Thoughts on grief and shopping

In an uncanny, almost freakish coincidence, our cat Bella, littermate to the late lamented Zee, has died of the same illness (lymphoma), almost exactly one year later, i.e., during the recent holidays, which are already horrible by nearly all measures, at least for me.

So, first off: Rest well, beloved Bella. We miss you.

I've just noticed that I am coping with my devastation in a way that replicates the premise of my first novel, Bigfoot and the Baby. That is: we shop because we grieve. I suspect I've bought more unneeded items for myself in the past 24 hours than I did all last year. And, sad to say, these purchases somehow make me feel better, if only temporarily.

Notions of "filling the void" come to mind, but seem inadequate, as an explanation. Perhaps there's an illusion of control--I find something I want, I buy it, I own it--that eludes us when a loved one is ill or dying. When we shop, we complete a concrete transaction with a gratifying result. There's no helpless guessing what might happen if we make one choice or the other; and if we don't like what we bought after all, we can usually return it (or the consequences of our mistake are usually minimal).

But the grief we feel may be more inchoate, which was an underlying theme of Bigfoot. Though I'm not religious, I believe Judaism and Christianity capture this feeling well with the story of the Fall. Our lives are rooted in a tremendous sense of loss, of reaching for that paradise we can never quite envision, let alone regain. Every actual loss resonates with that fundamental condition, making grief seem both bottomless and holy.

What evolutionary advantage this might give us, I can't really say. But it does give a real boost to consumer capitalism.

Why is writing so difficult? No, really--why?

It's the perennial question for those of us who call ourselves "writers." We supposedly need to write as much as we need to eat and breathe. Maybe more so. We don't even care if anyone ever sees what we create, let alone likes it. (This is a lie.) Writing is our identity, our passion, our reason for being. And yet, as often as not (at least for me, so I suppose I should say the "we" is royal here), we dread sitting down to do it. We do not want to. Our inner toddler begins kicking and screaming, maybe vomiting a little for good measure. If we manage to quiet this monster--or if we can endure him or her screaming in the background--we can get something done. And then we hate what we've written.

Why is writing so hard? Why do we hate what we love so much? And is there anything we can do about this?

If I knew the answer, I would tell you. I promise. But here are a few thoughts I have at the moment.

1. Writing is exhausting.

I'm closing in on the first draft of a new novel, and instead of feeling excited and exhilarated, I feel increasingly drained. Though I'm only actually "writing" for an hour or two every day, my head buzzes continually with ideas, corrections, doubts, aha moments ... It's like the Buddhists' "monkey mind" turned into a giant gorilla and running amok. I am burning glucose in large quantities. I feel dizzy and not entirely in control. I don't really like this feeling.

2. Writing is uncertain.

In fact, like faith, it's the opposite of certainty. Even as I put a word on the page, I think, "There's a better way to say that. What is the better way? Should I say that at all? Maybe I want to say something different. What should I say instead?" If it doesn't happen right away, it will happen as soon as I stand up to make a cup of tea, or--invariably--once I turn the computer off. Related to #1, above, writing means coexisting with constant doubt. Doubt fastens itself to me, like a twin conjoined at every point from head to toe. I drag doubt around.

3. Writing is exposure.

Even if no one ever sees your work but you, putting what's in your mind onto a page or screen makes the internal external. That means it can be seen, and, worse, interpreted. Maybe I think I'm saying A, but someone else thinks I'm saying B. And B is a very bad thing, which reveals my profound incompetence, wickedness, naivete, and general fraudulence. I don't want to face these things in myself, let alone allow anyone else to discover them. Why on earth am I doing this?

4. Writing is unrewarding.

Yes, I know, writing is its own reward. So is persistence. So is growth. But wouldn't it be much nicer if, after you wrote 500 words, your computer dispensed $500 into your damp and trembling palm? Or you received 500 prestigious awards? 500 compliments? Something?

5. Writing is self-indulgent.

I also know the arguments against this one. The world needs art, the world needs novelists. Although you're not directly feeding the hungry, or building a wall around Donald Trump, you're helping to create empathy and understanding--and increasing your own capacity for both. But shouldn't I really be building that wall right now? What was I doing while the U. S. descended into fascism? Finishing my satirical novel?

From all the think pieces I've read on this very topic, I've concluded that none of these issues can be solved. Again, like a Buddhist, we must just acknowledge them and press on. It's just that it's all rather disappointing. I thought this was supposed to be fun.

