When I was eighteen, I wanted to be the Editor in Chief of the New York Times. This was not an ambition in the vein of “Oh, I’m going to be a spaceman!” type fantasies. This was me, methodically imagining how I would climb and summit that particular ladder.
I don’t actually want to be at the helm of the New York Times anymore, for two reasons. One, I’ve lost my interest in newspaper journalism, and two, jesus christ, that place is a writhing deadly snake pit. You grow up and you change dreams, be they spaceman or newswoman.
No, what I want now is far more reasonable. I want to be a novelist. I want to be a novelist of middling success and fame. If fame, for instance, is a spectrum, wherein I represent 0 and Princess Diana is a 20, placing Brad Pitt at about 15 and the Mayor of St. Louis at a 4, I wouldn’t mind hovering somewhere around 5.
That is to say, slightly more famous than the Mayor of any fair-sized Midwestern city.
Not so famous that I’m instantly recognizable from my dramatic airbrushed jacket-picture, or get to meet the President, or write a book about writing a book, or say snobby things on Oprah (Toni Morrison, I’m looking at you). Not so well reknowned that I chair a prestigious writing workshop. Not so successful that I own more than one house.
No, I don’t think that’s the life for me. I wouldn’t mind getting recognized by a particularly keen-eyed reader, perhaps once a year in a cafe or so. I’d like to be invited to speak on NPR one day. I would be delighted to teach writing at some leafy New England campus, where I become an institution and as I age, begin to develop a stable of endearingly idiosyncratic behavior like eating whole cantaloupes while teaching class or saying “what..OH” for no discernable reason during my lectures.
I don’t think I need an army of successful published books to feel like I’ve accomplished something. In fact, a couple duds is never a bad idea. Builds character, gives you something to laugh wisely and ruefully about during interviews or with budding novelists. Failure, public and published failure, keeps you anchored and makes your successes taste sweeter, I think. No, just half a dozen books for me would be great. Half a dozen times to stay up all night worrying about the reviews, half a dozen jumps of glee at seeing your name in print again, half a dozen schmoozy and stuffy release parties. Like I said – with a couple bad ones thrown in, it’s got the making of success.
That’s the thing – the making of success. I’m trying a lot these days, to figure out what kind of writer I am, what kind of writer I can become, where my happiness would lie and what would be false, untrue, unfair to my character or unrealistic to my style. I’m trying to grow, as Lily so famously put it in Hotel New Hampshire.
In fact, that nails it. I’d like to be like John Irving. I’d like to spend my life telling stories, writing them down, and seeing how they fly. No more. But also, no less.
Now where’s that genie?
click to enlarge and see the Dooce Stipple Effect.
Stories, lists, pictures… all in one day. So don’t ever say I don’t give you the world. THE WORLD.
- Mark your calendars and rev your engines. Next Tuesday (May 3!) is the day The Shivs take over the world, with an 8PM gig at Kenny’s Castaways on Bleeker. This is your chance to be that cool blogger that knows the Next Big Thing before the LES hipsters do. Go, rock out, enjoy.
- I happen to like rainy mornings for the sole reason that it’s the one time that I actually relish entering my building, if only in that it becomes a sanctuary from the rain.
- We threw the mother of all surprise parties for the Kate, to mark her birthday two weeks early with a Merry Unbirthday party. There were scones and cocktails and spiked tea and the most unbelievable peanut-butter-and-jelly cake and there were pictures and I’ll show you as soon as I get them off that lazy camera. Yeah, it’s the camera’s fault.
- We bought a playstation this week and *punches fist in air*.
- We are going home this weekend for Greek Easter (those orthodox and their pesky schism!) and I plan on marking the solemn occasion by not making fun of the church on my blog and thus starting a flame war. How very mature of me. Pat pat.
- One of my favourite British bloggers is rumored to be coming to visit in August, another one might be moving here, and next week, we are playing houseguests to a blog couple of good repute so the general transatlantic blogginess of it all is just too adorable. TOO ADORABLE.
