PurpleCar

Raised with Jackals

Growing up in the 70s and 80s was a precarious endeavor. Instead of 1 or 2 savants-du-torture, we GenXers collectively bullied each other on a constant basis. Sure, some kids stood out but mostly we were a rotting pile of equal-opportunity menaces. Even the shiest, weakest kids spit out epithets on the regular. Boomers had manners; Xers had mayhem.

Any tiny family nickname, minor incident, or nondescript event was fuel for the merciless machine. Any. Little. Thing. was fair game. Your mother called you “Honey” at pick-up? You were a cloying version of “Sweetums” or “HoneyCheeks” for months. Some kid landed a good punch on your brother at baseball practice? Your family’s honor would be the next day’s lunchroom fodder. Any sign of weakness was also documented and replayed.

Moving to the country, gonna eat me lots of peaches (not)

One day in 2nd grade I felt sick, but the nuns insisted I finish my school lunch. I swallowed whole the canned peach slices in order to clear my plate. Less than an hour later, that lunch and those perfectly preserved peach pieces came out in a violent stream of vomit all over the classroom floor. The very LAST DAY of my SENIOR year, when the cafeteria served those peaches again (they were a recurring nightmare), my classmates reminded me to chew them thoroughly.

My school community was dinky, of course, but the never-live-anything-down culture stuck with me. In my (mostly analog) life, my secrets had not only been exploited by classmates but also by my mother, who would quickly circulate anything I said to my friends’ mothers, which in turn would came right back to me. (My father and brothers were absent in various ways; Confiding in the walls would’ve been more productive). Strict self-censorship was my only chance at survival and escape. What started out as a defense finished up as a way of life.

The Silent Hack

When I started blogging in 2004, mommy blogs were in full swing and I couldn’t understand the pull. How could these mothers expose their children in this way? How could they put themselves at risk of ridicule or compromise their personal safety?

Fast forward more than a decade later to today. The money’s gone out of it, so mommy bloggers are throwing out excuses for shuttering their sites: “I don’t have time;” “I want to go into consulting;” “The kids are older and need more privacy.” This last bit of reasoning irks me. Babies and toddlers don’t deserve privacy? Am I annoyed the mothers never thought of this? Or, really, am I still angry with the people and betrayals of my youth? This last bit probably holds the most truth.

But there is another reason for my ire about mommy bloggers, especially ones that quit for “privacy” reasons: I’m miffed/jealous they had the eggs (or blissful ignorance) to blog so personally and publicly, and I’m livid/disappointed they came back to feeling my same wariness of online soul-baring. Their changing ways make me question everything about being a writer or a blogger. I wonder if having Internet access is worth the effort. How does an essay writer (because this is what blog posts tend to be) live a sometimes-on life? Which parts are allowed onstage? Are we supposed to write, live, love with abandon?

According to my first fiction workshop teacher James Rahn of Rittenhouse Writers Group

When friends’ Facebook pages have post after post of

• wonderful vacation pics
• fierce workouts
• kids’ milestones
• new cars & houses
• parties (that I’m not invited to, natch)

my 1980s snark sets in. I think, it must be nice to get your money for nothing and your chicks for free.

We’ve talked about this ad infinitum: Rare is true struggle or distress portrayed on social media. These friends use Facebook as a photo album service. So then I ask,

How is it OK to show only one side of your life?

But that just brings me back to the other extreme and my original confusion:

How is it OK to raw-blog every post-partum depressive wave?

Nora Ephron and other back-in-the-day analog typists seemed to say everything about life while revealing almost nothing about themselves (which famous mommy blogger Dooce claims she did in her posts but it sounds a bit protest-too-much-y. She revealed more than she was conscious of at the time, and she probably knows that now).

