, chemical plants, factories, burned-out blocks of row houses that likely now function as crack dens. But even this has an upside. For one thing, it makes me really glad I don't live in Baltimore (as if that needed any reinforcing). For another, it gives my girlfriend and I an opportunity to play our favorite Amtrak game, which we affectionately call "Making Fun of New Jersey". This involves pointing out some atrocious sore on the face of the earth (in no short supply in the "Garden State") and making an allusion to something beautiful it's not. So I might point out a stagnant, litter infested brook and yell out: "Wild and scenic river!" Then she'll gesture at one of the innumerable "high voltage areas" around the tracks, and exclaim: "Playground!"
And so on. Is this mean and uncalled for? Of course. But, being from NY, it's my job to make fun of New Jersey.
So we spent about four days at middle brother's (MB). He's in the process of selling his house, so this might have been our last hoorah up there for a while. And this is how insane Long Island has become: my brother bought this house about three years ago. It's what's called a "starter home" - a small place, with one "master" bedroom and two smaller bedrooms (maybe half the size of the house I grew up in). Back when it was built, some returning WWII vet could have bought it and maintained it - even if his wife didn't work and he only did a blue-collar job. When the kids got bigger they probably would have moved on and made a nice profit, too. That was then, this is now. My brother couldn't have bought it without serious financial help from my parents, which means maybe he shouldn't have bought it at all. I say this because, even working two jobs for a combined income close to six figures, he couldn't maintain it and went into serious debt in the process. Now he owes my parents and my grandma huge sums of money (but that's better than owing lenders and credit cards, because there's no interest). He also owes me a couple of thousand too, actually. He's hoping to break even when he sells it, but every month he keeps it hurts him financially, and the market sucks right now.
He's made his peace with selling the house and seriously downscaling until he pays the debt back. Lucky for him, he has friends willing to take him in indefinitely. He says he is actually relieved, and I believe him.
But I'm getting side-tracked. The most interesting thing about the trip was that we didn't go into the city once. There were two reasons for this: 1) my girlfriend and I really just wanted to relax, do nothing, lay around, and eat...but at the same time, we wanted to get away from D.C.; 2) I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my brothers. We're close, but not that close, and the trip was sort of an evolving process.
The first day my other brother (younger brother - YB) came over with his girlfriend and cooked us all dinner. Again, there's a whole story here with her, but suffice it to say that she is 14 years his senior and used to work with my dad (does she get a kick out of fucking the boss's son, and especially one so diametrically opposed to him? does he get a kick out of fucking a co-worker my dad hated? I don't even want to think about it, really, but my guess is the relationship had its origins in some kind of mutual spite for my dad, but ultimately transcended this issue, and now even my dad accepts her); she and my brother were together for a while before he left NY and got together again as soon as he got back, so I hadn't seen her in something like five years; and she has a really good sense of humor and seems really good at keeping him grounded. So he was focused on cooking and the rest of us were really just kind of getting used to each other.
The next day we went to one of MB's workplaces for a few minutes. I don't want to give too much detail. But we were the first of the family ever to see it (though it's not like a cubicle farm - it's a performance-related job he does) and I really developed an appreciation for the skill he has and also for the amount of responsibility they've given him at this place.
YB came back the second evening (sans girlfriend) and we all went to dinner. We also had a long talk about the family. I saw it as inevitable this would happen, but I was afraid it wouldn't. I can't remember how it started, but it just seemed like it was everyone's expectation we would talk about this stuff for a while. The next morning was bright and warm - my head hurt just a little from a few too many Yuenglings (though in general I was pretty darned responsible with regard to drinking in NY and wasn't hung over once) - but a long walk back and forth down suburban streets with my girlfriend as we did a postmortem dissection of the conversation the night before totally cleared it.
All three of us agree on a lot (including most of the fundamentals), but right now YB and I seem very close to the same place and MB is not really there as much. This is likely because not only does he owe my folks a lot right now, but he has in essence gone into "the family business" and my dad can serve as much more of a career mentor to him than to either of us (also his view of kids may be more like that of my dad thanks at least in part to his job). It also, as my girlfriend elucidated the next morning, may be because he's not ready to be honest with himself about a number of issues, not just mom and dad. Anyway, the disagreements really come down to our individual approaches to the problem, and there of course it must be to each his own.
I felt like I steered a large part of the conversation, and given the reading and thinking I've done on this lately, that's perfectly OK. Also, I'm older and with more sophisticated memories of things that went on. When we were talking about the past, I felt like I filled in some gaps for both of them. A few themes emerged, and they're going to sound familiar if you've been reading this blog from the beginning.