Well, sometimes it is.

A few meandering thoughts about writer's block

We've all heard way too much about this mythical ailment, mostly from the movies, because 1.) people who write movie scripts are writers and are writing what they know, and 2.) as has been pointed out repeatedly, writers actually writing aren't very interesting to watch; the "block" is the only way to get them out of the house.

That said, I don't think "writer's block" is much different from any kind of procrastination brought on by doubt or fear. In my case, anyway, my reasons for not writing usually boil down to thinking it's not going to work. I don't want to spend two or four or eighty or ten thousand hours on something that's going to be bad, do I? In the same way, I don't want to cut back on carbs because it probably won't make me feel better; I don't want to see a movie because I might not like it; I don't want to go grocery shopping because I'm afraid of the parking lot; I don't want to work because I'm lazy ... or, I mean, it might not be satisfying.

Still, in most of these cases, I do the thing anyway. Sometimes, as with work, there's a concrete financial incentive. But other times I'm able to get past my objections relatively easily. How do you know it won't work if you don't try it? I ask myself, and then away go the carbs--at least for a little while. But with writing the resistance seems greater, and I can only think that, unlike these other issues, my ability to write says something fundamental about me. Writing something bad means I'm not really a writer after all, which means the only certain way to preserve the illusion that I am a writer is not to write.

So how to combat this? Maybe by remembering that writer's block is the ultimate absurd condition--and just writing any goddamn thing you can.

Consuming ambivalence

Do a Google search on "consumer culture ambivalence," and you will get "about 245,000 results." So, apparently, this is an issue.

But perhaps I don't need to tell you that. Because there seems to be something deeply ingrained in the experience of buying anything--other than, perhaps, food--that induces discomfort. At least for me. Do I really need this thing? I mean, really, really, need it? Or am I just adding to the stuff that surrounds me, separating me from a more authentic experience of life? I desired this thing, which is why I bought it, but now I kind of hate it, because it tricked me. I wanted it, but I didn't really, really, really need it. The thing made me confuse want with need.

Thoreau, of course, was quite the scold on this topic:

I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. 

However, we know Thoreau was kind of a nut. Admirable, but impossible to imitate; in fact, not even he could really walk the talk. As Paul Theroux says of his near-namesake, 

During his famous experiment in his cabin at Walden, moralizing about his solitude, he did not mention that he brought his mother his dirty laundry and went on enjoying her apple pies.

Did he also occasionally buy some snappy new boots in downtown Concord? But I ramble. My point, or my question, is: how do we decide when our consumption has gone overboard?

A book called The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, says the decision is cultural:

People believe consumption has become excessive ... when it threatens a culturally understood "balance" with morality, citizenship, production, saving, or the environment.

I'm at the point where any consumption feels like too much. Yes, deep inside, I'm Henry David. And yet, under these circumstances, buying feels somehow gleefully naughty, like an act of defiance, or a piece of apple pie. There's just no way out.

The things will always get us in the end.


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Is silence golden?

Insert usual excuses for not blogging here.

Plus:

I have been wondering lately about this whole imperative to say stuff on the Internet as often as possible. Where does this very recent, overwhelmingly powerful requirement to write in public come from? I think it's safe to say it comes from corporations, whose need to draw "eyeballs" to advertisements intersects powerfully with 1) the human need for connection and attention generally, and 2) writers' need to write and be read specifically.

Caveats:

1) This is not necessarily bad. There's a real discipline to rapid, public writing--which is still evolving, and whose shaky tenets many, many people don't practice. But still, discipline is good. Learning to write both reasonably well and reasonably fast is good. And who will finance this sort-of-real/sort-of-fake form of publication for aspiring writers, if not the makers of dangerous diet pills and fly-by-night, for-profit colleges?

2) My ambivalence about the compulsion to write is neither a satisfactory excuse for not writing, nor an indication I intend to give up blogging, or tweeting, or anything else.

3) I'm just saying.

What am I saying? I'm saying that last week I had in mind a post about the Ronco Rhinestone and Stud Setter, which was inspired by a pair of jeans I'd just bought at a thrift shop. They are Michael Kors, very nice, $14, but until I brought them home I was not fully aware of the large amount of studs adorning the front and back pockets. Normally I'm not a fan of adornments on jeans; I'm sure these will make my life a living hell if I forget and wear them through an airport scanner or if I happen to amble past a giant magnet. Also, they reminded me of Barbara Stanwyck in The Thorn Birds, stomping around the ranch with her dentures and bowed legs. By which I mean, too much stuff on jeans is either for 1) very young people or 2) old people trying to look young. Neither of which I 1) am or 2) wish to be.