- I’m not sure how this fits in anywhere but I thought I’d say it: Jen, you’re probably the most honest blogger I know. Every single time I read your posts, I come back to my edit page resolved to just write without thinking too hard about how it’ll sound to who’s going to read it and whether I should say it and why or why not. But you’ve stayed very true to the style wherein you just don’t give a monkey about who thinks what about why, and I love that. Come to think of it, I love it in you, too. So, hi Jen, I love you.
- Um, I think I’m done. FER ner ner.
Mouschka looked more like a ratty urban fox than a stalwart German Shepherd. She was the runt of the litter and though her paws and her ears proved her breeding, her body was woefully undersized. Her parents’ owners said she was purebred, but hey, this was Africa, it’s not like the AKC was making the rounds, right? In fact, for all our trying, I don’t think we ever really owned a purebred Shepherd. But in the beginning or end, that didn’t really matter.
We weren’t trying to be bad. It just occurred to us. We stood on the beach in Tolo, my cousin Jacques and I, with the lapping Mediterranean bay enticing our bare feet, and asked the dockhand how much for the paddleboat.
I don’t remember how much it was. At fifteen, I had small amounts of cash given to me on vacations and what I spent it on was more important than how much it was. We were about half a mile down the beach from the apartment my parents had rented in the sleepy Peloponnesean town, and it was early afternoon. The accomodating Greek sun was slanting down through the citrus groves that blanketed the curved mountains around us. Ask my parents for permission? Why?
I don’t do this very often but I’d like to link to two new blogs. Well, one new and one new to me. Tiffany and her guy are traveling around the world and they’re currently in China. She’s got such a fresh, curious voice that I found myself sifting through her archives both for places I’ve been, to see her take, and places I haven’t, for the same reason. Go there, have a browse around, and never forget your runcible spoon.
Also of note, my best friend from high school, the more holy in the unholy trinity of Erin, myself, and her: Rachel has started a blog. That’s the only time you’ll see her referred to her properly spelt name on this site, because I much prefer calling her Raychul. Pop over there to follow the depths of hilarious madness she gets into when her brilliant mind starts wandering. God knows how the world will cope with Lawyer Raychul.
Looking at new blogs (something I’ll admit I do very rarely because I’m a lazy bastard, okay) made me realize that the last time I asked you all to introduce yourself was sometime in the wilds of 2003, and I’ve lost those comments to the ether of site transition.
So, I’m asking again. If you stop here regularly on your blog rounds (or even if you don’t but you’re feeling friendly), please say hello. Say who you are and where you blog, if you do. Also, tell me your least favourite food and your most favourite word. Just for fun.
Hi! I’m Krissa. I blog here. I hate shrimp (because they look like cockroaches) and I love serendipity (because it makes me think of friendly snakes).
If you happened to look or be outside in the past ten minutes on the small island of Manhattan, you would have seen what meteorologists are scrambling to label “the most polite rainstorm of all time”. In the time it takes for a crosstown bus to go one avenue block, the rainstorm dripped and simpered its way from New Jersey to Long Island, muttering all the way about appointments it must keep and simply being stretched too thin these days.
New Yorkers with the vantage point of a high rise office were annoyed to see what promised to be a threatening advance of precipitation in the air at roughly 3:30 PM. Turning away from the droplet-streaked window, they only had enough time to place the call to their secretaries to secure them one of those nice golf umbrellas from the Brookstones downstairs. Turning back to the window, many a high-powered Manhattan drone was then surprised to see the sun’s annoyed countenance, having thought it had long enough to nip round to the local for a pint and being called abruptly back to duty.
The rainstorm, meanwhile, displayed very little zest for its job, and was heard shamefacedly saying, “I’m so sorry, pardon me, I’ve just got to – oh, you’re there? So sorry again, I – well, ooh, there you go, I’ll just slip right by without – OH! Sorry.” Many pedestrians noticed that the rain kindly fell around them, leaving them mostly dry and humbly begged their forgiveness, as it shuffled embarassedly through the bustling city.