No Justice, No Peace ––for a Writer’s Family

This sets my head spinning about “privacy” (<-nice quotes, if I do say so myself) and what it means to feel legitimate in this online culture. None of this is new, of course. In writer lore there are two (pre-Internet) sayings:

1. “You own your story and you are allowed to write it,” and
2. “If people in your life didn’t want to be written about, they should have behaved better.”

A bit mercenary, admittedly, but engaging the guerrilla-writer’s mind is necessary to build courage. Writing is art. Doing art is hard. One is never more vulnerable than when sharing creative efforts. It’s like hoping no-one will slice into your heart after you’ve offered it up on a serving dish. These mottos give us writers permission to release the relentless urge for words.

“Be free, no matter who it hurts” ??? Sometimes writers need cut-throat mottos to be able to simply start writing.

Thinking maybe it would help, I set out to make my own guerrilla motto: Be free, no matter who it hurts. Just reading that hurts all of my sensibilities. Some writers are indeed assholes. Just like some stand-up comedians are jerks, laying waste to their anything and everything for a laugh, some writers wreak havoc on those they write about. When Ayelet Waldman says, 10 years later, that her kids got through the “I love my husband more than my kids” row just fine, I have to wonder what her and Michael Chabon’s children would honestly say about it. Maybe they just know the deal: being the spawn of two writers comes with certain risk. We all have our sliced peaches to swallow, I suppose.

But it must be possible to balance the need to write honestly and the need to not hurt those who matter. The conspicuously false balance mommy bloggers thought they were striking is my nightmare, and the fear of vomiting all over my kids’ (and yeah, I guess my husband’s) feelings keeps me from writing the essays I need to write (and publish, let’s be honest. I journal 3 pages/day and it isn’t the same).

The Burning End

One of these days, I’ll stop hemming and hawing, and you will have something of worth to read.

But I can’t figure it all out tonight.

I guess I just gotta chew my peaches, one by sickeningly-syrupy one, and hope they don’t all come back up to haunt me. I have to believe I have a right to write, and even if I do brandish backsides I never meant to burn, I won’t end up, ever, as alone as I felt growing up.

For the past ten days I’ve been using a free trial of the social web monitor app ThinkUp. ThinkUp trolls your Facebook and Twitter feeds for highlights, changes, and bits of data you may find interesting and wraps it up in a pretty html daily email. According to the site, ThinkUp “gives you daily insights about you and your friends you can’t get anywhere else.” Here are some of the insights it sent me about Twitter (I didn’t hook it up to FB).

My friend Heather, a journo in NYC whom you should follow, changed her bio. You can see what she’s removed by what is indicated in the red strikethrough text. You can also see it is merely a dumb algorithm and not Artificial Intelligence noting the changes, because a smart robot wouldn’t cross out “@aajanewyork” when Heather obviously added it again.

My question is this: What if Heather wanted to quietly make the changes? Is there no such thing as hiding in plain sight anymore? It used to be that one could do pretty much anything online with little notice just for the sheer amounts of data flooding everything. Privacy in numbers, and all that. It seems like even those days are over. Big data is no cover from the bots.

That question being asked, I can see how this particular bot, despite it’s obvious bugs, could prove useful in deepening relationships. If Heather put a major change in her bio, e.g., she got a promotion at work, she probably wouldn’t mind that a bot had to point it out for me to notice. She’d just be happy to hear my “Congrats!”

The bugginess has to get fixed, though. I can see how these notices would pile up when you follow 12K users and the bot picks up every typo or tiny deletion. Perhaps a little bit of code to scan for exact-match text strings could help keep down the detritus.

Other “read later” algorithms exist for Favorites but I did like this feature. ThinkUp provides a graphic of the entire tweet with a clickable link, giving you the context in which you originally found the info.

The most worrying effect from the ThinkUp emails for me was the ego-boosting “Your tweet got these users SO MUCH MORE exposure” alerts. I can see how this information is crucial to a commercial account – it can be used to sell more in-stream ads, for example. But for me all it does is say I have more followers than users who are certainly more deserving. It almost elicits a “Ha. I’m better than you” sentiment that makes a person want to humblebrag to the users she retweeted.

