Lindsey Kay's Blog: *! (on Goodreads), page 7

If you’re going to be angry, do it right.

Indiana didn’t just pass a law that makes gay marriage punishable by jail time.

This didn’t just happen.  No, really. I know your gay friends (like mine) are probably linking to posts about that and everyone is angry about being dragged back into the dark ages.  And I understand being angry and feeling like recent victories are pissed on when things like this happen.  I mean, I wanted to be angry too.

Only that didn’t actually happen.

Indiana has had laws for many years that say falsifying information on a marriage application is illegal and punishable by a fine or jail time, and they’ve had a law saying that officiants who sign falsified marriage certificates can also be punished.  This seems, to me, like a perfectly rational law.

Fact number two, gay marriage isn’t legal in Indiana and never has been.

Fact three, when updating their application process Indiana made the boxes for the applicant’s names say “male” and “female” instead of “applicant one” and “applicant two”.

Is that, perhaps, rubbing a poo-covered stick in the eye of the gay rights activists who have been giving their sweat and tears to try to get gay marriage recognized in Indiana?  Absolutely, it’s a crap move.

But…  Gay marriage isn’t legal in Indiana.  So there aren’t going to be any gay couples trying to apply for licenses in the current hetero-based application system, so nobody is going to be falsifying documentation claiming they are a gender they aren’t in order to apply for a marriage license, so no officiants are going to be signing off on falsified certificates, so nobody is going to jail.

And if tomorrow gay marriage was legal in Indiana, a few lines of code could fix the whole problem.

So we shouldn’t be angry about the Indiana government’s dick move.  No, really, friends, we shouldn’t be angry about that.

We should be angry about all of the reactionist bloggers getting us to waste our venom on something that is, at the end of the day, relatively meaningless.   This is like letting the bully goad you with the poo covered stick and bum-rushing him and getting it all over yourself, when instead you should be looking at all your classmates as they sit idly by and either do nothing or point and laugh.  The problem isn’t that Indiana did a dick move, the problem isn’t that gay couples are going to be thrown in jail, the problem is that the fact that Indiana is digging it’s heels in on an archaic definition of marriage and aside from a few reactionary bloggers, nobody cares.

When the bully sticks the poo in your eye, psychology tells us that getting angry at him won’t help you.  If you are in trouble, and there are bystanders around who are doing nothing, what you are supposed to do is call them out. Hey, guy in the blue shirt, I’m in trouble!  Get help!  Hey, girl with the curly hair, can you give me a hand?  Hey, big guy over there, do something!

The same is true of if you are in a car accident, or if you suddenly feel pain, or if you see someone fall into a river and other people keep walking by.  Our natural tendency is to tune out disaster and assume someone better fit to deal with things will deal with things- or to assume that because everyone else is doing nothing that such is the appropriate course of action.  The best move for anyone is to start calling people out, in order to demonstrate that silence is not okay.

So don’t jump on the evil Indiana bandwagon.  Start a conversation. Start calling people out.  ”Hey, don’t you want to see the marriage application process change?”  ”Hey, look at how entrenched the language is, what are better words to use?”  ”Hey, why do you think everyone got so angry so quickly?”  ”You over there, why do you think people weren’t more honest about what happened?  Who started this firestorm anyway?”

Cause, hey, the tempest in a teapot doesn’t happen just because.

But let’s not waste all of our energy yelling at bully who only wants to see us angry.  (Because, honestly, isn’t that what some of the other side of the argument really is?  Doesn’t it serve their interest to keep gay couples as angry foaming-at-the-mouth activists ready to tear the jugular out of society?)

There is still a productive conversation to be had, one about the perceptions of society and how long it takes to make the language change, and with it expectations.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be angry.

They should, but they shouldn’t self destruct.

They need to be purposefully angry, pointedly angry.

Properly, productively angry.

They should show empathy to those who profit from their anger, and righteous rage at the ones who can be won by it.

Your feet aren’t the same size as mine.

So I’ve been thinking lately about the whole idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.  It all started during a more or less innocent conversation.  I was talking about canning and gardening and how I always seem to overshoot things, and my mom made a comment about how she remembers those days.  I almost immediately wanted to say, “I’m not you!”

I’m glad I bit my tongue, because on further reflection I can see how from her point of view, we are the same.

But then, I’m not.

