Archives for the month of: June, 2006
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con(fidence) artist

June 29, 2006 //

Criticism is a funny thing. There are a lot of people you read about in cautionary tales, people that don’t ever do anything they want to do in life for fear of judgment and social exclusion. I am not one of those people. You have to believe me or this whole little exercise won’t work.
I am not beholden to the opinions of others when I really want something. Case in point: Stuart. We met. We wanted to get married. I honestly didn’t care how completely insane that seemed. Sure, I cared what kind of wedding party we threw, and whether our parents would support us, but as to the rest of the world? Meh. As to the rest of our friends? If they knew me well enough, they’d understand right away that I was neither in jest or in sane, or they’d voice their concerns but trust me to take care of myself. If they didn’t know me well enough to know what I look like when I’ve made up my mind, they could hold their tongues like grownups.
The key element, though, was my own unshakeable belief in the rightness of what I was doing, leave-of-her-senses though it may have looked to everyone else. That’s what I mean when I say, I don’t care what other people think.
This, though, is different. I’m facing – and have made – a pretty bold move. I’m leaving comfortably numbing daily employment for the much less stable world of freelancing and writing, and I’ll have to supplement that income with part-time work. The question naturally has become, what am I willing to do for part-time work?
Here are two answers.

1. Oh, I’m looking to do something interesting, something involving writing and editing – maybe proofreading, copy editing, copy writing.
2. I’m willing to do whatever will pay me a base minimum for about twenty to twenty-five hours a week and most importantly, won’t either put me on a career path I don’t want to be on, OR distract me from my writing by being mentally exhausting.

Three guesses for which one is harder to say out loud.
And I’ve been struggling with this, struggling with being able to say that yes, I’m considering bookselling, and yes, I’m considering walking dogs, what? And on top of that struggle, I’ve been struggling with why this is so hard for me to admit, that I’d take non-career-focused work right now just so that it didn’t become yet another distraction from my writing.
If I think I’m so immune to the peanut gallery’s snarky opinions (or, worse, what’s said when I leave the room), then why is it hard to say out loud?
I realized why. Because I’m not really sure, either. Any doubts and judgements I see as possible reactions are only manifestations of my own personal doubts and judgements. And why not? Everyone I know has a good job. All my friends – whether they’re professionally happy or not – have steady, gainful employment. And who do I think I am, deciding not to “bother” having a full-time job and traipse around eating bon-bons and writing on the web instead? Do I think I’m better than them? Do they think I think I’m better than them? Do they secretly just think I’m lazy and want to stay home and pop out babies? Do I THINK I might be secretly lazy?
See where I’m going with this? Am I being mean and malicious about my own choices because I think that’s what others will say? Or is it the other way around? Don’t I know I won’t sit around eating bon-bons? Or do I?
Criticism’s a funny thing – someone else’s or my own. Confidence means I honestly don’t care if anyone thinks I’ve lost all but a handful of my marbles. Doubt and worry make me seem like a paranoid neurotic, counting on a million other hands like Tevye. I obviously need a couple double-strength jolts of that confidence, and I’m the only person that can whip those up.
Only then will I stop listening to the nasties – either within my head or without.

Categories thinking

review and spoiler alert

June 26, 2006 //

My review of the talented Mr. Westerfeld’s book is up at gothamist and be warned that it’s the final in a trilogy – I’ve been accused too often of spoiling things for people. In fact, even this blurb from my review is a spoiler. Duly warned:

So when we find Tally again in Specials, she’s something completely different than the Ugly Tally or the Pretty Tally. Crossing the last threshold of manipulation, the feisty Tally is special – a specially manipulated government agent designed to curb revolt.
Are you still with me? You should be. Aside from all the wicked cool tricks and gadgets that Westerfeld creates (skateboard-like hoverboards, skintennas, a floating ice rink), the entire trilogy is infused with humanity. The delicious rebellion against authority in Uglies becomes the struggle to escape mindless oppression in Pretties. The cult of beauty, apathetic distractions as a solution for unhappiness, even war and domination – doesn’t this sound familiar? They’re all in there. Westerfeld’s trilogy has everything an epic journey should have.

I’ll definitely be picking up Westerfeld’s other novels in my own time.

Categories writing

let the world domination begin …

June 23, 2006 //

desk 2
… NOW.

