A Word From Esther! Month 3

Quincy, March 1, 2010

Dear Internet,

I am told that you have not received the letter I sent you last, on February 8. The cause of this is mysterious to me. There is something wrong with my CD. There may be something wrong with my computer. There is definitely something wrong with my relationship to technology.

On the same day that I spend a literally blissful day doing all the things I love – reading, writing and parenting – almost as free from internal distractions as external ones, I misjudge the weather and arrive late to a committee meeting at the church that I have recently joined. The meeting is on the third floor. The door is locked. I have no cell phone. It is dark, and raining. I am lost, disconsolate, frightened. I tuck my tail between my legs and head for home. On Sunday, the committee chairwoman asks, “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

Trying to call Am Vets on a Monday morning to schedule a courtesy pick up, I discover that my phone line is dead. With no other method of communication, I can’t contact the phone company. After more than two days, almost – but not quite – long enough to get me to admit to my upstairs neighbor that I need help, Nick wanders into the dining room and lets me know that he has just reset the router. “The router? My phone line has a router?”

And I am losing letters. One is misaddressed, another doesn’t have enough postage. Two copies of another are simply MIA. I see the intended recipient of that letter in person and we look at each other as if speaking different languages. “You really didn’t get it?” Blank stare. “No, you really sent it?”

And, on the heels of all this, I hear that you, dear Internet, also did not receive my letter, because there is something wrong with my CD. Forgive me if I consider this almost enough cause to stop trying. I’m alone out here anyway. The precious trickle of letters has all but stopped. It turns out, it wasn’t just you that didn’t write back to me this month. It was all of you. (Is it me? Was it something I did? Do you not like me? – Even in your complete absence from my life, Internet, you make me self-conscious.)

Now, before I get called on this, I know perfectly well what has diminished that supply. I haven’t been writing as many myself. It is a truth that any relationship flourishes when attention is paid to it. I’ve been doing other things. I visited a few pen pals in person. I’ve had some dinner guests. And, I have to keep up on my homework.

It’s ironic, since graduate school didn’t work out for me, that I now have such a heavy course load. I have yanked the media feeding tube, and am relearning the world. I organize my studies, like any good post-Enlightenment Westerner, in concentric circles moving out from…me. In January, myself. In February, myself and my marriage. In March, myself and my marriage and my kids.

The methodology is always random, sometimes – I’ll admit it – sort of strange. My sister-in-law calls it “postmodern.”

In a sudden, ferocious impulse, I pull into the Goodwill parking lot, and sweep the shelves of discarded books, gathering every single text on love, sex and marriage that I can find. There are too many. I limit myself to paperbacks, which sell for 99 cents each. As cheap in this as I am in everything else, I refuse to spend more than ten dollars on books that are guaranteed to make me feel crazy. Improbably, I find Lesbian Epiphanies shelved skin to skin with Every Young Man’s Battle, the field guide to sexual purity for evangelical men. I check both covers for scorch marks – there are none – and sweep them both into my basket, where they land on top of Getting The Love You Want.

What kind of college am I going to? Lisel and Amy hear from me first, while I am still in the 1950’s, and I find my textbook quaint. Kim hears from me a couple of decades later, when I have steam coming out of my ears. By the time I visit Miriam, I have moaned and screamed my way through the detritus of my own adolescence. Here, The Hite Report, which accompanied my mother through the aftermath of her divorce. There, Men are from Mars and Women are From Venus, the blockbuster which gave me the only thin excuse I needed, at age 16, to understand my own sexuality as abnormal. (Men are from Mars; women are from Venus; Esther must be from…another galaxy altogether!) Between these texts -- a mother’s heartbreak, a daughter’s coming of age -- is a silvery spiders’ web thread of what a certain elder of my acquaintance would call perspective.

It’s impossible to miss it, when you hold them in your hand. These books were written by people, bought by people, read by people. Some, like Every Young Man’s Battle, which hasn’t a single crease, appear to have been not read by people. People are so funny! and so strange! and so infuriating! And yet, against all reason, we love each other. In the front cover of How to Make Your Wife Your Mistress (1972), in pencil: To Lee, from your wife & mistress with all my love. In Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (2003), highlighted: “But in our narcissistic culture, in which the individual is exalted above all, autonomy is often a guise for selfishness and irresponsibility.”