But then the Sikh temple shooting happened, on the heels of the Aurora shooting, and those are just the awful happenings I happened to be paying most attention to, thanks to the Internet. A breezy post about the Ronco Rhinestone and Stud Setter had to be out of the question for at least a period of time (how long? Is now OK?). But was I supposed to say something instead about the shootings? Does saying something mean you are automatically more concerned than if you say nothing? I started to feel like the better move was to say nothing. Or, rather, that speaking just for the sake of speaking was not helpful. I don't know what *is* helpful. But maybe the traditional "moment of silence" is more than just a mask for "let us pray," when you're not supposed to say that publicly. I'd like to think it also means: let us shut our traps for just a second. Let us pause. Let us not jump and react and flail our arms and demand attention. Perhaps only silence is as enormous as certain events, and speech is too small a thing in such circumstances.

So there. I said something about saying nothing. You're welcome, Internet.

"Show, don't tell" and hoarding

I spent the past two days purging old clothes from my closets. I hauled five bags of stuff off to Goodwill, and upon returning home, I felt ... awful. My sense is that one is supposed to feel liberated on such occasions, and also not a little holy for contributing to charity (though one is also aware that clothing donations from the first world can interfere with nascent clothes-making businesses in the third). While I kept reminding myself of how lame it is to hang onto stuff I don't wear, when others might be able to use it, when I drove away from the Goodwill container I felt almost like I was fleeing the scene of a crime I had just committed.

Yes, things are just things. And yet they are not. In the same way that in fiction, the specific, telling detail is a window into a character's psyche, things--in our consumer society, anyway--are portals to the past. To me, even the most trivial piece of clothing I heaved into the Hefty bag had some bit of memory stuck to it, along with lint and cat hair. I almost always remembered where I'd bought the thing, and what life was like at that time (I really have hung onto things far too long). If the piece of clothing was a gift, well, so much the worse. How ungrateful I felt for never wearing that jacket (even if it didn't fit, or made me look like Carmela Soprano, or both). How I felt like I was stabbing the giver in the heart, like I was tossing a kitten out of a car into the rain.

It's my guess that although I may be nuttier than many in this area, I'm not alone. (I am fortunate, too, that our condo is small enough that full-on hoarding is simply not possible.) Consumerism, I think, depends on this fear of loss, especially of the loss of memory. We buy to ward off Alzheimer's, and we give to keep others from forgetting us. Those aren't the only reasons, of course, but they come into play--maybe more so when we feel ourselves isolated, and people close to us start dying, and we start to think of how many people we've already lost track of over the course of our lives.

What will keep our memories for us, if not objects? Stories? Facebook? The Cloud? Fine, but we can't touch and see these things in the same way I could have--but didn't--wear that TV-test-pattern sweater I bought in England two-plus decades ago. You can tell stories to kids and grandkids, but if they're not connected to tangible things, those stories mutate and dissipate over generations, even if they're written down. Objects don't change, although they do decay, and their original appeal or function can become questionable.

This is where Buddhism is supposed to help, right? Impermanence, impermanence. Further: giving up clothing is nothing compared to giving up one's life, which is what Memorial Day is about. Yet Memorial Day is also about sales. It really seems like this endless circulation of stuff through our lives is really the presence (presents?) of death.

Anyway, I've moved more junk into the empty spaces in the closets, so there's lots more space in my office now. That's kind of nice.

A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory

So this is very cool.

It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.

As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never, not once, did it dawn on me that the purpose of this education was to be able to answer questions that were as yet unanswered. In doing countless experiments that turned out either right (yay, you got the blue foam!) or wrong (you idiot, you made black sludge!), and taking lots of multiple-choice tests, I was given to understand that science was about confirming what was already known. The black sludge was simply an error, not a result of processes that were just as real, and just as interesting in their own way, as those that made the foam. Science was proving you could follow the directions.