One was introspection, or the lack thereof. Dad didn't have it...or, if he did, he was able to compartmentalize his life to be introspective about doing his job while not devoting much thought to his home life. This was someone's theory that night, and I'm not sure I fully buy it. After all, he was an elementary school principal, not a United States Senator - how much thought does it take? On the other hand, I'm pretty good about being really introspective about some parts of my life and lousy about others, so maybe there's something to it. Consensus seemed to be that introspection was key to breaking the cycle.
And that raises another theme, which was questions about grandpa's parenting style. Much as I would like to, I can't really believe that he was a particularly good dad to growing boys, but the key question in my mind is whether he was bad the same way my dad was. The reason this is important is to help me understand why my dad was the way he was. Both because this might allow me to develop some level of empathy with him and because it would help me avoid the same pitfalls. My dad has two brothers, one with kids, and that brother (my uncle) has raised those kids in a fashion so diametrically opposed to the way my dad raised us that it almost seems like a reaction to something. But whether it was a reaction to grandpa, my dad, or something else - whether he is ignorant of dad's parenting style at all - remained unknown. And we all agreed that sources of information were few and likely biased. Maybe one of my uncles, maybe the wife of one. It's something we need to keep working on.
Along the lines of family mystery, there is none greater than my mom, and we talked about her a bit too. Much unknown surrounds her childhood, the death of her father and its effects on her, her relationship with her brothers. She is easily cast aside and overshadowed in these discussions, but of course all parents are partners no matter how unequal. (In our conversation, I somewhat flippantly gave her 2% of the influence and dad 98%. It's probably not really that bad, but it's nothing like 50/50.) In some ways she actually may have compounded the bad things my dad did.
So I showed my brothers the If You Grew Up Controlled book. YB was extremely interested, MB visibly less so...though when I flat out said something like "Controlled doesn't necessarily mean hitting with belts and drinking and molestation" his face changed enough to indicate I'd scored a victory in having him take the idea seriously.
And that was the last issue, and the one where YB and I seemed closest together and MB farther apart, and that was the issue of now and the future. Talking about the past is only useful insomuch as it sheds insight on why we are the way we are now and what we might have to do improve in the future. MB still seemed to think the answer lay in some sort of confrontation, or at least conversation, with dad.
But my take, and YB agreed, was that at this point what's done is done and it's not really about dad anymore. There's nothing he could do to "make it right", even if he wanted to - even if he admitted to everything we accused him of and fell on his knees in tears (which is an image so unlikely as to be disturbing), how would it help? We can't have any serious expectations of dad or mom...or even grandma, our uncles, anyone (I went through that phase briefly earlier in the fall - pissed off at everyone, even childhood neighbors and family friends, for not ever at least acknowledging how bad we had it). It's about us now - making our peace, developing that introspection, taking steps to improve. Focusing on the present, not the past. MB evidently has been successful with a self-described "bull in a china shop" approach to work and personal situations, and maybe in the same career milieu as my dad used to be, that actually does work. But it didn't work in academia and it certainly won't fly in policy - plus, there's little to admire about bulls in china shops and much more to admire about people who can operate in a more sophisticated, nuanced fashion (even if it does occasionally mean emulating the bull).
The next day YB had to work, so MB, my girlfriend and I went out to lunch (and dinner), and spent most of the intervening time sitting around and swapping stories. My girlfriend and I told a lot of stories from the year or so after we met - while I was still in grad school. And I was thinking to myself: "This is how we talk to friends." So it was good.
I don't think we settled anything, but the trip more than met my expectations for family bonding, honest conversation, and relaxation...and I thought it was great. I'd love to host either YB or MB here in D.C. one day...even if all they want to do is sit around the apartment and shoot the shit for four days.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Happy New Year!
Happy 2008!
I took a break from blog posting during my holiday vacation to read, spend time with family, and gear up to begin my novel (and my job search) in 2008. It was a relaxing and successful and much-needed vacation - here on its last day I feel reinvigorated and ready to tackle the commute and work and all the other challenges of life...hopefully it will be at least a few days before I get deflated again. Ha-ha.
My girlfriend and I had some friends over for a few hours last night. Our new place is coming together well, and it was nice to show it off. The friends left around 11 pm to head to one of their local neighborhood bars before midnight.
The New Year itself started off with some sad news. Not 15 minutes before the ball was scheduled to drop in Times Square, my girlfriend learned that her grandmother may not have more than a few days to live. Her mom is headed to her grandmother (who lives outside the U.S.) later today. Such news has arrived before and her grandmother has recovered - we can hope that is also the case this time. But either way, I am here for her, as she was for me about six months ago in a very similar situation with my grandfather.
I also firmly believe that this in no way sets the tone for the new year, which will be filled with good things: a new place for us, new jobs (possibly), and even a (much-needed) new leader and new direction for this country.