We’ve traveled some of the same old dirt roads.  I’ve relived many of her experiences.  If life were walking mountain trails it would be safe to say that she and I have seen the same panoramic views.  But we haven’t walked all of the trails the same, and I couldn’t ever walk a mile in her shoes (or she in mine) because our feet just aren’t quite the same size.

This is true of so many people.  We like to take our experiences and all the knowledge we’ve gained from them and just thrust all of that onto others, forgetting that our experiences are a product of who we are, and the knowledge they give us is personal. Are there some experiences that are universal?  Sure.  It’s always good advice, for instance, to tell people to lay down hoes and shovels blade side down or hang them up.  (Step on the blade and get smacked in the face just once, and you’ll realize that this is a universally crappy experience.)  I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t benefit from being reminded to always look over your shoulder before putting a car in reverse, or always cover the coals before bed when camping.  Sure, those are mistakes that no one, regardless of their perspective, would want to make.  The potential danger is just too great.  It doesn’t matter whose shoes you are wearing, you want to avoid potential damage.

But then there are the more vague adages, and the more personal experiences. Someone may say, “never get married young, trust me, you aren’t ready.”  Then someone else says, “have your kids in your twenties, you’ll enjoy them more that way.”

Whose advice do you take?

One man says, “leaving the homosexual lifestyle helped me avoid so much pain,” and a woman turns to him and says, “it wasn’t until I accepted my sexuality that I experienced true love and devotion.”

Their shoes couldn’t fit more differently.

And my mom makes a harmless comment to me, full of love and nostalgia and regret, and I have to accept the fact that whatever pain in  life she wants to help me avoid, it’s my pain to feel, and we may find it fits us very differently.  Like that last purple sun dress on the sale rack that we both try on and size each other up in, we may find that even though we are so alarmingly similar, it fits one of us better than the other, and we both know it.

You can’t just walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and understand their life.  You have to take all of the context into account:  who they are, how they feel, how they’ve interpreted their experiences, what they want from the future, what lessons life has given them so far and what they’ve learned from it, and if they are even remotely like you.

You can’t just borrow their shoes.  You have to walk in the essence and understanding of who they are.

You can’t shove your biases into their loafers and then say, “see, I can really rock a mile in these suckers.”

Your feet aren’t even the same size.

The only person capable of walking a mile in their body in their shoes is they themselves, excepting God.  (And we all know the trouble that comes from thinking that we can be God.)

So let’s leave all this business of shoes behind, and change the conversation.  Don’t retort, as I was so sorely tempted to, that nobody knows your life.  Say, “this is my life.  Now show me yours.”

Listen.

Being Weeded

So yesterday I weeded the entire garden.  There are four different beds, the largest of which is fifteen by twenty five feet, so it can be time consuming.  When weeding, I’ve discovered that there are few ways to keep myself from going insane.  One is offering my kids a few dollars to do it for me, although that is tricky because they’ll pull up EVERYTHING.  Another is singing show tunes to pass the time, but the fact that the neighbors are often in their yard working on cars and playing the soundtrack to 8 Mile on instant repeat (alternating with insanely loud Mariachi) is a bit of a damper to that.  The third, and the one it seems that I am most likely to use, is going into a semi-meditative state and asking Very Important Questions and Listening To The Universe.

Lately I’ve been in a bit of a valley and questioning if my faith is productive and if I am becoming the kind of person I want to become.

(Disclaimer:  I’ve been in a bit of a valley and wondering if my faith is productive for the past 15 years, so this isn’t anything new.)

So, anyway, I’m pulling up weeds by the bucketful and hauling them across the yard to dump in Ye Olde Stinky Pile of Yard Waste (which was, at one point, higher than the fence) and pausing to eat a nearly perfectly ripe apricot (which makes the haul across the yard more bearable) and going into this very quiet place in my head where everything is rhythmic and all the scary stuff is tuned out.  I’m thinking about myself, and how I’ve been lately, and feeling pissed off and disappointed that I haven’t been better.  I’ve been stressed and overwhelmed and angry and everything feels like it is too hard of work.  This is a harmonious parallel to the weeding itself, which when all told took most of my day yesterday and left me absolutely whooped.  It was one of those times when I knew that as soon as hit the bed my entire body would cry out, and I wouldn’t want to be getting up in the morning.  There was a part of me that was angry and wondering if the garden was worth it and wondering why I hadn’t kept up with the weeds better, earlier.