I can think of a number of reasons I got this message. One is that I was an extraordinarily rule-oriented child (I am only a little less so as an adult). After all, I also didn't get that art was about "expressing yourself," so much as properly rendering what you saw in front of you. So I may have simply missed the part about how we were learning scientific techniques through these repetitive experiments, so that we could later use them to make new discoveries. It may also be that my own teachers either didn't know or didn't think it important that science was about discovery. Their emphasis on mastery of the known might have reflected their own experiences and philosophies.

Or there may have been an even larger purpose behind this kind of teaching. The system cannot function if everyone in it is constantly innovating. Nothing would get done. In truth, we need people--lots of people--to implement known processes and principles. Maybe that's what this education was about: because most people will (by choice? by necessity? whose choice? whose necessity?) be implementers rather than visionaries, they must be trained as such.

Was there such a governing philosophy behind education? Is there one now? All the standardized testing going on now suggests that the answer to the second question is yes. Even if that is not the stated purpose of the testing, it will assuredly be a pronounced effect. Is that intentional on some deep, unacknowledged level? Or am I just being paranoid, or unrealistic? Should I just be grateful for the conscientious training of drones? I'm one, also, most of the time.

On sexism and sympathy

I read Jonathan Franzen's now notorious piece on Edith Wharton a few weeks ago, and I admit to not being immediately enraged. Mostly I was focused on his ideas about how authors create sympathy for characters, since this is a preoccupation of mine (and I taught a class on this topic a few years ago). Franzen suggests that characters who evoke our sympathy have some kind of strike against them, some recognizable handicap that they must overcome. He then pivots to the meta-suggestion that Edith Wharton's own handicap was her looks, I believe in order to engender our sympathy for her--a successful, talented, and privileged person of the sort we (Americans? women? who?) might otherwise tend to resent. The handicap notion is not new, but certainly worth considering as a way of understanding why readers root for certain characters. Maybe in reading fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter), we seek reassurance that we can overcome our own flaws as we make our way through our real lives. But that would be a "therapeutic" reading, of which more in a moment.

All that said, Victoria Patterson and others who've seized on this piece as yet another example of Franzen's sexism aren't wrong. I mentioned this very issue when describing my ambivalent but generally positive response to the treatment of Patty in Freedom. In Patty's autobiography particularly, I sensed Franzen struggling with his own handicap as a writer, which is his contempt for women. I think he realizes that this holds him back, and in a strategy that works on an interesting level, he represents his own contempt as Patty's self-loathing--thus creating sympathy for her, if only as the author's helpless tool. This is not to say Franzen only feels contempt for women; I think he wants not to feel it, and Freedom and the Wharton piece are both efforts to struggle with an aspect of himself that he doesn't like.

My, I am making assumptions about the author's personal life based on his writing, though. How about that? As it happens, this gets at the main point I wanted to make about this latest Franzen face-plant. For Franzen--and a very large number of other critics--fiction written by women is always read as "really" autobiographical. Not just women, but all non-straight-white-male authors, are subject to this treatment: critics read their novels sociologically, to find out what it is, or was, like to be them. This is fair and right in the case of memoir, but not in fiction. Why is it that Edith Wharton's novels are really about her own resentment of pretty women, whereas Franzen's novels--also about women and their families--are about The Human Condition? Why don't we read Freedom to understand Franzen's feelings about, I dunno, his divorce, his mom, his own looks? To be fair, in interviews he has alluded to events in his own life, suggesting they shape his fiction. The point is, that's true for every writer. To pretend that our biographies play no role in creating our art is ludicrous. However, I don't write fiction to tell people my personal problems. I think it's safe to say that we choose to write fiction in part to convert our experiences into something different, something that's no longer ours as such, but might pertain to a wide range of people, all of whom will interpret the story differently and make it their own. And if Franzen's fiction is about The Human Condition, then mine is, too.

I suspect (continuing my psychological analysis of Franzen, which, I should point out, I have no real business doing) that Franzen's real concern is that his own novels will be read as "personal" and not "universal." That they'll be seen as therapeutic documents and not as Art. Really, the more I think about Patty's autobiography--written explicitly as part of her psychotherapy--the more it seems like Franzen's own struggle with the whole concept of women as writers. Are they capable of creating Art that transcends their own neuroses, Art for Art's sake? Or will their writing always be tied to--and tied down by--their own unmanageable bodies and emotions? By encasing Patty's autobiography in his own larger Work of Art, Freedom, Franzen seems to suggest the latter.