As for resolutions, despite my earlier post I didn't do a lot of deep thinking about making any. Resolutions probably shouldn't just be continuations of what's already going on ("I will continue going to the gym four times a week, barring major time conflicts or travel") or things you have to do ("I will find a job this year") or things that are just plain common sense. I can think of lots of candidates for resolutions: doing better about bringing in a good lunch every day, drinking less soda and more water, going to bed by 11 every night, etc etc.
That being said, I came up with three sort of mushy-squishy resolutions for 2008:
1. I'll spend less time on the internet at home. More time reading, writing, posting (doesn't really count as "the internet"), talking with my girlfriend or my family, at the gym, or out with friends. Anything but endless surfing, google and myspace-stalking, etc. It's a good way to free up more time and spend more time in the present and less in the past.
2. I will continuously strive for perspective. I sat here for five minutes thinking about how to articulate what I mean with this one, and that last sentence was the best I could come up with. It may sound self-indulgent or even New Agey, but I don't care. Life is short, and the rat-race (especially here in D.C.) can seem like the only game around. Going to do fieldwork, especially overseas, always left me - for a while - with a different sense of perspective. Of what's really important, and how important my own problems are (or aren't). So what does "strive for perspective" even mean? It means to keep working to understand myself and the people around me, to keep trying to improve, to maintain and strengthen my relationships with people. I can't just single out one thing ("I'll work on controlling my temper" or "I'll talk to my grandma once a week"). What actions does it entail? Things like meditation (which I really want to start doing regularly again), writing down dreams, keeping in better touch with my brothers, living in the moment with my parents, giving my girlfriend the patience she deserves (and not displacing any of my own feelings onto her), and starting to give to charity again once I have a permanent position. This is probably starting to sound half-hokey and half-pseudo spiritual. All I can say is that I recognize this big mish-mash as important and want to work on it. If I can narrow it down later, I will.
3. I will start and diligently work on my novel, maintaining as much momentum as I can. Last year my one resolution was to begin the preparation work. In fits and starts throughout the year I developed the theme, plot, and characters. I wound up with a set of notes that is long enough to be a novel in and of itself, and spent many hours researching on the internet and reading books and papers. First I thought I would finish this by June, then September, then November. Now it's January 1 again and it was only just before Christmas that I finished.
At any point during the past year I might have decided the idea was unworkable, but I didn't. Is it scary to think about opening a new file and beginning to type? Hell yeah. You know, when I was in high school, I wrote three novels. All three were fairly well-developed in my mind before I began writing (at least in terms of overall plot), but all three were also projections of myself onto the page.
When I was a postdoc I also started to write what, if finished, would have been a novel-length work. Again, self-projection was an issue (though not nearly as bad as the high school stuff), and I just launched full-blown into it without much beyond a premise (one weekend of brainstorming preceded beginning to write). Little thought about where it was all going and what I really wanted to say occurred. I didn't even start at the beginning, but at some unspecified middle portion. The premise was intriguing, and still is. But, predictably, it quickly turned into a tirade against academia.
Is there some of me in my current project? Hell yeah. I have strongly embraced the idiom to write what you know. Is some of it drawn from my own experiences? Most definitely. But the protagonist is not me, and I am far enough removed from the time, place, and situation I'm writing about to be able to evaluate what is going on objectively. Any character sticking around for more than a few pages has already been named and developed - if I find myself needing an additional character or two that's OK, but I don't expect any major surprises. I know the beginning, pretty much know the middle, and know the end...I challenge my characters to thwart this plot structure (they're not automatons, after all), but since I know them pretty well, I don't think they will.
Some people say to write the way I tried to do when I was a postdoc and just let things happened. Others say to do it the way I'm doing it now. I guess it depends on the writer. Knowing myself, I think this way (deliberately, with lots of preparation) will suit me much better.
One thing I can't say in my resolution is that I will finish a first draft by X date or write Y words each day. First because I really don't know how long this thing is going to turn out to be, and second because life sometimes throws monkey wrenches into the best-laid plans. But one issue I had last year was momentum - as I said above, I worked in fits and starts. That can't happen here or the product will suffer. So that's why I set working diligently and maintaining momentum as my goals - mushy-squishy qualitative, but really the wisest course of action.
I did a lot of reading over the break and wanted to post about those books, and also about our trip to New York, but for now I'll just say "Happy New Year" again and close.
I took a break from blog posting during my holiday vacation to read, spend time with family, and gear up to begin my novel (and my job search) in 2008. It was a relaxing and successful and much-needed vacation - here on its last day I feel reinvigorated and ready to tackle the commute and work and all the other challenges of life...hopefully it will be at least a few days before I get deflated again. Ha-ha.
My girlfriend and I had some friends over for a few hours last night. Our new place is coming together well, and it was nice to show it off. The friends left around 11 pm to head to one of their local neighborhood bars before midnight.