It’s an excellent education, for the ten dollars I paid in course materials.

Returning to my concentric circles, I can’t draw any conclusions about how my internet blackout affects my own marriage, if at all. But I can say that it would take a strong marriage to survive all these books being thrown at it. And, when we took the matching quizzes in the back of Husbands and Wives (1990), we scored very well.

In the coming month I have signed up for a course in parenting. (Myself, plus my marriage, plus my kids.) The teacher is not yet assigned. If any of you would like the job, consider it yours. Only reply to,

Your friend,

Esther Emery

A Word From Esther! Month Two

Quincy, February 7, 2010

Dear Internet,

I miss you.

That’s the only honest way to start off a letter to the internet, which I’ve again asked Amy to post.

And after that…I don’t really know. The page is blank. I have fallen off my script. On the one hand, nothing much has happened around here. On the other, I’ve been launched into outer space.

For starters, I’ve gone off of politics. I didn’t blog about politics here, so it is only those who really know me who are currently picking their jaws up off the floor. I am off politics like someone goes off a drug. I am detoxing from the conflict, the name calling, the steady diet of anger, the dehumanizing of the enemy, the jealous guarding of one’s interests, and the perception of morality defined in the visage of kings. It. Is. Madness.

Now my phone is about to ring. A sister, a friend, a friend’s boyfriend… “We need you!”

And you do. I know that you do. How could I not know that, when I live in Massachusetts? This January (in a race that shall remain unnamed, like Voldemort) I was needed. At a play date with a fellow Democrat – and our three very youthful Independents – I heard that race described as a wake up call. Respectfully, I disagree. This race was nothing less than an opiate, one that kept the entire state of Massachusetts vibrating with fear and anger in the very same week that a chunk of the earth rearranged itself, crushing in the process 200 thousand human beings.

In that week, my Sunday paper reports, eight million dollars were spent on the Race That Shall Not Be Named. More than four million on each side.

What does eight million dollars look like, I wonder, in medical supplies? In rice and beans and cooking oil? What does eight million dollars look like, in good will?

I had a strange moment shortly after the New Year, when, sitting on the edge of Milo’s bed, staring past Stella’s fuzzy head, through the doorway and on into the kitchen, I had a vision of myself being stitched back together. Uninvited came an image of fluid traveling freely over the seams, the whole length and circumference of my self, separating, recombining, and forming cohesive whole.

I do understand an idea of integrating partitioned aspects of the self. I have lived with this idea and even taught it: that a practice of attention, honest inquiry and forgiveness can bring back the orphaned pieces, once cut off by trauma or regret. But what part of me was being welcomed back into the fold? I couldn’t place it, couldn’t quite tell where this feeling of wholeness was coming from. Of greater concern, I couldn’t tell what breach had been repaired. I have felt so relatively healthy!

Hours later, in another moment rare moment of silence, after the kids had gone to bed, I was finally able to place it. This thing that is being put back together…is my train of thought.

I received a letter with a question; — and here I must interrupt myself to sing a song to the precious, steady trickle of letters! They are, in a word, sustaining. I’d like to brag that I have a “thread” going on gender, one on virtue, one on God, and another on intelligence and schooling. But to oversimplify these letters into “threads” is to oversimplify these people. My pen pals have the courage to share with me their hopes and fears, which is to say, they talk a little bit, every once in a while, about What Matters. How courageous! How unusual!

But that’s a side note. In a letter dated January 2, 2010, Kirsten Brandt writes, “How do we prompt dialogues? How do we have real conversations?”

And, for this month of January, I have directed myself to answering that question. It has brought me back, again and again, to the dinner table.

Cooking isn’t the only thing in my life that is moving out of Someday and into Now. Rather, my List of Things I Have Always Wanted to Do When I Have Time is seeing unprecedented turnover. My baby is in cloth diapers. I’m doing my own baby food. I’ve read the second half of the Old Testament. I can juggle three beanbags. Most everybody who ought to have pictures of my kids has pictures of my kids. Despite a truly impressive resistance to musical knowledge, last week I learned from my niece a little song, the four notes required to tune Milo’s ukulele.