Categories love and family

two roads diverged in a wood and I

June 22, 2006 //

Oh, hey, there you are. Patiently waiting for me to blog about something other than home renovation or the World Cup. Have you been waiting long?
Can I get you something? A tea? Coffee? Iced venti non-fat extra-hot four-shot vanilla three-pump-hazelnut soy latte with whip? No? Pull up a chair, I’ll shake the cobwebs off my brain and tell you where I’ve been.
On July 7th, I’m leaving the job I’ve had for four years, since a week after graduating from college. It’s been a lovely, stable four years but it’s time for me to move on – a decision my boss and I came to mutually and which works for everyone. The job, without getting into too much detail, has become more admin-heavy than it was when I started and there’s very little room to move through no fault of my boss. So, I’m leaving. I’ll still be writing pretty regularly for them, but I won’t be sitting in the office.
But no, I’m not leaving for another job. That would be easy, I admit, and maybe some cynics among you may say the smart thing to do. But the other jobs I’m qualified for are, well, a lot like this one. And in four years, I might find myself in a similar position – four years on and I haven’t started the career I really want, which is to write.
So as of July 10th, I’m reporting to my own desk, in my own office, to work on my writing. Not just my own woefully unpaid fiction (although I have to dedicate a certain percentage of each day to that or a certain fiesty little redhead will eat me for breakfast) but paid freelance writing on the web and elsewhere. Let it be known that I have no idea how or to what level of success I’m going to be doing this, only that I hold in my hand a precious few leads and gigs and I’ll be chasing for more.
And I’ll be looking for part-time work to supplement the writing income. I’m being arrogant and naive and bull-headed right now, hoping to only work part-time so that the rest of my week can be spent on writing. Perhaps I will be chased naked and scratched and weeping out of this conviction but that is for me to find out and not for you to crow about afterwards, you naysayers.
If you’re getting the vibe that I’m terrified, give yourself a cookie. I’m white-knuckled, wide-eyed terrified. I’ve never really had to work for myself before, and I’m not entirely sure where I’ll find the necessary reserves of determination and discipline required. Maybe in that new organized closet?
Most days, I feel like a cartoon character who’s been trying to push a car up a hill with her back and as the car starts its inexorable slide back down the hill, her feet are on fire with all the “not that way!” scrabbling she’s doing. Not that way! I keep yelling at myself. But that way I’m going, and what’s more, I pointed the car down the hill myself. So there! How was that for a metaphor?
Or perhaps I feel like I’ve been fighting for years to get those stupid chinese handcuff things off my fingers, wiggling and whining and berating myself for being trapped – only to find myself with two free fingers and no idea what to do now.
Are you seeing what I’m saying? All this freedom, freedom I used to crave from the confines of a 9 to 5 box, is suddenly mine. The shove I knew I needed has finally arrived. But what do you want me to DO with it? Can I get back in the box now?
It’s a daily struggle to remind myself not to go running back to the box after a week on the outside, because if I do, I’ll never have any proof that I can do this, this freedom thing, this self-motivated thing, this writer thing.
So, putting aside all the jumbled metaphors, I’m going to be unemployed and writing, looking for the elusively perfect fit of part-time work (dog-walking? espresso-slinging? proofreading? research-work?) that will leave me with twenty or so hours a week in which I pay myself, so to speak, to be brave.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s exciting. Exciting like riding a rollercoaster built on a swamp and manned by pirates. Swamp pirates.

Categories Uncategorized

elsewhere

June 19, 2006 //

Not that I support or encourage Dave Eggers in any of his varied (but always obnoxious) pursuits, but his article at Slate about the World Cup and the US has its funny moments:

The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.

Also funny and on great display during the USA/Italy game this weekend is this:

Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. First there will be some incidental contact, and then there will be a long moment—enough to allow you to go and wash the car and return—after the contact and before the flopper decides to flop. When you’ve returned from washing the car and around the time you’re making yourself a mini-bagel grilled cheese, the flopper will be leaping forward, his mouth Munch-wide and oval, bracing himself for contact with the earth beneath him. But this is just the beginning. Go and do the grocery shopping and perhaps open a new money-market account at the bank, and when you return, our flopper will still be on the ground, holding his shin, his head thrown back in mock-agony. It’s disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured—excelsior!—and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.