Side note:  if you garden, you know that there are several stages of weeding.  The first is just turning everything with a hoe when the weeds are itty bitty and hacking them apart.  It’s tough on your shoulders and it can be a bit of a drag, but if you pretend you are a ninja or a giant terrorizing a teensy tiny village it’s not too bad.  If you go at it hard enough, you can FLY through the garden. The second is pulling up little weeds by the handful once they’ve gotten enough purchase to be hard to hoe.  If you do this well, it takes a lot of time but it isn’t hell on your body.  The third, which can be avoided by doing the other two, is having to use both hands to pull up weeds nearly as large as your plants, and believe me when I say it uses every muscle in your body and will make you rue the day you are born, and if weeds like that are all over all four of your fairly sizable beds that take up the majority of the side yard (ahem, like mine were) they will make you curse your mother and your grandmother and everyone who ever raised you to believe that things like Sustainable and Homemade were the great ideals, before hipsters made them fashionable.

I realized that it was all a tidy metaphor for my spiritual life.  See, our sins or foibles or what have you are like weeds.  If they aren’t deeply ingrown we can fly through them, merrily hacking to bits, and only feel it a little later on.  We realize that we are doing important work in our hearts and we feel good about it afterwards, but it only makes us cry a little.  We can see the benefits right away and our good fruit is growing faster than the weeds.  But if we put off working on ourselves a day, two days, a week…  that landscape changes, and it changes drastically.  Soon we are having to crawl through our hearts pulling up weeds by the fistful, and before we can get it under control our whole selves are involved in the effort and it feels like it will never end, and we lay down at night with our heart and soul crying out and feeling like we are dying.  And all the good fruit?  It’s failing, and we’re not seeing it as productive as it could be.

It’s easy to curse God, or nature, or life.  It is, but the truth is that what we produce in our lives is a result of our own effort, just like awesome bucketfuls of food don’t come out of gardens that haven’t made anyone break a sweat.

The truth is, some of my emotional distress in the past few weeks was entirely avoidable, if I’d dealt with my own shit while it was small.  It’s MY fault for letting it grow bigger than the good stuff.  It’s MY fault for not heeding the call to go out in the trenches when I should have.  It’s MY fault for thinking “I’ll deal with that later” and looking the other way until it was completely out of control.

I need to learn that when I’m going through this mega dark weeks that make me want to spit at God, I have to ask myself if I’ve been living in my faith every day the way I need to, or if I’ve just been wanting the fruit without the sweat and attention.  My grandmother walked her garden every morning, and while she did it she talked to God.  She didn’t only go out there when she wanted something.  She lived in it.

Faith is like that.  If we only go after it when we need something, we’re always going to find what we need choked by weeds.

Depressing Commonalities.

I may have said this before.  My brain, were I to compare it to any appliance in my kitchen, is a bit of a crock pot.  I tend to stew things for days before being really sure what I think about them.  (This is especially ironic when compared to the way I tend to reflexively make judgments about everything.  I snap to judgment and then rue it for days.)  So in the past few weeks, I’ve been exposed to several things I’ve had to mull over.  They aren’t things that have very much in common.  The first is the Netflix series House of Cards.  The second is Paula Deen’s cheerful racism.  The third is rape.

Sigh.

I realize now that there is a common thread:  News Media.

I haven’t been able to decide if I like House of Cards.  There are a lot of brilliantly executed moments in the show, the acting is incredible, and the plot was pleasantly surprising.  It seems like the kind of show I should like; it’s darkly cynical, hard to predict, and makes you think.  So why don’t I like it?  I think it may all boil down to the fact that I don’t like the way the reporters in the show are portrayed.  No one cares about truth in the show.  Everyone cares about getting a good break and beating the competition and keeping a razor sharp edge.  But truth?  Integrity?  F*** that sh**, who has time?  Gotta meet the deadline.  Gotta break it first.