But cooking is the most unexpected of my developing skills, and somehow the most important. I don’t have much to compare to, here, in my non-digital island. Is this my whole generation, or is it just me? Are there others of you who made it to age thirty and beyond without learning that pasta sauce doesn’t have to come out of a container? Or that you can make your own vegetable stock (and it’s cheaper and tastes better)? Or that it takes fewer steps to make bread than it does to make chocolate chip cookies? It’s too bad, in this, that I can’t see comments on this blog, but I will make an informed guess that I am not alone. If my mother, who literally wrote the book on country living, raised her youngest children on frozen dinners, chances are that some of you were raised that way as well.

Against the inertia of my former life, I am now learning how to cook. It’s a hard road, starting from so little knowledge, but I persevere. (Remember, without media entertainment in my life, I have really nothing better to do!) I have learned to make bread – although not nearly as well as my husband – and polenta, and short grain rice, and soups truly from scratch. I’ve nearly perfected the cranberry muffin, which success is mitigated by the fact that neither my husband nor my son really likes cranberry muffins. And, never mind that that the Sephardic bean soup was made essentially inedible by the enthusiastic addition of an extra jalapeno pepper, or that my apple muffins were unleavened, and not for religious reasons. There are successes, and there are failures, but mostly there is a sea change in my attitude towards how I sustain myself and my family. I am a creative being in the kitchen. I have a choice about what I eat. Putting food on my table can be an essay question, instead of multiple choice. And…I can invite people to dinner.

Question: How do we talk about politics without losing our very humanity? Answer: I am inviting people to dinner.

Aha! You see, those of you who were about to pick up the phone and chastise me, you may chastise me for my weakness, but not for betrayal. I am still in the fray. I am trying to go deeper into the fray. However, what I have been doing has not worked. Something needs to change. We are all human, and we are all hungry. I will not minimize, or be minimized. I will not be snowed by the infighting to the extent that I miss the greatest matter of that Race that Shall Not Be Named, which is that everybody feels betrayed. Who is betraying us? Is it really one politician over another? Or is it the unsettling possibility that we are all sitting at the table, counting our approval points, while the ship is going down?

“So what are we supposed to do?” asks my niece, who is not a resident of Massachusetts anyway, and looks as if she would like the whole darn thing that is politics to go away so we can go back to making pizza sauce and admiring Milo’s precociousness. “Vote for the person that we hate the least?”

Well, yes. That’s precisely what we are supposed to do. That’s precisely how our democracy is set up. What do we think of these people? That they are gods and goddesses? Or demons and demonesses? They represent blocks of people, not layers of stratosphere. They are not, in themselves, right action. What kind of drama has blurred the lines between politics and righteousness? Ah…but this is precisely the alchemy of a political campaign: to transform money received into messages to convert the many. Money into votes; votes into power. Money via drama into votes into power. And our media is so lifelike. We are so able to make our drama look like it is real. Money via reality into votes into power.

I don’t know, maybe I know too much about theatre. For listening to political campaigns? I should be earning union scale.

I do believe in right action. I do believe, ferociously, in civic responsibility. I don’t in any way eschew the ballot box. But my life is only so long! And my children are only this fragile, this vulnerable, for this short time! I see that the earthquake in Haiti could teach us our weaknesses. It could bring us closer to our vulnerability, which could bring us closer to one another. But, through the media lens, I see it only teaches us our fear.

I have plenty of fear. I won’t eat it. I won’t serve it. And I won’t pray to it.

Thus…After two months without the Internet, I am OFF the obsessive, multiple-choice politicking and ON to “Right Living, the Essay Question,” which is much harder, but which also gives my soul a space to breathe.

At this moment, the best thing that I can do for my country is to continue learning how to cook. Please, feel free to send me recipes.

Yours Truly, From My Kitchen,

Esther Emery

A Word From Esther!

Posted by Amy Chini

Month One

First things first. By way of correction, I need to let you know that my Year Without Internet is costing 15 dollars per month less than I thought it would. I bring this up only because I wrote two whole posts on it back in my blogging month of November, and now those figures are all wrong.

When I called to cancel the internet, the nice young man on the phone explained to me that I could keep my promotional rate just by signing up for basic cable. This sounds like a racket, and maybe it is, but the end result is that my monthly bill is less than I expected, and if you want to come over, I now have basic cable. All you have to bring is the TV.