This idea resonates with Franzen's famous spat with Oprah Winfrey years ago, which seemed to center on his not wanting female readers. Oprah does use books for therapy, and her audience is overwhelmingly female. But by choosing Franzen's The Corrections for her book club, she made the horrifying suggestion that his book could be used that way as well. Of course, they've since made up, and Oprah's book club read Freedom.

So let's just lay out the diagnosis. Franzen's condescension toward women writers represents his own fear of being a second-class artist. I have that same fear, although I would settle for second-class status at this point in my career...

Are we happy yet?

Like many Americans with a little too much time on their hands, I am a sucker for any article with "happiness" in the title. Perhaps, I say to myself as I click eagerly on the link, this one will be the answer. Finally, I will know the truth: am I happy or not? This WSJ article got me thinking...well, dang, maybe I am.

I hesitate even to say this, given that in addition to being (possibly) happy, I am also deeply superstitious about admitting any form of good fortune. So let me protect myself by saying I remain on constant high alert for bad stuff to get upset about. Bad stuff is always happening, and will happen, to me and to others, whom I know and don't know. I mean, jeez, all you need to do is look out the window, or, god help you, at the Internet, and you will see that there is an infinite amount of stuff to be unhappy about, even if you personally are not at this very moment unhappy. In fact, there must be some reason why the Internet is so full of awful, aggravating, horrible information--if we didn't seek out awfulness, content providers would rush to deluge us with some other kind of content. Like...what? What would we rather have?

That question gets us back to the article, whose main point is that what many of us think of as "happiness" is not really worth pursuing after all.

The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one's sports team—a feeling called "hedonic well-being"—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run.

Until recently, I guess I thought of "happiness" as either this "hedonic" business, or else the absence of any kind of bad feelings...which, on reflection, translates to a sort of blankness that seems scary. No wonder the pursuit of this is so unsatisfying.

The article suggests that engagement, a sense of purpose, and above all *not ruminating on your happiness or lack thereof* are the keys to a different type of happiness. This is "eudaimonia," which is more akin to fulfilling one's potential. People who feel eudaimonic happiness "are good at reappraising situations and using the brain more actively to see the positives... They may think, 'This event is difficult but I can do it[.]'"

Since completing my novel, I've experienced a lot more of this type of happiness. MIND YOU there are still plenty of things I strongly believe that I can't do (self-marketing, cutting the cats' toenails). But being able to focus on my writing and finish a large project have given me a certain confidence that I didn't have before. On any given day I feel despair, frustration, even self-loathing, but the difference is that I expect these feelings to go away at some point. Back when I was seriously depressed, I figured the despair was permanent, which contributed to the depression all the more. I've somehow--for now--concluded I can handle these experiences.

Based on this article, I might suggest swapping the word "confidence" for "happiness" when thinking about what we want to pursue. I'm not talking about bravado, the false confidence that requires an audience to exist--and usually attracts one. I mean a confidence you feel whether or not anyone is looking.

That's what I'm going to try for, anyway, because I no longer think the other is possible. (I say this with hope, not despair.)

What your novel requires of you: reflections on junior high school architecture

As I've said before, writing my second novel has so far been much easier. One reason is that I've set it in the suburbs of Cleveland, in a thinly disguised version of my hometown, which makes it just a hell of a lot faster to locate objects and events in space. I spend almost no time wondering about what someone's living room, or a street, or an afternoon sky might look like--it's just there in my mind. Even better, it's in the form of memory, so I get plenty of layers of emotional varnish for free. (Well, not for free. I paid for it.)

Another reason is that I've come to expect that the novel will make unexpected demands of me. I've learned to welcome (for the most part) these surprises, rather than fear them. I no longer assume that I'm going off the rails; instead I'm following a trail of clues that the story, from the future, is leaving for me in the present. Or something like that.

So anyway, today I found myself reflecting at length on the architecture of my old junior high school. I actually don't even know what has happened to that building in the intervening years, since the "junior high" concept has been superseded almost everywhere by that of "middle school." The difference in philosophy is almost entirely contained in the names. Junior high is a stepping stone, a "junior" version of high school. Middle school is meant to recognize these ages as a unique developmental period in themselves, both/and and neither/nor. Junior high is two grades and middle school three, and all the fundamental differences between twoness and threeness apply here.