Which brings me to Paula Deen, I suppose.  Almost all of my friends, even some of the most compassionate and racially sensitive, are angry that Paula Deen is being made a whipping girl for institutionalized racism in the South.  ”She doesn’t deserve this,” people keep saying, “just because she said some crap 30 years ago that she regrets now.”  First:  If Mrs. Deen hadn’t willingly turned a blind eye to (and alternately propagated herself) institutionalized racism in the South, she couldn’t very well be made a whipping girl for it, could she?  She was the CEO of a company that had racist and sexist policies.  The CEO is held accountable, because everyone beneath them acts in their name.  Her company had policies that punished employees for the color of their skin.  Her family members, who managed HER establishments, abused their employees, exposed them to sexually explicit and abusive materials, mocked and insulted minority employees (including women) and behaved in a manner that is neither legal, prudent, or even understandable.  Yes, Mrs. Deen should be punished for all of these things, if they are true.  Yes, anyone with a few neurons firing in a normal manner who is in a position to distance themselves from her company is wise to do so- including the people who co-produce her shows and publish her materials.  That doesn’t make her a whipping girl, that makes her accountable for her own freaking actions, as well she should be.

Which brings me to rape, naturally.  Because people should be held accountable for their own actions.  A friend of mine posted a story about how she had said no repeatedly to a guy, and he kept pressuring her, and she was drunk and exhausted and didn’t want to make him angry so she silently caved in.  I’d like to point out that if a woman has said no multiple times and then mutely lets you have her way with her, that is rape.

And it makes me blindingly, searingly, furiously angry to realize that we live in a culture that calls that a determined, self-made man getting his way.

I’d like to take this moment to point out that I’m not sure if it is the heat wave making it 90 degrees in my living room despite the air conditioner running full bore, or just the fact that after 30 years of being nice I’m tired of being nice to people who are absolute bastards, but I’d like to take a moment and just scream a general F*** THIS SH** to the world at large.

F*** IT.  WITH A RUSTY SPOON.  THEN DOWSE IT IN KEROSENE AND CALL IT THE FOURTH OF JULY.

Because if you live in America you live in a country where there are scads of journalists ready to pick my friend apart and tell her how she could’ve avoided getting raped, and then blather on about how it’s so unfortunate that her rapist had a moment of flawed judgment which is totally excusable because of my friends rocking bosom.  Which may have been overexposed.  (It wasn’t.)

We live in a country where Paula Deen is pitied instead of being called to account, where the discussion is about poor rich white women having to watch their tongues instead of the beaten black sous chefs that provide them with wealth and are underpaid in return.  We live in a world where a TV show about a politician f***ing his way to running the news is sadly believable, where no matter how dark and cynical Hollywood paints the story it doesn’t feel as dark and cynical as real life.

I’m effing tired of it.

So to my friend, I love you.  I wish we lived in a world that defended you and others like you, because you deserve to be upheld and not torn down.  To Paula Deen, your empire should fall.  It was built on taking advantage of others, which is the worst kind of avarice and cowardice.  And to the producers of House of Cards, eff you.  I’ll watch the next season, though, because it’s still good television.

I just wish it didn’t feel so much like real life.

Musings on Determination

So a few very short weeks ago, my daughter decided on the spur of the moment that she really needed a frog.  She found an old aquarium in the shed, got it cleaned up, and announced that she was saving up money.  I looked at her allowance jar, which was crammed full of crumpled dollar bills, and told her that she already had enough money.  Aquatic frogs are $2, food for them is $2 more, and she had money to spare.  Mission accomplished.

While we were at the store, she happened to spot a chameleon.  A new obsession was formed before we were even back out in the car.  Princess says, “MOM.  I want a chameleon.  Bad.”

I turn to her father, thinking, “what do I say?”  He is clearly looking at me and thinking the same.  I say, “well, maybe if you saved up money we could buy a terrarium for your birthday…?”  My husband nods, and I think, “Oh thank God we dodged a bullet.”  It had taken her a few months to put back fifty cents here and fifty cents there and finally have enough money to want to buy anything.  How long would it take before she wanted to buy a few candy bars, or a new book, and decided that saving up the money for a chameleon was just too much work?

But, no.  Princess was googling things like “what does a chameleon eat?” and “what does a chameleon live in?” and pretty soon “how to raise mealworms” and “good plants for a chameleon” and she was drawing up diagrams and randomly announcing things like “WE WILL NEED TO BUY MORE PLANTS” and “FLOWERS ARE OKAY”.  And one day a couple of different terrariums were in my Amazon shopping cart and she was announcing, “I’ll need the one that costs more than one hundred dollars I think.”

So I sat down and explained to her that even cutting her grandpa’s roses for five dollars every week, she would just barely make enough money to buy the chameleon, and there were limits to what her dad and I could afford to spend.  If she wanted that terrarium, she would need to make a little more money.  She said, “I want my Chameleon for the fourth of July.”

