Instant messaging is the new cinema verite. Blog verite. Here, Allison records an IM conversation with a friend; typing between contractions.
And congratulations, Allison! Especially a baby who actually lets you sleep. What a lovely baby. With a lovely name, to boot. (Well, I'm fond of it.) (And in Israel, nobody will try to tack that extra "a" on the end.) (Though it's an uncommon name here that I'm not used to reading it in print, so I keep doing double takes reading about how I -- I mean she -- is getting bonding time with daddy.) (I'm done with parentheticals now.) (I think.)
What Remains. I talk about the idea of a cure, also about some stuff we're seeing right now and what to do about it.
One of the pleasures of blogging like this is the ability to send you other places. So here goes:
For an antidote to my melancholy bird story, Otto tells the hysterical tale of a demented but determined squirrel.
Jessie went down to City Hall (in Cambridge, I assume) last night to watch a wonderful historic moment. Who believed it would happen this fast?
Someone named Carol wrote in to Neil Gaiman with some of the best advice for aspiring writers I've read in a while. (Note: the link to the entry doesn't work, so scroll down to the bottom of this archive page. It's the second part of the May 9th entry.)
Tiny Coconut has her own valuable perspective to add to my "Don't let your kids grow up to be screenwriters" rant from the other day.
Eve summed up how I often feel. Super-mom? Yeah, right.
Allison's thinking about naming her baby French Fry.
And finally, congratulations to Laura, who may have just bought a house (rather close to my in-laws, actually). Apartment 11D no longer? I remember that panic/giddy/shock/panic feeling extremely well. Three years ago last month that was us. Best decision we ever made. Not our perfect dream home (well, location), but crucial for all kinds of reasons. No regrets here. Good luck with it, Laura.
More of my own words tomorrow night. Till then, enjoy other people's.
This was fun. My first blog jog.
So our reverse googlebomb seems to have done the trick. The Wikipedia entry is now the top site that comes up when you Google "Jew." Interestingly, Google now has a disclaimer of sorts at the top of the page when it displays these particular search results. I understand their point. The ACLU would concur. It's still disgusting that a hate group could do such a thing.
It also upsets me -- and I write this knowing certain friends will think I'm talking about them, and maybe I am -- but the only people I've seen actually follow suit and link to the Wikipedia entry are also Jewish. I know plenty of people who read my blog who haven't honored my request. They're coincidentally all gentile. So I have to ask: does this feel like a minor thing to you? Too much bother? Because to me, as a Jew, it's rather more.
I followed Diane’s link to Rance today. (No, Diane, I hadn’t heard about him either.) An anonymous celebrity blogger. Not just any old celeb, either, but the kind that ends up on magazine covers and gets award nominations and has paparazzi swarms follow him on occasion. A movie star, in other words. A self-reflective, appropriately ironic one who writes well. Not bad reading.
The question pops into your head immediately, doesn’t it? Is this guy for real or is he just someone in the biz who can fake the talk and fudge the walk? It’s clear from his blog that he runs into this skepticism all the time. He seems amused by it. Which strikes me as the appropriate response.
It comes up a lot, I find. Is this person for real or is this another Kaycee Nicole, faking a dramatic life for the attention it garners? It came up last week on Teresa Nielson Hayden’s blog, a discussion about another intriguingly positioned blogger and whether she was the real McCoy. Maybe it’s the nature of blogs and online journals, that we can create ourselves however we choose, our words are all you have to judge us by – not our faces, not our voices, not our parents or even our pets. If I put up a picture of my cats, say, who’s to say that's not a shot I lifted from somewhere in an effort to have sexier felines and therefore seem hipper/cooler/dorkier myself?
I remember a wonderful writer, Acanit, who posted an online journal in 2001 as a former TV journalist, an Iranian living in America. The photos on her site showed she was a knockout. That right there made people suspicious, I think. And she wrote about difficult things and also about sex (which of course garners attention). Her stories were almost too perfect, some people said. As if they were written rather than lived. Created from someone’s imagination. And then one day she pulled her site down and she was gone. She had reasons, a love affair she didn’t want to talk about, but a lot of people said her cover was about to blow and so she got out quick.
I always wondered. They all seemed so certain, her critics. But what if they were wrong? How would you feel to have your existence doubted? And why? People get so passionate, so intent on debunking bloggers/journallers they think are making it all up. And yes, it’s important to know if you’re going to enter into a friendship with that person, if, in the case of Kaycee Nicole, you're going to send care packages and cry at a manufactured death. But in this case? If Rance isn’t really a movie star, who does that hurt? He tells a good story, he gives an intriguing glimpse into that life. We want to see. If he’s imagining instead of living the life of a movie star, it’s still a fun read. No harm done.