Also, a point about math: “2x more people” is very, very deceptive.  That is simply math between follower counts of the retweeter and the tweeted and not the click rate. If I had a commercial account with a million followers, ThinkUp would say I boosted a tweet to 1000x more people. But if no-one clicks on a link I tweet out, that million-follower account is useless to advertisers. Click rates are where the real influence measure is.

ThinkUp encouraged me to share a photo, which I actually ended up doing, surprisingly enough. I’d actually consider paying for the service if I could add Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr and G+, where I want to build accounts but I have no habit formed around doing so. My FB and Twitter accounts are already well tended and need no help.

I don’t really have any use for the ThinkUp service as of right now, but I do like where it is going. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable acting on any of the collected info without owning up to using a service, though. I don’t want users I contact thinking I just happened upon their tweet in my stream when I didn’t. Although in the job promotion example above, Heather probably would simply be happy to hear my congratulations, I can see where other communications could seem manufactured or disingenuous if they were spurred on by a bot. Letting someone think that you pay so close attention to them that you naturally notice minuscule changes in their bios is false friendship. I’d feel more comfortable owning up to using an algorithm (not that it’s shameful!) than trying to pass myself off as online Wonder Woman.

Check out the free trial. I happened upon it myself (I wasn’t contacted or paid for this review) and it was a fun ride that provided a lot of food-for-thought about how we are to handle bot-enhanced personal relationships online.

Today I took my first dip in the Describli pool. At first I assumed the extent of Describli was a daily email with 5 writing prompts to get your imagination started, as a writer. Today I discovered it’s a flash-writing game, with scores and votes and sharing and crazy creative people throwing words around daily. The limit is 5000 words, and the title is allowed only a few characters. Of course, I started writing without logging in, so my first post is anonymous. The prompt was “The Wife, The Mistress and The Ex.” I didn’t bother to look at rules. I just started writing. The prompt reminded me of the nicknames we’d given to the various pizza shops throughout our relationship, mostly in our very early years together as new live-in lovers in Philadelphia.

Anyway, here it is.

LOVE AMONGST PIZZA WARS

As 2 young 20-somethings, my college boyfriend and I had exactly one summer day to spend in Philadelphia securing an apartment for the quickly approaching fall and the coming year. We walked up and down Pine, Spruce, Lombard, between 24th and 16th. We found a small back apartment on the first floor of a brownstone at Pine and 18th. It had no light. It had, we discovered later, at least one mouse. Back in Pittsburgh we were living – officially – apart. We were making the leap after three years of college dating to living together. His parents protested. Mine shrugged. I’d find a job and he’d attend graduate school at Penn. It was a plan.

All of our belongings from 2 different apartments fit into a small rental truck. Family hand-me-down furniture would fill up the tiny dark rooms we had waiting for us in Philly. When we moved everything in and returned the truck, the first thing we did was look for a pizza joint. We had the best pizza joint back in Pittsburgh, a tiny spot in South Oakland with an immigrant Italian behind the counter and the crispiest crust, smoothest mozz, and fullest-bountied sauce you could imagine. We still echo the owner’s heavily-accented lilt, these two decades later. We were regulars; they knew us. They had our order always waiting. Our love was built in that hot little eatery, one block down from my boyfriend’s one-room hole-in-the-wall roach palace of an apartment.

But life makes you say “Ciao” more often than not, it seems, and we found ourselves standing on a quiet residential city street, wondering where the good pizza was. We chose the closest option, a place within a block of our new hole-in-the-wall mouse palace. It wasn’t like home, but it would do. It was our new home, and it was close.

