Ruby & Purple

Last week was challenging and then all right, with great variability, and the best of my attention was spent on productivity. I read and pitched and wrote and read some more. I started a fight on the internet, and it was helpful for plenty of people but quite deleterious for me. Multiple reviews went live after a couple of dry weeks. I had a piece published that took a lot of research and time to assemble, and it kind of vanished without a ripple, which bums me out. A silly Twitter thread I did on Mansfield Park got more attention. Also, I finished up the fourth in Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic series, a tetralogy of books that has been one of the purest pleasures of my year. The first draft of my review was 1,300 words, and I could have gone on and on and on after that.

I had a lot to think about and process after the last couple of weeks, and that might be why this week has been snoozy and unproductive. I have a pile of ideas to write about, and no motivation whatsoever to write them. Some of this feels like perfectionism, some of it overwhelm. Luckily, there's always reading to do when I can't seem to write.

Last night my brain gave me yet another idea I don't necessarily have the time for: an essay that breaks down the 1977 film Ruby, which is truly awful, but which I love, and which is a failure that I suspect has an interesting and/or sad story behind it. My guess is that Ruby once had a good screenplay; excavating its layers shows that, most probably, someone came in to "enhance" it with zeitgeist elements and screwed it up. There's cliche, genuinely compelling drama, cheesy Exorcist imitation, unique combinations of genre elements, and deeply stupid horror scenes. It's a very both/and movie, the kind of bad art that fascinates me bottomlessly.

This is bad art idea #3, after essays on Plan 9 and Death Bed, so it's starting to seem more likely that I have a book about bad art in me - less a hope than a likelihood. I wish I could pursue it now, instead of pursuing all the other crap I want to/have to write first, but it's probably better to let it marinate anyway. In the meantime, if you're interested, Ruby is on YouTube, and a less grainy version is available with a Rifftrax track attached, the existence of which I think I'll use in the essay.

Of note, I'm writing this on my tiny purple laptop, which I bought after dragging my too-heavy-for-airport-walking laptop to Iceland, and which in terms of processing power and etc is worth about what I paid for it ($200), but which has the major advantage of being purple. I know I'm not the only person who is suckered by aesthetics when making purchases. Purple and dip-dye are the two most reliable ways to make me buy something.

In a little less than a month, a short story I wrote will go on sale as a standalone ebook at the Wild Rose Press. It's priced at only $0.99, so if you'd like to support me, I hope you'll pick it up. I'll have more news about that, promotional links and whatnot, soon.

Shortness of Breath

I enjoy smoking cigarettes. That's it. That's all there is to it. I love smoking, and I will never not want to smoke.

My Male Novelist author photo

Various factors contributed to me picking it up as a genuine habit again at the end of 2015 and in January of 2016. Usually I am a social smoker, in that I'll join in when others are smoking but am perfectly fine not doing it by myself. But I found myself smoking in the car at the start and the finish of every day, and not being able to stop myself. While running, my wind was beginning to decline. I noticed I was much more irritable than usual.

So, two weeks ago, I stopped again. It was really only two months, tops, that it was a habit this time - not a matter of years, as in the past - but I am not having an easy time with it. I miss cigarettes desperately. With my body, yes, thanks to the nicotine that dug its claws into my back again, but with my spirit much more so. The sensation of the smoke going in and coming out. The having something to do with my hands. The actual nostalgia that smoking brings me, of old times, of smoking partners long gone.

Girl, cry me a river. Smoking is a pox on our society and you're better off without it. 

Eh. I suppose. The very real health effects matter a lot less to me when I'm actually engaging in the activity. And missing it is making me maudlin. I'm sorry if that seems silly, but you try giving up a habit that brought you comfort through all your teenage and early-20s years.

What are you actually talking about here?

[Hands up] You got me. I'm talking about something other than smoking. I'm talking about Facebook, too. I know I've talked a bunch about Facebook, and about giving it up, and I can only imagine how I sound when I'm doing so and then you see me on there again two weeks later. But really this time, really now, Facebook is exhausting me.

My tolerance for political discussion and engagement is the lowest limbo bar you can imagine. Because the pace of the election talk and share and yell at each other has not let up even a little bit, I'm now at the point where I have to choose between Facebook and one of the classes I'm taking this semester, lest Matt come home one day and find me doing whatever the protagonist was doing at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper." The class is skidding so deeply into political territory that I'm starting to get quiet and depressed instead of happy and engaged. I can't quit the class, so I think I'm going to quit the site. For a while.