While the Rainstorm Union couldn’t be reached for official comment at press time, several unconfirmed sources say that the mighty and powerful movers and shakers in the rainstorm world are “embarassed” and “humiliated” by the accomodating appearance of their usually fierce presence. A few old-time tropical storms were more than willing to shake their heads violently and call this a “truly tragic moment” for their illustrious organization and blame the “touchy feely vibes” among younger, more innovative members. “In my day, you battered, you broke, you didn’t saunter,” said one member who wore the golden badge of the Broken Umbrella, the most coveted award in the Union. Press reps, off the record, insist this has absolutely nothing to do with recent cost-analysis ratios that rocked the weather-making world recently, calling today’s rainstorm a “disgrace” to what is still a “powerful landmark of New York life”.
The soft-spoken rainstorm, however, insisted that it had someplace very important to be and hadn’t meant to rain across the often-soaked buildings of New York (it also made veiled references to construction on the Triboro and wordlessly indicting an election-year Mayor) . “I’m quite fearsome, really, but Manhattan isn’t my zone,” it mumbled. It also insisted it was “just listening to my iPod, you know? I didn’t even notice I was raining, honest.” Expounding on the myth of rain’s constant fierceness, the storm insisted that sometimes, it’s just a little rain, nothing to ruin anyone’s good time. “It’s just such a cliche,” it complained, “rainy days and Mondays, you know? I went to Hampshire. We learned to think outside the box.”
No word yet on whether more powerful rainstorms will be attempting to regain the populace’s fear and respect (and the industry’s top Broken Umbrella Award) during their weekly showing on Wednesday. Whispering its last comment, the nameless press rep for the RU said, “it’s April, you know? We’ve got an image to maintain here.”
When you look through these pictures (click above), I want to reassure you that it’s okay to sing the Chicago song. Just in case, you know, you were worried about your image.
As plans go, it was standard Friday night fare, but perfect in its simplicity. Dinner at the famed and tiny Kebab Cafe, lauded by Astorians as the best place to get middle eastern with the added hilarity of the charismatic owner, Ali. Nine o’clock movie, Sin City, at the Astoria Kaufman Theatre. The theater was at the southern end of Astoria, and Kebab Cafe was on the southern end of Steinway St., right nearby, according to the superpages map I diligently checked before leaving the office.
It was when we turned onto Steinway, at 7:30, that the alarm bells started ringing in my head. Western Beef? Autobody shops? Where was Kebab Cafe? Where? WHERE?
The first domino fell.
I got on the phone, called information, all the while insisting that I’d seen the map online, that I knew that it was at Northern and Steinway, knew that fact to be true even in the very face of reality as we stood on that intersection with no cozy Kebab Cafe to be found. Information put me through to cheerful Ali, jovial wonderful proprietor of the middle eastern foods I’d been craving all week (tabouleh! falafel! pita!), and he said, yes honey, we are at Steinway and 25th avenue. Eight avenue blocks from where we were.
The second domino fell.
I looked at my watch. I did the math. I whined to Stuart, who was proposing everything short of teleportation to stop me from being sad about Kebab Cafe. We’ll take a bus! A cab! We’ll…
The third domino fell, and with it, furious little tears threatened to leap out of my eyes. I fucked it up, I moaned. The date we’d planned to celebrate the beginning of a weekend, the beginning of spring, our neighborhood, good news at Stuart’s job … I’d fucked it up! And Stuart, holding on to the thread of my rapidly disheveling calmness, looked stunned. Helpless.
And that’s when I stopped. That’s when I turned around the childish Good Ship Tantrum and stopped. And as we started to walk west again, towards a casually hip diner we knew near the theater, as my breathing got long again, I tried to explain to the man next to me something that he probably already knows – that plans are always more than plans to me.
A plan, in a life as erstwhile-chaotic as mine has been, has been like a liferaft, if that wasn’t a sad and tired metaphor. But it is, so I’ll explain it this way, the way I did as we walked slowly to the diner.