But that’s not quite true, is it? Because people would feel – as people have felt – duped. Tricked. Even betrayed, as silly as that seems. Nobody wants to be the brunt of a joke. And when you read a blogger’s account of his life, you feel a kind of intimacy that feels real for all that it’s virtual. If it turns out to be a fake, you’re left with nothing. And so people analyze word choices, suss out authenticity in the choice of story material, and try to protect their hearts or at least their dignity. I understand that, I do. But I think sometimes, as with this guy Rance, you just have to shrug, smile, and go along for the ride.
And that’s okay too.
Via Dawn:
A hate group has googlebombed the word "Jew" to link to their site. Basically that means a bunch of their hate-cronies have linked to their horrible nasty site (it lists the Anti-Defamation League, B'nai B'rith, Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ACLU as "Jewish hate groups") and so Google is listing it at the top of their searches when you type in the word "Jew." So Melanie and others and I ask you to link the word "Jew" to the Wikipedia definition. All you have to do is this: Jew. If enough of us do this, we can knock them off the top spot on Google.And people still argue that anti-semitism no longer exists.
If you have a blog or any kind of personal website, please do link the word "Jew" to Wikipedia. This is ill. Worse than ill.
I'm burned out. Hollow. Brain has turned to mush. Body wants to follow suit. Or maybe it's the other way around. Too fried to tell. So naturally I found myself on Jennifer Crusie's website this evening, preparing for some enjoyably lightweight reading.
I'm partway through reading her FAQ, which is mostly serious (well, more or less) and definitely interesting. What caught my eye, though, was:
4. Do you research your sex scenes? Yes, but it's a hassle because I always have to keep one hand free to take notes.
Maybe it's just because I'm bleary-eyed and doped with fatigue, but this cracked me up.
The folk at Fractious Times have split off a lefty political blog. I'm glad. I generally avoid reading political blogs because I just get too upset. I hate Bush so much I find it difficult to read about him and impossible to hear his voice.
I hated Reagan. I wore a black armband the day after his election. I was shocked he was re-elected. I thought he'd snowed everyone, the Teflon president who could do no wrong despite the idiocies of his policies. I thought it couldn't get worse. Then Bush Senior was elected. Corruption is thy middle name. Who could be worse than him?
Then thankfully, Clinton was not only elected, but reelected and I thought the country had returned to sanity. Well, except for the whole sex-and-lies hooha, which frankly? Yawn.
But then Bush the Beyond Corrupt was not-exactly-elected. Now I know it can't get worse than this. He's such a horrible excuse for a president I can't even talk about it. Besides, if you want to read liberal rants, there are plenty of places you can go.
But when I followed the link to The Moat and read a bit, I realized there actually is reason for hope. Kerry might win this thing. If staunch Republicans can finally see past Bush's I'm The Man Against Terrorism smoke and mirrors to the love-your-corporate-cronies-and-laugh-at-everyone-else mentality lurking beneath a thin veneer of I'm-your-pal-bonhomie. He's not our pal. He's also not our best bet against terrorism. He may in fact be our worst.
Oops, there I go ranting. My point is, if intelligent Republicans can see the corruption and deceit and environmental (and human) mayhem the Bush administration is perpetrating, maybe we can pull together and get this horror behind us.
Thank you, Corina. You've given me hope.
And thank you, Melissa and Elizabeth and everyone. Now I feel unfrozen, able to read political blogs without being afraid I'll choke on my own disgust.
This makes me almost glad I spent the last month of my pregnancy on bedrest. I didn't have to deal with the idiotspeak that seems to flood people's vocal cords when faced with a woman in late pregnancy.
Of course, I didn't escape altogether. There was that woman who laughed and said "Any day now!" and "You've got the biggest belly I've ever seen!" I was six and a half months pregnant at the time.
She didn't try to touch it, though.
(Good luck, Jessie. I'll be thinking of you next month and hoping for a splendid birth experience. And you're a better woman than I for holding your tongue with those boneheads.)
Toni's back! (You may notice from the URL that I had a little something to do with that. Yes, you can thank me.) (Diane's hosting us so she did too. Thanks all around, yes.) (Let's comment a lot, make her feel welcome, maybe she'll stick around this time.) (I think she will, though. Movable Type is fun.) (So are parentheticals.)