I’ve asked Amy to post this letter for me today, because I feel strongly that the conversation I started in my blogging month of November deserves to be kept alive. This is a conversation about our relationship with communication technology. It’s a conversation about love of “speed” and love of “ease,” and whether or not technology created to sate these desires is actually in any way improving our lives.

In this New Year’s week, I have heard (on the radio) and read (in the newspaper) a lot of references to science fiction. As adolescents, we used to read books that were set in 2010. These books had spaceships and aliens and artificial intelligences. It’s funny now to say, “Look, none of that has happened. None of it has come true. What fun we had with all our imagining!” It’s also funny to say, “Look, robots are real. Genetic engineering is real. Cloning is real. It’s true that we don’t press a little button on our chests in order to open a phone line, but our lines of communication are that ubiquitous, and almost as easy.”

In some small ways, these two worlds are converging. Science fiction has happened. Science fiction has come true. (Although, apparently, without the aliens.)

I am only one of a hundred voices this week that is noticing this. Many, many people are talking about how we observe and judge our relationships with communication technology, especially at the individual level. How do I, in my life, find the time to disconnect? How do I turn off the signal long enough to live here and now, in the place where I am?

My perspective on this is personal, related to a difficult thing that I have set out to do, by myself. On my solo journey, I am constantly measuring my self-reliance. Americans are a hardy bunch, and we talk a big talk about this, self-reliance. It might be the ability to trust that even without the pull of the crowd, one will still muddle along into the best possible action. It might be the faith that motivation will sustain, even in the absence of deadlines and hierarchies. Or it might be the ability to stop, even when everybody else is still moving.

This is the practice which emerges from the journey of my Year Without Internet, Month One: a practice of stopping.

This is the question which emerges from the same: Do you know how to stop?

As soon as I set out to stop, there emerge two smaller and more insistent questions. The first is “What do I do with myself?” And the second is “How do I get away?” I have tried, turning these over in my mind, to disengage them from one another. I will do a chapter on each one. But I can’t get them apart. They are the same question. “To do” is the verb for getting away. I do in order to escape.

At the end of this first month, I am very aware of the relationship between the internet and what I might call “busy work,” which is any work that you do that you don’t really want to finish. A good friend of mine, living in relative idleness after being laid off from his job, was asked, “What have you been up to?” He answered,

“I’ve almost finished reading the Internet.”

Of course he started reading it all over again the next day. But I have excluded that option. Without my bottomless well of busy work, what am I supposed to do with myself? Crossword puzzles? Or a cross stitch? Read magazines? Pick the lint off of all my sweaters?

Approaching the same problem from the other direction, it’s privacy that feels lacking. I realize that Facebook is not only a way to connect with people. It is also a way to stop connecting with people: namely, the ones who live in my house. These are the little ones, who try to connect in problematic ways like begging for another game of Airplane, or spitting food into my hand, or just endlessly interrupting my train of thought. But this is also that one person who is always and forever occupying my personal space, whose imperfections are a constant drag on my buzz, and whose traumas are the ultimate killjoy. These are my children, and this is me.

So…here I am in New England, sitting in the middle of piles and piles of snow, learning how to live with myself. And the wonderful letters seem to come around just exactly when I need them, like ceramics classes. And this household celebrated the battery-operated candle lights out of Christmas.

I am (mostly) glad to be exactly where I am, right now.

Exit, Pursued by Letters

You can write to me at:

Esther Emery
62 Holyoke St.
Quincy, MA 02171

I will write back to you. (Holiday cards count. Postcards count.)

I am closing comments on all the posts except for this one. If you would like to talk to each other, please do so here. If you'd like to talk to me, all you need is a stamp.

Thanks for reading.

Apples and Apples (Envy)

I've been saving this topic. This is my most personal reason for taking a year off the internet. It isn't metaphysics or philosophy. It isn't a plan to write a fascinating book, or to contribute to feminist theory, or even to build a beautiful argument for a simpler way of life. It is simply me, and what in this life is hardest for me.

I presented a thought experiment a while ago, in which I mentioned my "creative drought." That really happened. You might also call it burn out. It started on a Sunday in February, built gradually for almost a year, and then, one day, it overcame. The cause was not really motherhood, and it certainly wasn't the internet. It was more complicated, and less: this strange, deep conflict between working and living that I have spoken of here in so many different ways. At that moment, my work wasn't very good for my life.