Are you equating Facebook and smoking?

Yes. And I've done the same thing with the former that I've done with the latter: sorta quit and then cheat a lot, or quit for a while and come crawling back. I always end up with shortness of breath. I always end up distracted and wasteful and isolated.

I finally quit smoking when I was 25. It stopped being a just-me habit that year. I would maybe smoke on my birthday, or bum one from a friend outside a bar while keeping him company. But not until December 2015 was it again a thing I did without company, without occasion. It was like I'd never stopped, except that I was lonelier than before, older than before, had more to lose than before.

Maybe it's not a perfect metaphor. Anyway, I'm trying to work out the Facebook thing, because the cons column of staying and fighting on is groaning under its own weight, while the pros column has a mere few, exceptionally strong, entries. a) My stats on this blog dropped by half when I didn't post links on Facebook. b) It's the only way to keep up with certain friends. c) It allows me to offer support to friends who would never ask for it over email, or to keep up on rapidly changing circumstances. d) And sometimes I find things worth reading or seeing, worth saving.

But that's it. And my spirit is struggling to maintain buoyancy in the avalanche of Everything Else.

Geez, it's only Facebook. Chill out. Maybe smoke a cigarette or something.

Hmm. I suppose I could.

Is There an Antibiotic for Perfectionism?

The internet and I aren't getting along lately. I snap at it, and it snaps back, harder. I expect too much of it, and it disappoints me. I keep crawling back, like a fool, because I need it, but what I need more is to separate our work relationship from our emotional relationship and put all my efforts into the former. This process continues, haltingly, hurtfully.

Isn't this beautiful? I look at this picture when the internet beats me up and I feel sad.
I'm one of those little lights on the other side of the mountain. Click to embiggen. 

I've had middling luck with books lately. I was galloping along through two a week, or thereabouts, and then I read half of an uninteresting one and screeched to a halt. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started Between the World and Me, which is quite short, but which I still haven't finished. I keep taking deep breaths between paragraphs, and I have quit a little over halfway through and can't seem to start again. Not just because of the subject matter, and the emotional difficulty wrought by my various histories held next to it, but because the writing is brilliant.

There's such a difference between good writing and full-on brilliant writing, and I always forget it until I am faced with the latter. Like an incandescent lamp (beautiful) against the morning sun (staggering). It's too much to take in quickly. The book, in multiple ways, is itself too much. Too painful, too many ideas too challenging to confront, too beautiful, too angry-making, too heartfelt, too guilt-inducing, too bright a star. I think this is part of the point, to overwhelm me, but that doesn't make it easier to read.

I've made an attempt to write every day, per my New Year's resolution, but I've written in six of 26 days in January. That is failure in any jurisdiction. I examined my failure this morning and came to a terrible conclusion: I don't want to finish the Ceremonials project.

In doing the math, I found that I could be done with a draft in maybe two or three weeks if I wrote a half-hour every day. I couldn't believe it, that this thing I've been putting off and chewing on and figuring out for going on two years could be over so quickly if I just sat down at the notebook for a ridiculously small amount of time each day (much less time than I waste on my abusive boyfriend the internet), but no matter how I rejiggered the numbers, the math came out the same. I did this math six days ago, and in those six days I wrote zero times.

This is an upsetting habit I've developed in the last few years: stopping right before the finish line. I do it at work, at school, at home, everywhere. From laundry to research papers. It's when I'm almost done, when the remaining work is goddamn negligible, that I feel the strongest urge to quit. This was not my work pattern when I was younger, not in my secondary school years nor in my college years nor in my twenties. I think it's some kind of adaptive mutation of that old foe perfectionism, but I don't know how to stamp it out. MRSA defeats state-of-the-art hospital environments, after all.

Because I could be done in less than a month, could start on what I consider (this time) the exciting work of rewriting most of what I've written, and I'm remembering every day that I'm supposed to write every day, and I'm still not goddamn doing it, the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't want to finish. When that thought shot through my mind, I immediately agreed with it.

I think it's because I've put a lot of feelings into the success of this project, even though what constitutes that success is self-defined. If I finish, I might look back and find that I have not succeeded. If it's unfinished, I don't have this problem.