So Diane just started a new fitness blog, called That Calvin Klein Skirt. I've seen the skirt. It exists. And I have no doubt Diane will fit into it again. Just like I'll fit into my wedding dress. I like these icons in our closets. I like her new blog, too.
I'm tempted to start my own fitness blog, but I think an occasional journal, a mostly-daily photoblog and this blog are enough, don't you? And I can (and do) write about fitness/weight loss issues here, after all. I consider this an issue blog of sorts, only I have multiple issues. Um, so to speak.
Speaking of which (which which? issues? blogs? fitness?), I've been meaning to link to a new forum. I quite like it so far. It's called Resolutions, founded by the smart and funny Kat, and the idea is probably self-evident: talk about whatever issues you resolve to work on. (See how I tied all those things together? Except maybe blogs and since the forum is populated by a fair number of blogger/journallers it fits there too. Heh. I amuse myself. I also overuse parentheticals. Perhaps I should go to bed early tonight, huh?)
Anyway. Resolutions is pretty cool and I'm moderating the Reading and Writing forum, so go over there and give me something to moderate, okay?
I'm in the midst of excavating my tiny office so I can consider painting it pretty colors, as opposed to its current lovely meld of institutional minty green and spackle-and-primer white with a coating of sparkly acoustic popcorn on the ceiling. Also so I can actually find important documents instead of constantly ordering new copies and feigning atrocious mail service. (ahem)
Therefore I won't post any of the half finished or partly considered highly intelligent entries I had planned. Instead I leave you with a link:
I'm not exactly a dog lover. I like them, and, okay, yeah, I'm specifically partial to Golden Retrievers in memory of my family's sweetheart of a dog, Miranda the Serene. But mostly I prefer cats. Or kids. But Jennie's site won me on the first page with a shot of the dog taking a bath with the caption, "Paul shrinks in water." Or maybe it was the image of a post-bath pup with the caption: "Is that a rat? No, it's Paul!" But my favorite is on the last page, when Paul is a naughty boy indeed. A veritable home wrecker.
So I set my mom up with a blog/journal/web presence last week. She knows what she's getting into, to some extent; she's been reading mine for... four and a half years? Is that possible?
She's been reading along, seen what it's done for me, been intrigued. So she asked and I did and here it is. I love it. I unequivocally love it. It's like looking into a mirror in some ways: we share some of the same flavor and outlook. Not surprising, I guess. I mean, she is my mom. But still, it is. I mean, she's not me.
Anyway, very cool. Go check her out. Leave her comments. Make her happy.
I was struck by a recent entry in Tiny Coconut. She talks about parenting models: Attachment Parenting and Taking Children Seriously and others, how she sees value in bits of each but each parenting modality demands too much that doesn't fit her as a mom.
I know exactly what she means. Though I chose to label myself an attachment parent, it was more in overall philosophy and approach than in the exact parameters. For instance, I couldn't tolerate co-sleeping for more than a month or so. Damian was a wiggler and I was up all night. So many childrearing philosophies seem to say it's all or nothing and that you must subsume your own needs for your child's. The problem with this, as TC points out, is that it sends your children a problematic message. She thinks about what she hopes for her daughter as she grows:
And I realize--and this is where the light comes on for me--that I don't want to raise her to be someone who feels compelled to subjugate all or even most of what she is as an individual for her own children.
I like her solution:
I guess what it all comes down to is that I want my children to see me care about and for me, because I want them to do the same for themselves when they are adults. I also want them to see me care about and for them and Baroy and friends and family and sometimes strangers in need, because I want them to do the same for others when they are adults. And so, lately, I've been making parenting decisions through that prism. Makes it much easier to sort things into column a and column b, to pick and choose from the parenting philosophies that call to me, and yet discard that which seems to be contrary to my goals.
I think this is an admirable approach. I've been doing the same, or trying to. It's difficult at times, balancing his needs and my own. This is why I haven't wanted a second child, not because I lack the desire but because I know I wouldn't be a good parent anymore, that two children (and at least one with more needs than your average kid) would turn that teetering, tentative balance into a permanent imbalance. As it is, sometimes I think I don't have enough of myself to give Damian. But when I can give enough to myself -- writing time, exercise time, friendship time -- I become a happier and therefore better parent. I'm more present and involved with him, not just going through the motions. And it's true, I am also showing him by my example that these things are important. Work you love, taking care of yourself, people in your life. The choices I make in my daily life affect how he grows almost as much as what I teach him through direct interaction.
Food for thought.