Oh, sweetheart.  Oh, you darling naive girl.  I explained to her that such a thing meant making a whole lot of money in just a few weeks.  ”Mom, have you ever needed to make a whole lot of money in just a few weeks?”

Oh, sure, I used to make and sell jewelry.  Once I wrote a book.

Princess very matter-of-factly replies that she doesn’t want to write a book, but I should see if any of my friends need new jewelry.  ”I’m good at making jewelry.”

This is true, she’s good at making jewelry.

So Princess started asking who needed jewelry, and in a few days she had $30 dollars.  Then she had $100.  I told my husband we should start thinking about how we were coming up with our share of the money.  ”If she wants it before her birthday she needs to figure out how to pay for it.”

God help us, I thought, she’s only eight.  But I guess we all need to learn hard lessons somehow.

Never mind.  By the end of two weeks she had enough orders to buy the Super-Mega-Terrarium-Of-Awesome-Proportions, we were just waiting for checks to come in.  Then she threw a curveball, and spent a third of her money on making Super Expensive Necklaces for her grandmothers.  Oh, Princess.  It wasn’t a big deal, she said, she could still make more money.

And she did.

I tell you that whole story to tell you something else:  no one told her that she was just eight.  She didn’t realize eight-year-old girls don’t buy themselves $50 dollar lizards that come needing $100 terrariums and another $100 in accouterments.   She set a goal for herself, and heaven provide for anyone that didn’t buck up and get in line.  (Including her mother, who had to take her to the bead store every morning and do the finishing on freak-ton of necklaces and address twenty envelopes and make payment arrangements and keep the books.  All of this as Priority One on Princess’s daily “to-do” lists, above even breakfast.*)  She set her goal, and then she looked at the world around her and tried to figure out what she had available so she could meet it.

She didn’t look at the world around her before setting her goal.

She didn’t ask anyone’s opinion of if her goal even made sense.

See, I realize there are times I did things backwards.  I asked people if my goals made sense, then I looked at the world around me, and I decided I needed different goals.  I didn’t ask myself how much my goals mattered and then mangle reality to my will.

I’ve decided that I’m going to hold off on explaining to Princess that she’s still a little kid and sometimes she can’t make the world give her what she wants.  May that be true, sometimes?  I suppose it must, eventually,  it is when she wants to sneak out of bed and get chocolate ice cream, or when she wants to force her brother to wear a princess outfit so she can be Iron Man for once.  I mean, it’s true as often as it needs to be.  But about the other stuff, the stuff that has to do with her dreams, does it need to be true?  I’m guessing if I don’t kill her optimism it will be less often than I think, even if it’s more often than she wants.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t want to break her.

I need to figure out how it is that she does it.

 

__________________________________________________________

*There are limits.  I did eat breakfast first.

Thank you, YVCC

So I have a college degree now.  For the first time in my life I was filling out paperwork, and where it asked “highest level of education” I could choose something other than “some college.”  I know that doesn’t seem like the most monumental moment, but I think I teared up there more than I did during commencement.  Three years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me I would make it.  I felt broken.  Lost.  Flawed.  I had my life just the way I wanted it and it was wrenched away.  I thought, “I can’t hold things together.”  I thought, “everything always falls apart.”

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why I went back to school.  I was tired of not doing anything?  I thought a drastic measure might be what finally shocked me out of complacency?  I’d been talking about it for long enough that people expected me to eventually follow through and I was embarrassed not to?

Here’s the thing:  I’ve always had big dreams.  When I was in fourth grade I wanted to write a play, so I started to.  And it kept getting bigger and bigger until it was too big and I got depressed and gave up on it.  It grew away from me.  Same thing with my novels.  Same thing with my homes.  Same thing with my gardens.  Same thing with me.  I grew away from me.  And somewhere along the line before I ever even started things, this place in the back of my mind would say, “oh, screw you, it’s going to happen AGAIN.  You know it will.”

So when I enrolled in college, before I ever even walked through the doors for the first bit of paperwork to sign, there was a part of me that said, “do you really want to go into social work?  Do you really want to go to school?  Don’t you think you’ll be one of those people with a master’s degree still waiting tables?  Oh, screw you.”