Yeah, that's perfectionism, all right. Shitballs.

In other news, school starts today. I think I've bitten off more than I can chew - three classes - but I have pretty much never regretted doing so. I'm off to explore.

Operation Read Less (no, really)

The other day I unsubscribed to a blog I've been following for something like four years. It wasn't a mentally taxing blog to read, as it was a one-outfit-a-day fashion blog, but the updates were just too frequent and I found myself getting annoyed, rather than pleased, every time I clicked on a link for it.

This isn't a tragedy. Interests come and go. People change. As an unfortunate number of tattooed folk learn, passions bloom and fade. I feel a little sad that I'm not into her blog anymore, but I don't have to make excuses to her about how I spend my time.

A few weeks ago I made an incredibly vague resolution: stop reading so much stuff on the internet. I seemed to be spending half my waking hours skimming essays and reading articles and looking at scrolly picture-posts on Buzzfeed. When I was in the middle of a good book, or a good Netflix week, I had less time for this stuff. Yet if there was nothing else to do but work or the dishes, there I was, back on Slate, reading articles that didn't interest me very much. Back on Facebook, clicking on links I knew weren't my thing at all.

I just didn't want to miss anything. In case a link that looked kind of eh turned out to be the little sparkle that jumped into my life and rearranged everything. In case Slate ended up posting something that I could respond to and get an essay published. In case Buzzfeed miraculously put up that animated gif of Christof looking self-important from The Truman Show that I desperately want someone to make for me.

Image searches only ever turn up Christof looking serious

It dawned on me at Esalen, when I hardly missed this shit at all: This is so not how I want to live, sludging through a swamp of mediocre media to feed my fear that I'll miss something.

So for the last few weeks, I've been trying to consume less on purpose. Before I click, I say really? is that really how I want to spend the next ten minutes? Because my notebook is right over there, not yet completely full of my words. That upon which I sit encompasses a bunch of flab that might improve in tone by putting that ten minutes into the treadmill instead. There are things I could learn how to cook, books in my apartment that I haven't yet read. There are mixtapes to download and hell, there's even usually laundry to do. Laundry is better than another passel of words that's going to mean nothing to me in an hour. It actually is.

I love the internet. I love my computer. Nevertheless, I kind of hate sitting in my desk chair at this point, because I sit in it around eleven hours a day. It's the same damn sit all day long, and yet for many months now I've been doing the opposite of trying to reduce the amount of time I spend there.

Instead of doing my work in one big chunk and walking away to live my life - which is after all how I lived before I started working at home, even if there was a lot less of my life to go around a given week - I'm doing it in little stutters, dribs and drabs of work combined with Facebook-checking and YouTubing and looking up random shit that floats into my head on Wikipedia. I do not know why I do this, except that I think the freedom of working at home makes me a bit self-destructive.

I want to believe you so bad, awesome vintage lady 

If the little shit, the flotsam of articles and Wikipedia and the lightsaber sound that means I have a new e-mail, really mattered, I'd still remember to do it after I was done with work. But the pattern of multitasking, of swapping back and forth between the work and the play, has been so firmly ingrained that I'm having to relearn, laboriously, how to stop doing it. Even while I was writing this, I had to stop myself from clicking tabs over to Facebook, to see if something new had been posted in the last 15 minutes.

EVEN IF IT HAS, SO WHAT?? I want to scream at the impulsive repulsive destructive part of my brain that compels me to do this. YOU WILL LIVE WITHOUT SEEING THAT BLUE BORDER FOR HALF A FUCKING HOUR. YOU ARE CONCENTRATING. KEEP CONCENTRATING UNTIL YOUR WORK IS DONE.

So. The consumption has to stop. I don't have a ceiling, like I will only read seven articles a day or I will only watch three videos a day or whatever, it's just a chaos level that I can feel, I can tell when it's going too high. And circumspection is the watchword. Taking that extra moment before clicking to think really? because your time is actually precious, you know has made an enormous difference. Time will tell if I succeed at the actual defragging of my time into work and play. I hope I can gather all the fragments back together to make a little more room in my brain.