The architecture of my junior high really embodied the stepping-stone philosophy. The design reflected two (of course!) basic concepts: aspiration and revelation. Aspiration in the high ceilings that tended to draw the eye upward (toward high school, your future career, or the eighth graders' floor if you were a lowly seventh-grader) and revelation--in that what you saw in those high ceilings was, as I recall anyway, a tangle of exposed, brightly colored pipes. You see? What was once hidden--plumbing--was now revealed. By education.

I wonder what has happened to that building. It can't have survived in the above form; it would be such a relic of the seventies, outmoded in both design and educational philosophy. I do know the middle school is now housed in one of the really old elementary schools, which I hope has been refurbished inside. Because before aspiration/revelation, we had the school-as-factory concept. And boy, did they look (and feel) the part.

Fiction over 40: Is it possible?

I am not sure what to be more depressed about: the fact that the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list contains so many people who are more accomplished than I will probably ever be, or that Sam Tanenhaus thinks most people over 40 can't write. In Sunday's NYT Book Review, Tanenhaus lists all the great authors who did their best work--or what "history" has deemed their best work--before the age of 40. Well, the list, though impressive, isn't that long, really--when you think of all the great authors past and present. And he does give some exceptions--Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth--to give some of us on the downhill slope of artistic possibility the faintest glimmer of hope. (Or maybe that's just the abyss, which glimmers too.)

I would point out that many of the examples of those who peaked before 40 lived in the olden days. Like, before 1950, or even 1900. Might this early peaking be attributable to historical or sociological factors, rather than something innate? Tanenhaus seems to think not:

Not every major fiction writer is a natural, but each begins with a storehouse of material and memories that often attenuate over time. Writers in their youth generally have more direct access to childhood, with its freshets of sensation and revelation. What comes later — technical refinement, command of the literary tradition, deeper understanding of the human condition — may yield different results but not always richer or more artful ones.

Look, I'm more than happy to sink into despair at the slightest hint that I may not be up to achieving my dream. Give up? Give me a reason. But I don't think Tanenhaus has.

More direct access to childhood? So the best authors are, what, twelve? Sixteen? Four? Let's get those nursery school kids into critique groups, pronto! And do we really only want stories about kids, or people who think like kids? I'm all for freshets of sensation and revelation, but are these experiences really only possible for children? I would suggest that more than a few young people spend their days avoiding freshets and revelations of all kinds, and only later, with the perspective that comes with few forehead wrinkles, are able to open up to the world.

I mean, are all those books on finding your inner child just psychic snake oil? OK, yes. But it is entirely possible, as well as desirable, to find new ways to see the world afresh--at all stages of one's life. THAT IS WHAT ART IS FOR, FOR CHRISSAKE. Who are all these brilliant young writers writing for anyway? Themselves? If so, they would not be brilliant.

So if your life is short of freshets lately, even if you are really freakin old and should just give up, here are a few things to try before you do that:

* Art. Look at it. Read it. Listen to it. Feel it. Taste it. Talk about it. etc.
* Astronomy. Look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Now look at, I dunno, anything. Changes your perspective, right?
* Water. Spend some time near it or in it.
* Meditation.
* Remembering your dreams.
* Taking a photo a day and writing a description of it.
* Look through the wrong end of the binoculars.
* Get away from the computer.
* And so forth.

None of these suggestions is particularly new, and some veer into "inner child" territory that I would rather avoid. (My inner child is a brat, turns out.) I'm just saying, we can train ourselves to observe, and to feel wonder. We can work on our memories. So if that's the only reason older people supposedly can't write--because their memories of childhood are too foggy--that is just no reason at all.

Inventions That Would Almost Work: Hair Magnet Exer-Suit

This is a padded full-body suit made of a revolutionary, highly static-y material. Put suit on and roll across floor and / or furniture to collect cat hair and strengthen core muscles. Launder suit to dispose of cat hair. Repeat.

ITWAW is brought to you by a restless, slightly underemployed writer.

Bad news on the zombie front

Now that the Large Hadron Collider is temporarily shut down for re-wiring, I don't have to worry about the world getting sucked into a black hole approximately one nanosecond after some guy in Switzerland goes, "oops." The bad news is, according to a new mathematical model, zombies are a far greater menace than I originally thought. Researchers in Canada have found that unless swift and dramatic action is taken at the outset of a zombie outbreak, the zombies could easily wipe out the human race.