Of course, because it is still Dave Eggers, it also has moments that make me want to kill things with my hardback copy of that AHWSGORNDMWFOVVWTF! book of his. Par for the course. But I’m reinforcing the positive today, people. Happy thoughts.

Categories sports

weekending

June 19, 2006 //

It felt like summer this weekend, of which I’m glad. I spend too much time in summer moaning about the heat of summer when really, I should switch modes so that I enjoy it like some plant lapping up the sun.
Stuart and I went home to Rhode Island for Father’s Day and if I’d taken the camera – if I hadn’t just fled our hot apartment on Friday with nothing but a weekend bag and a cranky mood – I could maybe show you how my parent’s house was the perfect place to be this weekend. We woke up late on Saturday and had breakfast while watching the unbelievable Ghana-Czech game (1:09 in, first goal to Ghana!) and then we lazed about and I did laundry and sat in the fragrant shaded garden sipping water with my mom and let my hair dry by hanging it over the back of the comfy chair.
We curled up into the TV room to watch the USA game while dad went to the store for dinner and man, was that game a bloodbath. After the game Stuart and I jumped in dad’s truck and went to Swan Point Cemetery (so gorgeous) for Stuart to practice his driving. Is that weird? Apparently, everyone in Providence does that and it’s one of the oldest, biggest cemeteries around – the back end of it is quiet and empty on a Saturday afternoon and the curved roads are perfect for driving practice. When we got back, my parents and I flitted around getting dinner ready – steaks and hash browns and salad and wine – and after dinner, we watched the meerkats on Animal Planet (Stuart: “Shouldn’t the little ones be meerkittens?”). Bedtime got stretched back because I couldn’t stop reading Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties until I finished it, ditto for Stuart and The Gods Themselves. It’s so nice to fall asleep right after finishing a gripping book.
We woke up Sunday, early, and jumped in the car to drive over to Seekonk to pick up the wicked cool Auto-Wrench I had reserved online from Lowe’s for dad. All the cool dads have those, they’re flying off the shelves. A special stop at McD’s for dad’s favorite bad indulgence – sausage biscuits – and we were home.
By the time we left RI at 4PM, we were stuffed with saganaki and fresh corn and watermelon, and the IKEA stop went well – new organizational tools for the office, whee!
Doesn’t that all sound boring? That was my weekend. But it felt so good, so relaxing, all the rush and hurry of my city week just drained out of me. My parents’ house is this oasis of neat and comfortable calm and their company buoys me up. I wish they lived closer, I wish I had a car and I love my city life and the subways and the heat and the calamitous fun but this weekend, a little, I wish I lived someplace where it was easier to remember what’s great about summer. Fresh corn, flip-flops on grass, afternoon rests on cool wide sofas, the sparkling bay blinking through the trees as you turn onto a quiet boulevard in the air-conditioned car … I will just have to make all those things happen for me here.
Except the car part. After two hours approaching the Trib in traffic last night with a seriously full bladder, I don’t need the car much.

Categories travels

crouch, bringing new definition to the word akimbo

June 15, 2006 //


This is just never going to stop being a funny picture to me, ever. Also, YAHHH ENGLAND!