Inertia and busy schedules and the strain of living with someone who could barely live with themselves kept us going to the corner pizza, always good in a storm, always good in an argument. A break in school finally came and we could wander a bit more around the neighborhood. We tentatively took a few steps into another corner shop, this one to the south and east, past our normal corners. He got pizza and I had a cheesesteak, a staple for me as I grew up in Poconos where we ate them with marinara sauce. This place was smaller, more for takeout than sitting. Cramped and unwelcoming. But the food was so much better than the first stop we’d grown used to.

I’m terrible with names, all sorts of names. Although I will forever remember the name of our Pittsburgh Pizza place, I couldn’t for the life of me remember even the first letter on the doors of the new pizza joints. So the southeast girl became “The Mistress,” as we felt as though we were cheating on our first chick and her staff that came to treat us as regular pests. She was the Wife. The new one, the Mistress. And painfully, and although we never said it aloud, our Pittsburgh pleasure the bittersweet Ex.

The next year we found a 3rd floor walkup 6 doors down on Pine Street, with a skylight and double the floor space. We got married. We got a dinky little kitten from Morris Animal Refuge who grew to a very tall and long 18-pounder and just died last year at age 18. They make the cats quite hardy in Philly. That cat made it through two more moves, one around the corner onto Naudain and one out of the city entirely into the close western ‘burbs, where the poor cat endured then loved 2 little humans who came into our lives. We all miss him terribly. Now we’re learning to live with and love a puppy. Our Ex-pet and the once-unimaginable pup. Each in their own time, each in their own season.

We’ve found a new pizza place, out here, so close but so far away from the city life we once loved. But no pizza or greased 4-walls can compare to that original lover, that little Italian sweat-bomb of a shop where we were first seen as one order, never one half without the other half, tucked away in a booth on the sunny side of a forgotten Pittsburgh street.

Memory is a bit of a bitch, isn’t it? It never quite works the way we want it to, pushing up irrelevant details in front of good ones, or even making up whole scenes on a whim. The line between fact and fiction is usually the messy demarcation of memory blurring the boundaries beyond recognition.

Memory also is not very strong. Any emotion can come in and overwhelm it. Depression, for example, is a vicious filter on memory, locking away any nurturing feelings and enlarges any bad-natured events, so all one can access is act after act of depravity, anger, indifference. When depression works its way into one’s memory files, it’s close to impossible to break free of the invading darkness. Chemical jump-starts are needed to unlock the connection with past joy and the possibility of future happiness.

I’ve been struggling with my fiction projects this week so thoroughly I’ve been teetering on the verge of questioning my very existence. Depression is often guised in Frustration and can quickly clear all bits of satisfaction from view. In attempts to fight it off, I found myself making a deal of sorts with the Matrix Devil. In the Matrix movies, The Architect tells Neo everything about Neo’s existence is is fake and none of Neo’s actions really matter. Writers have a version of this Matrix Devil in the form of Doubt and Damaged Self-Consciousness. The Matrix Devil gnaws at your ego and exploits its weaknesses until you give up. “Nothing in your life matters,” it says.

But Neo chooses to keep fighting. Why? Because if “nothing matters” then it won’t matter if he fights; Neo realizes there must be something to fight for, even if he can’t fully grasp what that is. He sees something matters to The Architect, so therefore there must be something that matters in his own life (which is probably in conflict with The Architect’s). Neo sees through the Matrix Devil’s message. Things matter, even if only a slight bit, and they more than likely matter more than he himself can ever know.

I need to drop the depressive self-consciousness all writers seem to fight off and simply write. Thinking my actions (mostly) don’t matter can be liberating, actually. In fact, I am obligated to think they don’t matter much or I won’t write at all. I must remember those times it felt good to write.

But that’s the secret, isn’t it? Liberating memory’s hold on the joyous times, the rewards, the pretty –but useful– delusions. This whole writing life may all be fake, but it’s my fake. It’s my delusion. And I can memorialize it any way I want.

And ye who would judge, judge away. Away, away, from here.

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Photography and Artwork by me, Christine Cavalier. Creative Commons with Credit, Please.