Now, this particular summary in Wired online leaves a few questions unanswered. Mainly I am wondering if the model applies to the new-style fast zombies (as in the movie 28 Days Later), or the old-school slow ones. Let's assume it's the latter, since I think we can all agree that the fast ones would pose a problem. But one would think that all but the extremely slow and frail could outrun or even outwalk the slow zombies. They are indeed so slow, that one has to come up with creative ways of passing the time--say, theatrically cowering in a corner--while they make their approach. How could these guys take over the human race?

According to an analysis of this article by my beloved husband, in an epidemic there is always a period of time during which people don't understand what's going on. A few dead guys staggering around in the mall--so what? That's normal, right? And meanwhile these guys are gorging themselves on a handful of unwary shoppers over by the Mervyns side-entrance. During this phase, the "oh, those can't be zombies" phase, they multiply, and before we know it, they have sufficient numbers to overwhelm the living. Volume trumps speed in the end.

Further discussion raised the following additional points. Zombies lurk. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are, by definition, unexpected, and their lurking skills make them even more so. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, zombies are relentless. As we know from the workplace, it is the relentless who succeed most often, far more than the wise, the charming, or even the powerful. In fact, extreme relentlessness may be a sign that someone is a zombie.

I'm not saying we have to drop everything and obsess about zombies. Indeed, that kind of fear can be paralyzing, which is exactly what slow zombies want. But neither should we be complacement. I would just keep an eye out for those slow, lurking, relentless types, and sound the alarm if you start seeing more of them.

One more thing about Cleveland...

It wasn't the Cuyahoga River that caught fire. It was the stuff floating on top of the river. So there.

Ingenuity

Via Andrew Sullivan. Ben Franklin would be proud--or very scared.

Terrorist fist bump day

Happy Terrorist Fist Bump Day! Wish it could have been my birthday; missed it by a day.

Why we need Bigfoot hunters

From Amy, blogger-by-proxy, this Salon article explains why the crypto can't be completely cut off from zoology.

The hunt for cryptids isn't just quixotic. It's motivated by the same 
ambitions that have led to key zoological discoveries. You might even 
say cryptid hunters keep warm that place in science where
 anything is possible. And it's from that place where some of the 
most astounding advances in the sciences are derived.



At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, the Mountain Gorilla and the
 platypus were thought to be legend or hoax. Pearl fishermen of 
Indonesia told tales of enormous prehistoric-like creatures on a remote 
island; the stories turned out to be real and the animals were named 
Komodo dragons. (An animal, even today, has not been "discovered" 
until a bona fide scientist says so, no matter how many locals claim 
its existence.)



Similarly, I'm open to the possibility that there are moderate Republicans, but I'll only believe when I see one.

Hollow Earth

I'm happy to report that I'm back working on my novel, after the two-week mental and physical implosion known as the holidays. Well, sort of back. I'm doing some research (aka procrastinating) by reading Hollow Earth by David Standish. I bought it for Trev a couple of years ago, and he just cracked it open for the first time, looking for a reference to City of Ember, a book that's been turned into a movie with Bill Murray--who knew?--and which he watched on the plane back from Cleveland. That reference does not exist. However, it dawned on me that my novel includes some hollow earth--what do you call it, theory? imagery?--so I picked it up. It's fascinating. One of many things I didn't know: ground zero for nineteenth-century hollow-earth thinking is...Ohio! John Cleves Symmes, he of the critically important Symmes's Holes (oh! there's a Museum of Hoaxes!), is buried in Hamilton, and his sidekick / rival Jeremiah Reynolds was born in southwestern Ohio. It was Reynolds's name that issued repeatedly from Edgar Allan Poe's dying lips--why, evidently no one knows. But his and Symmes's ideas of polar exploration leading to voyages into the earth's interior inspired Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Which is one hell of a narrative. Also ape men are big in underground narratives; there's a Bigfoot figure, in the form of a large, hairy shepherd, in Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

It also occurs to me that on our flight to Cleveland for Thanksgiving, they showed Journey to the Center of the Earth. Twice. (SFO-Houston, Houston-CLE). What is with Continental Airlines and the hollow earth? Will they be adding Symzonia to their route map?

What is money?

This is a question I've had for a number of years, and it's even more baffling now. I am beginning to gather that one reason for the current financial crisis is that no one really knows. Perhaps everyone is beginning to realize that money is a species of mass delusion like religion--only worse, because questioning it brings about real and immediate consequences.