And, for the first time in a long time, I was fed up with myself.  I had to steel my nerves and confront the fact that I didn’t, perhaps, really know what I wanted to do.  I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t end up waiting tables.  I might be like I was the first time I went to college, and completely implode and flunk out of everything and sneak away in the dark of night to lick my wounds and cry.  People always told me I was brilliant, creative, beautiful, whatever.  I would roll my inner eyes because only I knew the truth.  Everything inevitably grew away from me.  I was a brilliant, beautiful, whatever, cripple.

But not this time.  I was sick of myself.  I was exhausted.  I had moved across the country to try to save a marriage that like everything else grew away from me.  I had lost the one job that I truly loved and traded it for a job that made me completely miserable.  I had lost my book deal, I had lost control of my kids, and even more importantly I had lost whatever thread of hope told me that despite all my various failures I was still good at being a decent person.  I wanted to succeed.  I had to succeed.  I had to believe that I still had something of value to offer.

A bit of a rabbit trail, here, but community college gets a bad rap.  It’s like the losers school.  It’s the place that takes in all of the tired and weary downtrodden that can’t be successful anywhere else.  Right?

Maybe.  But it took in me, and the instructors that I worked with from day one completely changed my outlook on myself.  Suddenly, when I had something to say in class I could see a response that affirmed me.  My answers to questions contributed something.  My essays were full of notes in the margins that made me feel like I was saying something good.  My classmates asked me to study with them and we were learning together.  I was helping them learn.  I was good at it.  Not that I was remarkable, there were times where I was embarrassed not to have done better and I still had to fight the old bogeyman of never living up to my own expectations.  Yet there was a buffer there, because as frustrated as I was with myself there were other people who believed in me.  I can remember talking with my English 101 instructor about not being sure about going into social work.  She mentally twisted my arm (and may have literally if I hadn’t given in!) and encouraged me to go with my passion for English and work in the Writing Center.  That experience quite literally changed my goals and understanding of myself.

The Writing Center itself taught me so much, too.  Hey, maybe I can be a teacher.  Maybe I do understand people.  If I can teach other people how to break down their goals and have realistic expectations, maybe I can help myself too.

Oh, and Creative Writing?  Words don’t describe.

I feel like I’m blathering on too much, so I need to try to get my thoughts in a tidier line.  I guess all I’m trying to say is that I started out this journey broken and faithless.  The only reason I stuck with it is stubbornness.  I didn’t want to be one of those people who never tried to get their lives back together.  I may not have succeeded, if it weren’t for class after class where the instructor believed what I started out not believing:  I could, and would, be successful if I was willing to do the work.

So here I am, three years later, twenty pounds lighter, a million times happier and more confident.  I wish I knew what to say, other than a heartfelt thank-you to each and every teacher who I’ve had over the past two years.  It can’t be easy, quarter after quarter, taking in classrooms full of people who like I wandered in out of hope and options.  It can’t be easy dealing with students who are unwilling or able to do the work, or even believe they can.  But yet you do it, and time after time you project the sincere belief that the students in front of you can and will be successful, and you push and prod and argue them into agreement with you, knowing full well that many of them will give in to their demons and just give up.

You didn’t give up on me, so I didn’t give up on myself.  And I am grateful.  Sincerely.

Gae Polisner, Author with the Box of Wax Lips

(Written for my journalism class, with endless thanks to the fabulous authoress herself.)

“I get an image, or an interesting fact, and suddenly it’s a whole book,” Polisner says, “And I think, what is this that I’m writing?”  

The storylines that plague Polisner into writing them have staked out a place for her in classrooms and bookstores right beside classics like Steinbeck, whose “Of Mice and Men” features in Polisner’s debut novel, “The Pull of Gravity”.  

People choose to become authors for a variety of reasons, such as a love of literature, a desire for fame, or to emulate novels that have held deep meaning for them as readers.  For Polisner it’s about doing what she loves:  finding simple themes or ideas or even single scenes that interest her, and trying to paint a picture to share those unshakeable feelings with her audience.  While she doesn’t know what the future holds for her books or herself as an author, Polisner knows that she’s not going to stop writing.

Polisner lives on the North Shore of Long Island with her husband David, and two sons Sam, 17, and Holden, 15.  She attended Boston University and Brooklyn Law School.  She spends her days wearing many “hats” as a legal mediator, a mother, a wife, and of course with her writing; when she isn’t working on a manuscript directly she builds social networks on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads.  It may not be exactly what she expected being an author to be like, but for Polisner wearing the many hats that being an author requires lets her keep writing.  That, for Polisner, is “just this wish fulfilment.”  

