word

– Your attention, please

/ jelizabeth / 8 Comments

Thank you for your attention to my work.

That’s the line that ended the cover letter I sent with an essay to an editor who had read “Tethered” online, dropped me an e-mail, and encouraged me to send her something else. (I finally did.)

I stared at that sentence for a long time. Yes, it is gracious — anyone who went to public school in an era when students learned to compose and format a letter (do you know what the five parts are called?) — and concludes the body of the letter appropriately.

I wondered, though, as I stared and stared at the line, if that’s what I really want: attention.

A writer cannot actually be a writer without an audience. While I and others might write to organize our thoughts (see Seth Godin), I could also do that in a private journal. But that for me would not be enough. An idea written down is not somehow alive unless someone reads it.

Is that the secret function of an audience? Attention? I think of that as something children want. And yet there I was, grateful for it. Continue reading →

– Trouble with avatars

/ jelizabeth / 1 Comment

After Christmas, I made myself a Wii Mii on the kids’ new console and thought, “There’s something not quite ‘Jane’ with this avatar.” No medical device, and no way to make or add one.

On New Year’s Day, we went to see Avatar: 3D as a family. I enjoyed the movie, yet it bugged me. And while I’ve been reading lots of smart commentary on the web about the film and its racism, sexism, and colonialism, I’ve come across nothing on the disability of protagonist Jake Sully, an ex-Marine in a wheelchair, and its relationship to the plot.

So I wrote about all this trouble with avatars, here.

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Note: If you don’t have Nintendo Wii and still want to see what your Mii might look like, try My Avatar Editor, which Rosemary pointed me to.

– Pucker up, baby

/ jelizabeth / 2 Comments

Grace and I are sitting at my parents’ dining room table, eating cheese and crackers. Grace is also, as usual, writing on a notepad.

“Mom, I have a question,” she says.

“What?” I reply hesitantly, expecting the unanswerable.

“What do you do when life gives you lemons?”

Oh, that old one? I think. I say, instead, “Make lemonade.”

“Nope.” Grace rolls her eyes at my obvious answer. “You pucker.”

And, indeed, you do.

– Writing in the snow

/ jelizabeth / 2 Comments

Brian is the first to tell me about Ommwriter. Telling, in this instance, involved posting a link to my Facebook page. I happen to like, in our Internet age, how much we can learn about each other, even our siblings, via blogs, e-mail, and social networking sites. He guessed right that I would be curious about this.

Ommwriter is a new text-processor (dowloadable, not web-based) that creates a distraction-free space for writing and concentrating. The image of the space — a range of grays: snowed-over field, storm sky, tiny tree silhouettes, and six buttons — is what made me want to try it. To be bodily in the space was the dream; to type in it, the reality.

I tried it on Thursday, when I wrote my Beck post. Instead of opening up a new post field in wordpress and typing, formatting, uploading, googling, and linking as I wrote, I just… wrote. Did I like the experience? Eventually. Did it work? Yes.

With Ommwriter, what you see and hear is what you get. Everything is available in the space: the text box, sound control, and save button. It’s supposed to be an immersive experience, so immersive that, when you open a file, there’s a vivid and gentle reminder to use headphones to get the full experience. (I didn’t, because my house was empty and quiet.) The music is like what you get with The Buddha Machine: tonal, steady, and low. I’ve never studied Zen Buddhism, so I have no idea if this adjective actually applies, but I could imagine some person saying, “How zen,” and getting started with Ommwriter. You open it; the music starts; and all there is to do is write. Continue reading →

– Heart breaker, list maker

/ jelizabeth / 1 Comment

GROUND BF 4, RIBS 2

Leanne told me that she and her spouse have become one of those families with an extra freezer in the basement.

Then she told me the part that made my heart beat faster and gave me goosebumps: Mark keeps a notebook on top of the freezer, with a running list of the items and quantities inside. Leanne, what a catch! I love that about him.

I have often joked that, when looking for a romantic partner, it would be helpful to identify someone who can both dance and cook. These qualities might sustain your life with both joy and food.

I’d like to add a third quality to that list, and suggest that someone — like Mark Mason — who can make and keep a good list is a rare and wonderful find: a sustainer of order. Ah.