I remember being taught, as a little kid, that every coin or dollar bill I had represented an amount of gold in Fort Knox. If I wanted to, I could show up at the Fort and demand my bit of gold in exchange for my currency. The system was designed to save our backs; otherwise we'd all have to drag around sacks of gold and the most wealthy would end up horribly crippled--who wanted that? It all made good sense, and I happily did my part as a consumer for many years, a little gold nimbus hovering in the back of my mind every time I performed the ritual of exchange. Apparently, though, none of this has been true for quite some time, and the only people who want it to be true are right-wing, tin-foil-hatted survivalists.

The gold standard is problematic for a couple of reasons I can think of. One--mining gold is terrible for the earth and for the people who do it. Two--what's really so great about gold? It's pretty, it's malleable, it's hard to get (see One, above)--but so what? There are other pretty objects, as different civilizations have shown by trading in beads, shells, etc. So is the issue beauty combined with rarity? But if rarity, or difficulty in attaining (which may be, in fact, the same thing), means *doing damage* in order to attain, what's the value there? In one way or another, we have to pay for that damage.

OK, so back to what money is now. If it represents the combined value of all goods and services produced in this country (and in the world, too, I guess), that seems to be a tautology: money is worth what we buy with it. There are goods we don't buy, services we don't use. In any case, we're back to mass delusion. Now, we're all deciding that Hummers, for instance, aren't valuable after all. What happens if the concept of value starts getting radically separated from the material world? Can we monetize time, for instance, in a way that would support our current economic system? Or is that just another form of barter--if I give you five hundred hours of my time for a Prius, does that just mean I'm doing something I'd rather not be doing during that time, like working? And how do I prove I've worked, if you weren't there to watch me--by giving you the money? Is there no escaping the material world? Does value always entail some form of money?

Some economist on Marketplace last week finally raised this question, and said something to the effect that money is now nothing but numbers on screens. Because of all these complicated financial instruments (like derivatives), no one knows what the numbers really represent. The problem is, in a nutshell, that everyone has started wondering. And the powers that be want us to just shut up and stop asking questions--don't even think the questions, or you are sinning and there will be consequences. The system will crash and you will be poor.

On gloom

I was getting ready to blog this morning about the end of Daylight Savings (I know it's "Saving," but I find that gross to say) Time--about how it seems to me like the end of the world--but then the power went out due to a storm. So here I am at a little after 5 p.m., the sky a pale green, darkness about to clang down all around us (not to mention sugar-crazed children and their minders out terrorizing the streets; thank god for our second-floor condo and security building). As a lifelong Californian, Trev does not understand my problem. It's true that here we have plenty of sun in winter, and much-needed rain, which causes spring to happen round about December, just when life is really starting to suck for the folks back in my place of origin. That would be Ohio. It's clear that my seasonal gloom is hard-wired into me from growing up there. Daylight Standard Time means Time to shrink. I feel my muscles contracting even now. Going anywhere is a project: you stuff your feet into boots which never, ever keep your feet warm, and wrap your neck in an itchy scarf which does not quite address the fact that your coat leaves a mysterious gap in coverage in the center of your chest, which the wind then finds and slugs with fists of ice. Don't get me started on hat hair. The fact that I don't have to deal with severe cold and snow anymore only engenders guilt and alienation, which causes me to focus more and more on the darkness, which none of us escapes. Dark at 5:00. That is madness.

However I would trade six months of a full-on Cleveland winter* for:
--Obama win
--Defeat of Proposition 8
*I offer this only if there are no alternatives; i.e. if these things weren't going to happen unless I personally volunteered to experience a full-on Cleveland winter for six months. In that case I'd do it for a year if I had to. But only if.**
**For an Obama landslide, I'm prepared to offer three months, with same conditions as above applying.***
***Lots of liberals, including me, think they are magic. That is, they think they personally can doom the election through any expression of optimism. Maybe we're narcissists, infants, just like everybody says; or maybe the fact that any human being could be so deluded as to vote for McCain/Palin or so cruel as to vote for Prop 8 is inexplicable by any form of rational thought, so we turn to magic.****
****We are not magic. But we have power.
Barack Obama for President.
No on 8.

UPDATE:
This cheered me up. Especially this part:

The I Forget How to Turn a Doorknob Effect This is expected to keep roughly one percent of Republican voters from leaving the house.