I am an accomplished person. I excel. I understand that to be a verb, as in, "to show superiority; surpass others," and it is a practice that I have cultivated. Upon entering any arena, any field, I perceive the definition of success and I chart a course towards it. I take the advantages that I am given, shrug off the failures and, "just keep doing 'til it's done." Historically, if I thought I was not going to be able to succeed in something -- or if I didn't want it badly enough -- I wouldn't particularly try.

This isn't my favorite thing about myself. But it is the quality that has built my resume. It is a quality that makes me who I am. And it is the quality that burnt me out. Even without my practice of excellence -- which, depending on the mirror into which it peers, can also name itself perfectionism, workaholism, ambition, or OCD -- my art is one that slides easily into vanity. With vanity comes envy, and with envy comes distraction, and distraction, when you're trying to make art, is crazy-making.

This morning, sitting down to a post-Thanksgiving breakfast of pumpkin pie, I trailed my two older brothers to an Idaho summer about twenty-five years ago, when we lived for a short time in the basement of a soft rock radio station. We discussed some damage once received by that radio station's satellite dish, wondering if a poor, innocent woodland creature had received undeserved blame. And Jacob and I team-told our favorite bad kid story, about how we once pulled a couple of darts out of the remains of a car wreck on the highway, and Jacob accidentally sunk one about an inch into my thigh, and we worked together, brilliantly, to make sure that no adults ever found out so I wouldn't have to get a tetanus shot. (Never before or since have our unique motives been so precisely aligned. It taught me the definition of politics.) And then I remembered Jacob's records, which he loved, and then he remembered that I had taken one of his records, which he loved, and smashed it with a hammer.

I didn't remember that.

"You were jealous, I suppose," he said. "I really liked that record."

I don't like this memory. I'm taking immediate steps to re-forget it.

And that's why this post is personal. Envy is not digital. My envy is not digital. I have sisters, too, whose very existence has been a frail excuse for my most dangerous mirror-gazing. My sister's body is exactly like mine, except... Whether that is vanity creating envy, or envy creating vanity, it is a sure way to become distracted from whatever you care for most.

My sister in law, Daiquiri, once gave me permission to share her stories, because, as a blogger, she shares them herself, and today I'm going to take her up on that.

Daiquiri is married to my husband's brother. The first time I ever visited their home, I was 18 years old, and Daiquiri must have just turned 24. This now appears to be relevant. But at the time, the difference between us didn't seem to be explainable by something as insignificant as age. There is a Norse myth in which the Norns are said to spin and cut the threads of men: a gray, coarse thread for the laborers, and a finer, colored thread for the craftsmen, and every once in a while, a thread of pure gold for a king.

Daiquiri seemed to have gotten a really good thread.

When I was 18, like one third of college women, I had disordered eating behavior. I couldn't cook myself spaghetti. Daiquiri was hosting Christmas dinner. I had just dropped Organic Chemistry and was mourning the death of my future as a scientist. Daiquiri was a Mechanical Engineer. I was struggling hard with money, bouncing checks and barely staying in school. Daiquiri lived in a house, decorated like a catalogue, with two cars in the driveway. She was beautiful. And she was good at Christmas. And she was blonde.

She was blonde, and I was green, and dinner was not yet on the table when I said something unkind. Daiquiri told some version of these events on her blog more than a year ago, and, with her characteristic generosity, she indicated no fault on my part. But my ability to perceive the human heart is given, not learned, which is to say that I knew what I was trying to do then as well as I know it now. I spotted a weakness, and made an offhand remark, and watched it land. A similar effort to cut someone down a size has occasionally been helpful in the rehearsal room, but I do not recommend it around Christmas. I have deeply regretted it since.

There's a unique relationship, between sisters in law. We are not blood. We did not grow up together. We did not choose to be friends, but we are family. And Daiquiri and I are apples and apples. Even before I began to realize the sort of stunning degree of similarity between us, we were of a kind. Our husbands are like different shuffles of the same deck. Even our courtship stories are similar. It's almost impossible to keep from drawing the comparison.