The New Year itself started off with some sad news. Not 15 minutes before the ball was scheduled to drop in Times Square, my girlfriend learned that her grandmother may not have more than a few days to live. Her mom is headed to her grandmother (who lives outside the U.S.) later today. Such news has arrived before and her grandmother has recovered - we can hope that is also the case this time. But either way, I am here for her, as she was for me about six months ago in a very similar situation with my grandfather.
I also firmly believe that this in no way sets the tone for the new year, which will be filled with good things: a new place for us, new jobs (possibly), and even a (much-needed) new leader and new direction for this country.
As for resolutions, despite my earlier post I didn't do a lot of deep thinking about making any. Resolutions probably shouldn't just be continuations of what's already going on ("I will continue going to the gym four times a week, barring major time conflicts or travel") or things you have to do ("I will find a job this year") or things that are just plain common sense. I can think of lots of candidates for resolutions: doing better about bringing in a good lunch every day, drinking less soda and more water, going to bed by 11 every night, etc etc.
That being said, I came up with three sort of mushy-squishy resolutions for 2008:
1. I'll spend less time on the internet at home. More time reading, writing, posting (doesn't really count as "the internet"), talking with my girlfriend or my family, at the gym, or out with friends. Anything but endless surfing, google and myspace-stalking, etc. It's a good way to free up more time and spend more time in the present and less in the past.
2. I will continuously strive for perspective. I sat here for five minutes thinking about how to articulate what I mean with this one, and that last sentence was the best I could come up with. It may sound self-indulgent or even New Agey, but I don't care. Life is short, and the rat-race (especially here in D.C.) can seem like the only game around. Going to do fieldwork, especially overseas, always left me - for a while - with a different sense of perspective. Of what's really important, and how important my own problems are (or aren't). So what does "strive for perspective" even mean? It means to keep working to understand myself and the people around me, to keep trying to improve, to maintain and strengthen my relationships with people. I can't just single out one thing ("I'll work on controlling my temper" or "I'll talk to my grandma once a week"). What actions does it entail? Things like meditation (which I really want to start doing regularly again), writing down dreams, keeping in better touch with my brothers, living in the moment with my parents, giving my girlfriend the patience she deserves (and not displacing any of my own feelings onto her), and starting to give to charity again once I have a permanent position. This is probably starting to sound half-hokey and half-pseudo spiritual. All I can say is that I recognize this big mish-mash as important and want to work on it. If I can narrow it down later, I will.
3. I will start and diligently work on my novel, maintaining as much momentum as I can. Last year my one resolution was to begin the preparation work. In fits and starts throughout the year I developed the theme, plot, and characters. I wound up with a set of notes that is long enough to be a novel in and of itself, and spent many hours researching on the internet and reading books and papers. First I thought I would finish this by June, then September, then November. Now it's January 1 again and it was only just before Christmas that I finished.
At any point during the past year I might have decided the idea was unworkable, but I didn't. Is it scary to think about opening a new file and beginning to type? Hell yeah. You know, when I was in high school, I wrote three novels. All three were fairly well-developed in my mind before I began writing (at least in terms of overall plot), but all three were also projections of myself onto the page.
When I was a postdoc I also started to write what, if finished, would have been a novel-length work. Again, self-projection was an issue (though not nearly as bad as the high school stuff), and I just launched full-blown into it without much beyond a premise (one weekend of brainstorming preceded beginning to write). Little thought about where it was all going and what I really wanted to say occurred. I didn't even start at the beginning, but at some unspecified middle portion. The premise was intriguing, and still is. But, predictably, it quickly turned into a tirade against academia.
Is there some of me in my current project? Hell yeah. I have strongly embraced the idiom to write what you know. Is some of it drawn from my own experiences? Most definitely. But the protagonist is not me, and I am far enough removed from the time, place, and situation I'm writing about to be able to evaluate what is going on objectively. Any character sticking around for more than a few pages has already been named and developed - if I find myself needing an additional character or two that's OK, but I don't expect any major surprises. I know the beginning, pretty much know the middle, and know the end...I challenge my characters to thwart this plot structure (they're not automatons, after all), but since I know them pretty well, I don't think they will.
Some people say to write the way I tried to do when I was a postdoc and just let things happened. Others say to do it the way I'm doing it now. I guess it depends on the writer. Knowing myself, I think this way (deliberately, with lots of preparation) will suit me much better.
One thing I can't say in my resolution is that I will finish a first draft by X date or write Y words each day. First because I really don't know how long this thing is going to turn out to be, and second because life sometimes throws monkey wrenches into the best-laid plans. But one issue I had last year was momentum - as I said above, I worked in fits and starts. That can't happen here or the product will suffer. So that's why I set working diligently and maintaining momentum as my goals - mushy-squishy qualitative, but really the wisest course of action.
I did a lot of reading over the break and wanted to post about those books, and also about our trip to New York, but for now I'll just say "Happy New Year" again and close.
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