Categories sports

doors, windows, and closets

June 12, 2006 //

This weekend we did something astoundingly, mind-numbingly cool. And I’m not talking about the futebol!. I’m talking about going into the closet.
See, and you Manhattanites who live in shoeboxes should look away right about now, we have an office. In that office, we have a closet. For going on two years, it’s been jokingly referred to as the Closet From Hell (staircase of SATAN! bonus points for correctly identifying the reference). It’s technically our linen closet, but it’s our linen closet in the sense that it EATS LINEN AND DOESN’T SPIT IT OUT. In the past few months, when we really gave up any hope of it ever reverting to a functioning closet, we just started piling stuff on the floor and couch rather than open the door and get eaten by the vacuum cleaner. Yes, it was that bad.
But no more! Thanks to some key help and encouragement (and power tools) from our trusted Rhode Island Based Advice Team (that’d be my parents), we spent Saturday putting the wrongs to right, a crusade against disorganization that I can delightfully announce Mission Accomplished and without any crotch-grabbing outerwear or ironic overtones. What was once a jammed, terrifying mess of stuff has now been pared down to the essentials and filed in wire drawers, small stackable boxes, and wall fixtures. It’s like heaven in there. There’s even a lightbulb. I CAN FIT INSIDE. I mean, should I want to stand in my own closet and inhale the dryer-sheet-scented perfection of it all.
Did I mention there are LABELS? There are. It’s glorious. It’s also step #1 of #2 in the reorganization of our entire office to fit two gorgeous desks my mother is building out of our current single desk. Can’t be done, you say? You’ve clearly never met my mother, who’s like Martha Stewart but with a better accent and no jail time. Plus, tools.
Our new office, in turn, is a big part of all the Unspoken Interestingness that’s going on in my life, starting in early July, when I will be less committed to a desk owned by other people and more committed to a desk owned by myself, doing what I admittedly do best (which isn’t knitting, btw). The desk and office reorganization is next week’s task and as soon as I sit down at it, with pen and laptop and file folders at my command, I will feel even better about the Big Changes and my ability to face them with organized verve and drive.
So, you see, it’s all connected. The closet to the desk to the giant open window that’s been left as a present for me when I looked away from a door that had closed. It’s all a big metaphor for starting down a new career path and feeling like I don’t have to hide under the covers. Mostly because the covers are neatly stored in a well-labeled wire basket so I can’t hide under them ANYWAY.
after
[click on the heavenly baskets to go through to the full before-and-after set, but be warned: I was too zealous on Friday morning to remember to take a picture of the monstrosity intact. Use your imaginations.]

Categories love and family

futebol!

June 12, 2006 //

I grumbled out of bed early on Saturday morning – okay, I didn’t grumble. But I grumped out of bed early on Saturday morning to head down to our local EuroCafe in Astoria to watch England beat Paraguay one-nil (as Stuart insists on my saying, rather than one-zero, pfah, pedant). Yes! I got out of bed early to watch sports. I know, what’s next, NASCAR?
In all seriousness because I’d never enjoy the near-death that is race-car driving, I enjoyed the game immensely. Football – and before you say anything, I have to call it that, it’s in my marriage contract – is one of the few sports I both understand and enjoy watching. I understand baseball but it’s boring unless it’s the minor leagues, I willfully do not comprehend [US] football because I was on drill team and was forced to watch a whole year of games wearing lycra, and basketball is just too loud for me to enjoy in person and too boring to watch on TV. So that pretty much leaves football and cricket, which will take a full lifetime to explain to me and I’m using my lifetime, thanks.
So, what I’m saying is, World Cup = good. I’ll be watching all the England games (and the games in England’s group) and the Brazil games, as well as the USA games for, ahem, as long as they continue. I even spent 20 grueling minutes of my lunchbreak finishing off the Czech-USA game in the bar across the street (I had a COKE, okay). My personal favourite moment of the football-laden weekend was when Stuart explained offsides to me for the umpteenth time but this time involved TEAM SWEET-N-LOW V. TEAM DOMINO with a wadded bit of napkin as the ball. GO TEAM DOMINO! I still barely get it and whilst watching an actual match, have a hard time spotting an offside until someone points it out, usually Marcel Balboa, that sweet-voiced young thing.
Also, wicked points for all the hot young players on the field (hello, baseball, NOT SO MUCH) and getting a little verklempt when Stuart hums “Three Lions”. Forty years of hurt, indeed. Plus, watching the afternoon games on univision because ABC has moved on to golf means hearing “GOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA … AAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!” reverberating across the apartment.
This month could make a hooligan out of me yet.

Categories sports

words words words

June 7, 2006 //

Considering that the past few weeks have been concerned with questions like So What Do I Really Want To Do and Where Do I Want To Do It and also featuring When?, this comes as a particularly happy announcement – some of the words you’ve read here on this website will now also be here in this book. Sarah and Wendy have worked their manicured fingers to the bone making this book happen and I’m just glad to be a part of it, along with some freaking cool other bloggers.
Even though you can totally see those words for free right here on this website (I won’t tell you which words, HA!) I’ll go ahead and urge you to buy a copy and show it to your friends and keep it under your pillow and nominate it for the Man Booker and stuff. Considering all the Whats and Whens and Wherefores decisions I’ve been making lately, I’d totally take your support and enthusiasm as a tick in the Correctly Following My Dream, Continue On This Path column. But, you know, no pressure or anything.

Categories writing
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