Ten or twelve years later, I think I would have grown out of that comparison, or at least gotten over the sting, if I hadn't started reading Daiquiri's blog. "You mean," I said to myself as I read about twenty posts in one sitting, "she's also a writer?" And I'm thinking now of my friend Amy Chini, who is similarly competent in everything that I do, and many things that I don't. She's a playwright and a poet, and a very skilled painter -- much better than I am -- and crafty as hell, and she also is a musician whose recording of Hallelujah is treasured in our house because Milo and I both love it, and...oh, yeah, she also cooks. It might be nice to be angry at her for all this, but there she is, in perfect humility, just loving the hell out of me and my imperfections, so there's nothing left for me to do but to survive it, and allow my ego to be obliterated by her talent. In the end, there's no better feeling than that. That's the best part of friendship.

Theoretically, I feel the same way about Daiquiri. And, as long as I'm in a strong place, meaning that I'm already feeling good about myself, I do feel exactly that way about ultra-talented, inspiringly humble Daiquiri. But she also writes a blog. And my ugliest moments -- the moments of deepest insecurity -- are often the ones in which I find myself reading blogs. Lisel mentioned this phenomenon in a comment very early in our blogging month, so I know that I am not completely alone in this. If administered (in)correctly, the tonic of mommy blogs can make you feel completely terrible about yourself. All the other moms sound so smart, and so talented, and they always have these great ideas, and even though they're clearly human in the sense that they have the same experiences that I do, they are inhuman in the sense that they recover neatly from their traumas and wear them like pretty jewelry to their best advantage. I have problems. These other women have beautifully written, blog-sized moral tales.

When I'm feeling alone, I want friends. And I go to blogs. And blogs are not really my friends, even when they are written by my friends.

And here, some of you are saying, "Wow, she has some imagination, thinking blogs are her friends. They're just pixels on the computer screen."

But just as many of you are saying, "Blogs are my friends. She isn't using them right."

We know that blogs do not live or die on the social impulse alone. Daiquiri is a good writer. There's no other reason that I would have kept reading, since her conservative point of view has been a sore thumb in my liberal blogroll, and on half a dozen occasions she has said things that really, really got me steamed. And here it may feel like I'm headed to a revelation about jealousy -- that I'm going to find that my addiction to her blog is actually an expression of the envy itself, but, as always, it's more complicated than that...and simpler. I keep reading her blog because she's a good writer. She's a real writer. Like me.

But we are not only writers.

This is such an elementary lesson, about the dangers of oversimplification. We are not apples and apples. We are people. Daiquiri posts little slivers of herself, for her own entertainment and mine, and for her own edification and mine. Her words have purpose. But they also have virtual life. I can get confused. I can think we are actually talking to one another.

Daiquiri knows from reading my comments on her blog that I can debate politics, and I can. I do. But in person, Daiquiri brought up one of our differences and I almost burst into tears. She doesn't know, from reading my carefully composed words on her computer screen, which issues I can talk about with confidence, and which ones make me panic and fall apart. She didn't grow up with me. She isn't really related to me. What makes us think we know each other? Where did I get the idea that this was real?

This is the point in a post where I usually say, "The internet didn't create this problem. This is human nature, and digital media only expresses it." And then I link the other posts where I've said something to that effect. Except, I can't say that here. The internet did create this problem. The internet is this problem. The strange phenomenon of the virtual serial confessional and her virtual audience IS the phenomenon of the internet.

We are not apples and apples. Mommy bloggers, sisters in law, politicians, actors, directors. We are not equal units of humanity to be categorized and compared. We are people. And we are in great need of one another -- not just the knowledge of one another's traits to go in the little black book of who has what -- but our living vulnerability to one another: our precious ability to be affected, to forgive and to be forgiven, and to share the growth, and change -- and some would call it Grace -- that makes us human.

And there it is. This is the most personal reason for my Year Without Internet. Mommy blogs make me jealous, and I have a problem with jealousy. And now I am at home with these two babies, and it's the hardest job I've set out to do so far. As I face the challenges of full time parenting in a time and place that isn't especially appreciative of full time parents, I need every resource I can get. I can't afford to lose a single real friend to digital envy.

This is from a prior post:

The question is, in a year or so, when it isn't so eminently sensible (or even possible?) for me to stay at home with the kids, can I return to the world/internet/workforce with a greater sense of balance? Can I return with a greater appreciation for humanity and humility and spirituality and personal journey and all the little details of life that I forgot because I was glued to the computer, constantly scanning cyberspace for a quick ticket to resolving the inherent difficulties of this one great difficulty, life?