Don't Be Steppin'

So, I was originally going to try and write about this with the notion that as a writer, SOPA and PIPA matter to my interests--in the future, without fair use excerpts of my work in various places on the web, I won't see as much promotion as I'd like. That's a pretty threadbare connection, so I thought I just wouldn't write about it. But I realized that the reason SOPA and PIPA and their idiocy matter to me is that I'm a citizen of the internet. As are we all. SOPA and PIPA matter to anyone at all who uses the web on a regular basis. Which means that they matter to you as well.

I think what needs to be said about the wrongheadedness of these bills is easily Googleable, and what interests me about it was crystallized by an item I read this morning from The Escapist. It seems that the hacker group Anonymous is claiming to have hacked and broken some major websites overnight: the Department of Justice, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Universal Music Group. Not that I expect these sites to be invulnerable to a serious hacker collective, but I'm still rather impressed; this ain't small potatoes.

I had kind of hoped that the peaceful shutdown protests that took place on Wednesday would go even further than they did. I hoped that Google would shut down its search function for a day, keep people from being able to Google anything for just 24 hours. I hoped that Twitter would grind to a halt. I hoped that comments forums all over the internet on sites like the Washington Post and the New York Times would cease functioning, so that just for one day, you couldn't make your voice heard (no matter what you have to say). I thought if there was serious, major disruption to the sites that people use with impunity every day--even, perhaps, sites that senators themselves visit--they would see how goddamn stupid these bills were, how too-far their reach extends.

I don't want to see the world go down in flames of chaos. Nor do I really even want people to actually suffer for their stupidity. But I know that in order to make obtuse people see reason about something that matters past the ends of their noses, you have to hit them hard exactly where they live. That means different things to different people, of course. If, as a barista, you know that a certain senator just has to have his Starbucks in order to function, and whenever he comes to the counter you turn your back and refuse to serve him--and you could be sure that all Starbucks baristas everywhere would do the same--you would probably have his ear a little more easily than if as an employee of a McDonald's you intended to refuse him, when the senator hasn't visited McDonald's in twenty years.

One of the things that troubles me about these bills is the same thing that troubles me about a great deal of legislation passed in the last 15 years: it seems to have been drafted and pressed and fed through the rollers of Congress without any sort of input from the actual constituency that elected these congressmen. I'll grant you that I have a pretty self-selecting group of friends to choose from, but I don't know a single person who thinks this legislation is anything like a good idea. I'd love to see the numbers on how many ordinary folk contacted their representatives on Wednesday, after discovering what SOPA and PIPA were all about, and said, no, we do NOT want this to be law. I'm betting it was a lot of them. I'm betting it was enough to elect somebody completely new, in fact.

For Wednesday's protests to actually hit the congressmen where they live, though, it would have to be a more dramatic gesture than Wikipedia and Reddit and what-have-you. It would have to be Google and CNN.com and CNBC.com and the Cornell site that houses the U.S. Code and whatever other sites congressmen and their staff use to get through their workdays. YouTube, probably. It would have to matter more than just your constituency rising up against your actions, right? It would have to be your bank's website.

For Anonymous to take out these websites is--if not merely an act of revenge for Megaupload, which would be kind of lame and negate my whole point, and I can't believe it's a coincidence, with SOPA and PIPA so nearby--intentioned, I think, to send the message We Know the Internet and You Don't. Don't Be Steppin' in 'Hoods that Ain't Yourn. If this is their message, I think it's a completely proper one, if delivered in a terroristy sort of way. Of course, how the authorities will see such a message is a completely different matter. They'll smack down like parents on teenage rebellion: you little punks. How dare you fuck with us just because you can't break copyright law as easily as you could three days ago. It's meaningless defacement, taking down some websites, like spray-painting ASSHOLE on somebody's car.

This is the problem with terrorist messages, of course. They're never delivered properly. The destruction always seems to matter more than the message. Which is why the Gandhi/King-type protests of Wednesday did so much good: we're not going to wreck anything, we're just going to make your life a little harder for a day. Just to show you, and meanwhile show a lot of other people who didn't even know about it, that we think you're doing the wrong thing.

Yet I can't help having some admiration at the message, if only the message, of Anonymous in wrecking usdoj.gov. Rather than only showing you how heavy an anvil is by slackening the rope until the weight's pressing down on the top of your head, it's a razor slicing through the rope that holds the anvil up. Bang, you're dead.