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P.S. Thanks to Leanne for the photo, and the introduction to MM.

– Vain, vain world

/ jelizabeth / 4 Comments

The VFW Parkway: that’s my strip. Home Depot. Jo-Ann Fabrics. Starbucks. The connector to 95S to get to the Cape. I drive it often, practically hypnotized by the same-old-sameness. Not mindful, not in the moment. Lost in my own reverie.

Many times I’ve passed this group of signs without really seeing them. Every time around this point, I’ve thought long and hard about vanity. (Interestingly, I haven’t dwelled on Jennifer, who is my cousin.)

Vanity, all around us. The guys at the gym who look sideways at themselves in the mirror while gently running their palms over pecs (the self feel-up?). My dentist, the competitive weightlifter in the 50-and-over division who introduced me to “cut” as an adjective. The lushly pregnant celebrities on the cover of People. The botoxed and lip-injected woman on the T with eerily old hands. Old feet, beautifully pedicured. The accumulation of friends on Facebook. Black and white photos of authors on book jackets: eyeglasses, bemused grin, hands placed just so. Shaved heads. Waxed crotches. The tanning salons clustered around Boston University. Clarice’s good bag. Modesty, an eschewing of vanity, and therefore vanity supreme. Pynchon, Dickinson. White teeth. Sunglasses. Bonfire. The memoir. The blog. Tweet. I’m guilty, too.

Vain, vain world.

My rumination was interrupted, finally, by an ah-ha! moment one day as I drove past the stacked signs, and concrete meaning derailed my train of thought: “Oh, bathroom sinks!” I laughed over the repeated misreading and my elevation of the prosaic to the profound. Ha, that, too, a kind of vanity.

– States of mind

/ jelizabeth / 17 Comments

Every time I hear on the radio the new Alicia Keyes/Jay-Z song, “Empire State of Mind,” I (mis)hear Keyes’s lines as her voice enters the song. To me, it sounds like:

In New York…
I’ve become a wintry tomato
There’s nothing you can’t do…

Play the video, and listen for the line starting at 0:56. Do you hear what I hear?

In the car today I asked Lydia, “What is she actually singing there?”

Lydia replied, “Something about dreams.”

“Dreams?” I queried. “Dreams?! Where do you hear that?” I sang to Lydia my tomato line.

Lydia smiled. “I think I prefer yours, Mom.”

For the record, this is what Keyes sings. Lydia is right.

In New York…
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do…

You pick what you like: wintry tomatoes, or concrete jungle dreams. I’ll stick with what grows on the vine.

– Getting too much done?

/ jelizabeth / 6 Comments

In high school, I had a clerk’s job at the Leicester Pharmacy in the center of our town. It was about three miles away from our house. To get there, often I drove or got driven. Once in a while, I walked and took the lovely meandering way: up our street, down the dirt road that connected our circle to the newer Cricklewood development, out onto Pine Street, a detour through the old cemetery, and then back up Pine Street to where it met Main. If it was autumn, I’d kick the fallen leaves as I walked, in no hurry at all. As I strolled, I thought my thoughts. I hummed to myself, bothering no one.

Last Thursday night, one of my office mates Karen and I were talking about our teenager children as we tidied up the piles on our desks. Their lives, to us, seem to be like full-time jobs, plus moonlighting. Busy, rushing from task to task, sleepless. No time to think their thoughts. Like the present-day us.

About 12 years ago, when my oldest child (now 17), was a little boy, my friend Martha Mulligan and I were feeling the pressure from our culture to get stuff done, gracefully and in multiples. (This was before the GTD system was even a gleam in David Allen’s eye.) We felt ourselves to be failing more than meeting expectations. Mirthful over our own daily inefficiencies, together (and probably with Eric and Jimmy, too) we came up with an idea for a humor book, with illustrations, called Maximize Your Inefficiencies. Martha billed it as “the Dilbert for your home life.”

I still have the file. I dug it out.

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Martha and I planned for 101 inefficient items, perhaps one per page. It would be like a coupon or flip book, the kind you can purchase on impulse at the counter of a book or gift store. Continue reading →