What the internet doesn't control is how we use it.

Deep Cuts, Trk 2

Early in this blog month, I gave a post the title Deep Cuts. That title was meant to be a reference to the compilation albums that are 0h-so-helpfully created for me by iTunes Essentials: The Basics, The Next Steps, and finally, the Deep Cuts, where you'll find those lesser known gems and prized oddities that are only known by the lucky bastard who goes deep, preferably staying on iTunes as long as possible, double clicking on 30 second sound bytes of songs until his bank account balance drops by the double digits, seemingly entirely of its own accord.

On November 26, just a few days before I unplug, it feels like the right day to add a track to that compilation album. It has a 90 second drum solo, that only a purist could love, and that's the telephone. It doesn't offer the total anonymity of the internet. And it doesn't offer the soul-calming ease of being with someone face to face. It means listening to hold music. It means keeping track of phone numbers. It means practicing being a generous listener with the phone in one hand while Milo is threading figure eights around my legs.

And I'm not good on the phone. If I were to take one of those fun quizzes that test, "What Kind of Learner Are You?" -- and I am bravely resisting the impulse to do that, right this second -- I am certain that it would define me as a visual learner. Unlike the parrot I have for a son, I have a hard time remembering -- or even responding correctly to -- things that I hear without matching visual cues. After several years of racking up a mess of phone call slip-ups in which I spoke the wrong date, name, theatre company, or even play title, I actually made a point to move my professional interactions into cyberspace.

In that light...what I'm doing right now is crazy.

But, here I stand, with a goal and the will to achieve it, and I have many more reasons to leave the internet (for a while) than I do to stay. Prime among those reasons is the realization that the type of interaction that I've been having, even on this blog, is completely accessible to me through other means, if I'm willing to make the effort.

Toast to the Turkey

I'm a Thanksgiving person. Like there are cat people and dog people, I'm a Thanksgiving person.


I think very fondly of the years that I sat at a table spread by Adam and Ben, who probably will read this at some point, and toasted our gratitude so elaborately that we might have fallen off our chairs before we ate. And I think very fondly of that one college-era Thanksgiving of "tequila rapido," with our friend Forrest's mom, who observed in the wee hours that I was too drunk to keep playing her games and so administered cold turkey, instead of letting me go to bed. And let me be clear that this isn't an alcohol thing, although those two vignettes are obviously from the days before pregnancy and breastfeeding. There's just a pure spirit of celebration that comes with Thanksgiving. I've successfully separated it in my mind from any historical events, and I celebrate it as ritualized gratitude for gratitude, in which you eat and give thanks and eat and give thanks until you can't eat and give thanks any more.


This year, I'd like to toast the turkey, and...

The chef, who is never me.

The many friends with whom I have reconnected.

All the forgiveness that I didn't deserve.

That I have someone in my life who actually believes that turkeys say, "gobble gobble."

Hot cocoa and every part of the distribution chain that brings hot cocoa to me.

That my husband stole a flower for me on the way home from work today.

That my husband came home from work today.

And...

Your blogs.

If you are a blogger, and you are reading this, I do mean YOUR blog. Even if I don't comment, I read it. And even if I don't read it very often, when I do read it, I tend to read back to the place where I left off when I read it before. And, just in case you still don't think I mean you, if you have told me something in conversation that I already knew from reading your blog, I probably didn't let that show.

Tomorrow, in my post-turkey state of regret and resolution, I will post about how reading blogs is bad for me. Given my particular weaknesses and imperfections, which include gluttony -- and there's the real reason why I love Thanksgiving -- that is true.

But today is the day before Thanksgiving, and I'm celebrating gratitude.

Today I'm saying thank you to all of you for letting me read your personal thoughts, and your poetry, and your rants, and your prayers. I'm saying thank you to all of you for letting me know that I'm not alone in so many things that I'm not alone in, like...injured kids, and sleep frustrations, and poor housekeeping, and work stress, and obnoxious theatre patrons, and being inspired to laugh by your baby for no apparent reason, and crying on your kitchen floor, and being deeply concerned about the world, and having a love/hate relationship with Starbucks, and WalMart, and Disney princesses.

Thanks for writing to me.