To hell with the Internet, amen!

“The Internet? Don’t get him started. ‘The Internet is a big distraction,’ Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

‘Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,’ he said, voice rising. ‘They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’”

—Jennifer Steinhauer on Ray Bradbury in the New York Times, the whole article about him trying to save libraries is absolutely worth a read. I can’t get over that perfect sentence in the first paragraph I quoted. That little detail, the medal “sort of tossed” on a table, just clinches it. Plus, his wife was named Maggie!

A friend for three seasons.

I am a fair weather friend.

In the truest, most literal, unhyphenated sense, I am a better friend when the weather is nice. In this foul winter weather, nothing can tempt me outside, even the promise of friendly company. My closest friend in Minneapolis, Christina, suffers most from this.

I am unrepentantly, unhesitatingly quick to cancel plans when the weather takes a turn for the worse. “Another couple inches of snow in the forecast? Sorry, I can’t hang out.” “An ice storm on the way? Nope, I can’t make it to that show.”

I hate driving in snow, and this is totally old-person of me to claim this, but I have a hard time seeing to drive at night these days. The cold wears on me. Knowing I’ll have to get in a frozen car and slowly navigate slippery streets is enough to stop me in my tracks.

I’m just as bad in Chicago. I don’t want to bundle up and trek somewhere in the cold, even when I don’t have to drive. Waiting 10 minutes for the bus is pleasant in the summer, tolerable during a winter day, and pretty damn miserable on a January night.

Even the daily gray gloom and darkness that comes at early evening leave me sleepy and confined to my bed after dinner. I’ve become more of a homebody than ever before, and I just want to be at home at the end of the day. I don’t go out past a certain point or stay out as late as I used to.

This summer, leaving my house at 9 or 10 p.m. to hang out until the middle of the night was no problem. Christina and I would grab a beer and walk around her neighborhood or the lake. We were volunteering at the Cedar two or three times a week this fall, and grabbing a drink at the Nomad afterward.

For now, I’m content to be a fair weather friend. I’m sure we’ll see each other more often once the snow melts. The warmth of spring sunshine is always worth the wait.

It’s a jungle out there.

My mom and I are going to the bank tomorrow to resolve my issue—the bank’s been taking my money as a bogus “online banking fee,” and customer service over the phone hasn’t helped at all.

She just told me, “I’ll get you your money back. I’ll be protecting my young, just like a lioness protects her cubs.”

She’s a gem.

A favorite quotation.

“At that point, I felt an importunate tap, almost a punch, on my upper arm, from Charles’ direction. I turned to him. He was sitting in a fairly normal position in his chair now, except that he had one knee tucked under him. ‘What did one wall say to the other wall?’ he asked shrilly. ‘It’s a riddle!’

I rolled my eyes reflectively ceilingward and repeated the question aloud. Then I looked at Charles with a stumped expression and said I gave up.

‘Meet you at the corner!’ came the punch line, at top volume.

It went over biggest with Charles himself. It struck him as unbearably funny. In fact, Esmé had to come around and pound him on the back, as if treating him for a coughing spell. ‘Now, stop that,’ she said. She went back to her own seat. ‘He tells that same riddle to everyone he meets and has a fit every single time. Usually he drools when he laughs. Now, just stop, please.’

‘It’s one of the best riddles I’ve heard, though,’ I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two.”

For Esmé-With Love and Squalor, Salinger

Ready to read.

“The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”
—E. M. Forster

I decided that I’m going to write a least a little something about all the books that I read this year.

A quote about balance.

“Good relationships balance over time. This means that at any particular point in time, the relationship may appear quite unbalanced: One partner may be more nurturing; one may be more needy; one may be providing all the financial support, etc. But if both partners are loving, understanding, giving, dedicated and flexible, then the relationship can handle all kinds of ups and downs, and still be strong, exciting and, yes, romantic. The best relationships are well balanced. Not a delicate balance; not a static balance— but a dynamic ever-changing balance.”