Magazine editors have storyboard walls for each upcoming issue. They take pieces of paper and design each page, laying down the artwork. It allows them to move pages around, reconfigure feature stories, but they’ve got the stories and the artwork there all along.
I have a storyboard too. For every evening I plan, for every weekend I look forward to, every trip, every life event, I automatically storyboard it. How I picture it going, who will be there, sometimes down to what I want to wear. It’s like a catalog of my evening, in small happy frames. And when I see an evening a certain way, I come to rely on that process of unraveling the storyboard as it occurs. I take pleasure in it, as if life were a movie and I was watching it play out happily.
But when something happens, something I didn’t plan, it’s as if some mischievous imp dashed into my calm and collected warroom, grabbed my storyboards off the wall and delighted in tearing them to shreds with his devilish little hooves. Nevermind that he doesn’t have opposable thumbs – he just ruined my movie!
And that’s when the tears start. And the useless whining. And the utter inability to go with any kind of flow I didn’t evaluate, price, and approve beforehand. And what I finally realized standing on the corner of Not There and Other Way, what finally swung into the frame to save the day from yet another one of my pouts, was how inherently selfish it was. How inherently self-centered it was to get upset when my perfect plan didn’t work.
Because there were – if you remember – two people standing there. Two people who’d been looking forward to middle eastern food and the jovial Ali. And only one of them was throwing a tantrum. The other one – Stuart – was completely robbed of the chance to be maturely disappointed because of the mammoth snit I was throwing. When one person is overreacting, the other person must underreact. And at the look of helpless despair on Stuart’s face, I finally started listening. It’s okay, he was telling me. Let’s go to Cup Diner, he suggested. We’ll plan another evening around visiting Ali, he promised.
And right there, on the corner of Steinway and Northern, I threw away my tantrum. I tossed the ruined storyboard out the window, told the merciless little imp who preyed on my need for organization to go stuff himself, and I put down the snit. We had lovely burgers at Cup Diner and enjoyed every minute of Sin City.
And when we got home, I realized that storyboards can change. That I can reap the benefits of my need to plan and organize – always knowing a good restaurant in any neighborhood and having a stable of laid-back weekend diversions – as well as enjoy the detours and where they might take me. Because when I got home, I read in the newspaper that there’s a famous old mansion at the northern end of Steinway.
It’s right near Kebab Cafe.
Maybe we could go this Friday night.
What would I wear?
This is probably the worst day of the week to publish this question, since no one reads weblogs on weekends, but I can’t get it out from under my skin so I need to turn to the internet. Hello, Internet.
Let’s say I’m a photographer. And I photographed military personnel and military equiptment, and also coffins returning from Iraq. These photographs are then OWNED by the United States Armed Forces. Let’s say that an independent journalist online then demanded to see those photographs, under the Freedom of Information Act, and the USAF released to him a CD of those images. And then let’s say the independent journalist then released those images on the internet to any and all media that wanted high resolution images. And different magazines requested high resolution images, and then printed them uncredited.
My gut instinct, and the instinct of any photo agency worth its salt if that had happened to one of THEIR photographers, would be to cry foul. After all, someone owns that image, and the person who is distributing them on the internet is not the person who has the legal ownership and distribution rights.
However, the images were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A national body owns those images, not a photographer per se. When a document is released under FOIA, I don’t need permission to reprint it. Why is a photograph any different?
Except… and here’s what bugs me … I couldn’t very well pass off the document as my own, could I. I’d have to credit it, wouldn’t I? So why aren’t these photographs being properly credited by the media outlets that are reprinting them? If they’re owned by the USAF, even if they’re public domain to use, shouldn’t they be credited to the USAF? Or even better, to the actual struggling photographer that took them?
This might very well be the most boring question in the entire world to anyone who isn’t interested in digital image rights or photographers’ rights, like I am. But perhaps some of you out there, especially you photobloggers, might have an answer, or be able to point me to someplace that does. I don’t want to release the names or links to these images because I’m not trying to start an internet brawl. I’m just curious.
This Ethicist is now open for discussion.
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