—Gregory Godek

Slouching toward balance.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to quote Death Cab for Cutie: “So this is the New Year and I don’t feel any different.”

I love-love-loved that back in 2005-6 when I got the album, and that sentiment still rings true all these new years later. It’s been a new year for a few weeks now, and this has all been percolating since then. I’m not going to try to sum up the last decade, but I do have plenty to deal with in the next year.

My friend Brenna’s word for 2010, her attitude, her goal, is to be “proactive.” She’s right. I need to be more proactive too. I wouldn’t have spent Tuesday crying about my student loan mess if I’d been proactive.

But my word for the year, my goal, is “balance.”

Balance has been a constant goal for me, but it’s gotten away from me lately. I made a zine a couple summers ago, and it was called “Equal Parts.” In my introduction, I wrote, “To me, ‘Equal Parts’ is about balance. My life is a balancing act: balancing between details and big pictures, consumption and creation, words and images, looking back and looking forward. It’s not about ying and yang, but I tend to get extreme and want all or nothing.” Well, my same issues still apply.

I need balance in my music collection. It’s taking up too much space on my hard drive, but I can’t bear to delete music I may want or need. As I look through for things to delete, I’m reminded of three more albums I want to acquire (which I can, thanks to Heather’s generous iTunes gift certificate). I don’t need 40 gigs worth of music, but I can think of a justification to keep almost everything, no matter how little I’ve listened to it or how long ago I feel in and out of love with it.

I’ve always felt like I listen to music wrong. I can’t balance the new stuff I get with the old stuff that I love. I just move from one obsession to the next. For no good reason, some albums languish unplayed while others are played and played and played and then forgotten. Sometimes I can’t handle anything unfamiliar, while some days all I want is to hear something new.

I need balance in my room. I am living at home, in a small room, and it is stuffed to the gills. My shelves and drawers and stands overflow with books and paper and photos and clippings and magazines and mail and crap and junk and old junk and older crap and too many clothes and art and mementos and more books and more magazines. I know I need to get rid of stuff—donate some of it, recycle old magazines, find a way to organize all my stationery and envelopes and mail and craft stuff—but, at the same time, I don’t want to waste anything.

I don’t have much discretionary income right now, and I can’t afford to buy something when I can repurpose something or save something until I need it. Plus, I go through cycles with my clothes—I can’t bear to wear something, until I’m magically able to see it with fresh eyes and I’m glad I didn’t get rid of it.

This problem is compounded by the fact that my little room must hold everything. My younger sister cannot tolerate any evidence of my presence in the house beyond my toothbrush and shampoo in the bathroom. Anything I leave in other parts of the house always ends up unceremoniously dumped in my room where it can be hidden behind my closed door. So my room is my bookshelf, my desk, my workspace, my vanity, my wardrobe, my long-term storage, my coat rack, along with where I sleep at night. Everything I own is contained within this space, and it makes me a little claustrophobic sometimes.

So there is no room for anything that is not essential, my closet cannot hold anything else, and I must stop leaving clothes on the floor.

I need balance in my relationship. We’ve been together almost a year (!) now. Sometimes all I can think about is our future: a day when we might live in the same city, or even the same apartment. Then I get scared, or I get overwhelmed by yearning, or I dread the future grievances we will encounter. I know this is not a good use of my time or energy. I am in this relationship for the long haul, but we will not get there if I don’t worry more about taking it one day at a time. I need to be doing the day-to-day work to maintain my end of the relationship and do my part to keep us together.

Sometimes I wish we could go back and revive our roles as a painfully adorable new couple, where everything was new and exciting and we’d talk until 3:00 in the morning and make out until 4:30. I need to act more like that girl, the girl from March and April, who was wondering if she was doing everything she could to make him fall in love with her, and not the girl now who takes everything for granted and cries at the smallest provocation.

With a long-distance relationship, it is easier to avoid taking things for granted, because we don’t get to see each other as often. But it’s easy for me to convince myself that the years will stretch on forever and we’ll never live together and his cat will never like me and I’ll never be able to afford to fly to Chicago and on and on and on. That’s not going to get me anywhere. A few good hours on the phone have revived my faith in us, and I’m going to be on my best behavior for my next visit, and we’ll keep going.

I also need to balance books versus the internet (the internet’s been winning), reading versus writing, worrying versus affirming, worrying versus acting. I need to balance my paralyzing discouragement regarding my lack of employment versus my desperate need for a job and money to pay for student loans and health insurance. I need to consume less and produce more, especially in terms of my blog. I’ll read hours of other girls’ blogs instead of writing a single word for my own. I’ve gotten really good at obsessing about something without doing anything about it, but that stops now.

So I’m doing what I can every day to take small steps toward greater balance. What else can I do? Here’s to a new decade! Happy New Year!

PS: Dear Ben Gibbard,
All I want from 2010 is a new Postal Service album, please.
Love,
Maggie

Steve Almond on television.

“I have never actually owned a TV, a fact I mention whenever possible, in the hopes that it will make me seem noble and possibly lead to oral sex.

As we all know, TV is a cesspool of mediocrity that sucks precious time and energy from those who fall under its spell. In other words, I am an addict. Anyone who has seen me in the presence of a television knows this.

As children, my brothers and I developed a TV loyalty so fierce as to occasion its own vocabulary. The brother who turned on the set first was said to ‘emenate.’ When another brother entered the room he would immediately ask, ‘Who emanates?’ I should stress that we were using this word from the time we were eight years old, despite the face that we had no idea what it meant, which, regrettably, is still the case. Most of the 1,739 fights we got into as kids related to some issue of emanation, such as whether the act of fixing oneself a banana with peanut butter constituted a voluntary surrendering of emanation and thus empowered the emanator-designate to assume control. I don’t suppose I need to tell you we could have done with a bit more parental supervision.

My point is that I would have suckled the cathode tube, given the chance. I can remember in vivid detail particular sessions of TV watching, as the gourmand might recall an epic meal. At the tail end of the Candyfreak tour, for instance, after five weeks on the road, I lay down on my hotel bed and watched consecutive episodes of a show called, I think, Extreme Blind Dating, in which the girl wears a hidden earpiece so that two of the guy’s ex-girlfriends can, from a remote location, advise her as to the most humiliating things she might say or do during the date. At the end of the program, a limo shows up. If the girl is inside, he gets a second date. If he’s failed the test, his exes are in the limo and they get to jeer at him and, in a gesture that is apparently fixed Extreme Blind Dating protocol, flash him their breasts. As I watched this program I began to believe that it was my duty to contact the producers—I took down the 1-800 number—and audition. I considered which of my exes would agree to be on such a show (none), and what they might tell my date (make him dance), and whether I could muster the necessary poise (probably not), and whether I really wanted to see my exes’ boobs (yes), and which ones (any of them, actually), and would it be possible, in the absence of real exes, to hire fake ones (probably). It was, though I don’t think I’m quite doing it justice, a glorious and deeply tragic afternoon.”

—”A Brief Discussion of My Relationship to TV” by Steve Almond, from the book Not That You Asked

“The big terrible things they’ve done…”

“Harvey and I sit in the bars, have a drink or two, play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people, they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, ‘We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.’

Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers—soon we have friends. And they come over, and they sit with us, and they drink with us, and they talk to us.

They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.

And then I introduce them to Harvey… and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.”
—James Stewart in Harvey (1950)

Another blog to admire, starting with this post.

“And it takes a confident, exceptional man, to be on board when you write about the two of you, to take a deep breath and let you glide your pen like a razor blade over the seams that join you, exposing the deformed parts, the parts that you hide from the neighbors and stuff under the couch cushions when you have guests.”

-Diana Vilibert, “A Love Story” (from her blog)

That sentence takes my breath away right at “pen like a razor blade.”