Like many authors, Polisner talks about writing from the time she was small.  She never really imagined that she would become a professional author, so she set aside writing creatively when she entered into law school and focused on technical work.  Polisner still loves her job as a mediator and practices it in between the many manuscripts she’s revising and marketing.  So why did she decide to pursue a career as an author?  

“One day,” Polisner says with a laugh, “I sat down and decided I would write a hundred pages, just to see what it felt like. But after a hundred pages I couldn’t stop.”

Her self-effacing humor is amplified when she talks about stumbling into a career.  “[Friends and family] read it, and they liked it, so I kept working on it.  Honestly, I don’t know how that all happened,” Polisner says.

Polisner finished her first manuscript and entered it into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2007, the first year the contest was held.  That experience led her into a conversation with agents and publishers which carved the path to her writing career, even though that particular book has yet to be published.  

Her own experiences with publishing affect the advice she gives to writers just starting out.  Polisner says, “you have to find your inspiration, whatever keeps you going, and you have to have some luck.”  

By luck she means that no matter how great your work is, writing is still as subjective as an art.  Each manuscript is a little masterpiece, and just like a painting everyone will interpret it differently and have a different idea of where it belongs.  Authors depend on getting their manuscripts in front of the pair of eyes that believes in the potential there and wants to fight to have it published.  

“That part is the luck part,” Polisner says, “that part you can’t control.”  

For Polisner, the drive to keep going even when she received rejection was her children.  

“Having my sons really changed it for me,” Polisner explains, saying that she chose to live by the maxim that it doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, what matters is if you get back up.  She didn’t want her sons to give up when people said no to their dreams, so she just kept going.  It was ten years from the time she first decided to give writing a shot before her first book was published, but she doesn’t regret any of the journey.

Polisner’s original passion was women’s fiction; the first time she sat down to write a novel, that’s what she wrote. That was what won her recognition in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and secured her first agent.  For some reason, a publishing deal never came together.  She wrote another women’s fiction novel that received a lot of positive feedback from readers and agents, but still not a book deal.  

“The young adult literature was a surprise,” Gae says with a touch of nostalgia, “because women’s fiction was my first love.”  It seems as if most of her journey surprised her.  The idea to have Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” take center stage in “The Pull of Gravity” was also unexpected, something that simply occurred to her one day, redefining the novel as well as giving Polisner new and unexpected avenues for marketing her work.  

One of the ways “The Pull of Gravity” has reached the most readers is through being used as a “bridge” or “companion” novel, being paired in the classroom with Steinbeck.  It is used as a stepping stone to getting readers interested in classic literature and standard literary fiction.  Bridge novels are a new trend in teaching that have even come to Yakima, where Yakima Valley Community College has even seen the technique used in an English 101 class taught by Dan Peters.  

That class paired “The Hunger Games” with “Fahrenheit 451”, and many students responded enthusiastically. Dodie Forrest, director of the Writing Center and chair of the English Department, states that while using Young Adult Fiction as a bridge is useful, she wouldn’t suggest that every professor try it.  Part of helping students reach the level of literacy they need at a college level is recognizing what they already bring to the table.

“While I want [students] to appreciate literature,” Forrest says, “I also want to appreciate their literacy.”  But Forrest is quick to add that she’s excited any time she sees a student reading, be it YA Fiction, a graphic novel, or classic literature.  If a student loves any words on a page, that creates a foundation to build on for a more critical response later down the road.  So books like Polisner’s “The Pull Of Gravity” can have a place on college campuses, like the copy that is available to borrow from YVCC’s own Writing Center.

Sarah Andersen, age 28, an English teacher at Clio High School in Clio, Michigan, was the first teacher to use Polisner’s book in her class.  Andersen’s school was looking to replace “The Odyssey” with another story about a journey, and “Of Mice and Men” seemed like a natural fit.  “Once we made that decision, I recommended that we pair it with The Pull of Gravity,” Andersen says, because both of the books are about friendship and the timeless adventure towards self awareness.

Andersen was glad to find that Polisner was enthusiastic and eager to help.  Making a guide that other teachers would be using, and possibly judging, was a nerve wracking process.  The emails exchanged back and forth smoothed the process and helped Andersen feel confident in her work.  Andersen says that Polisner “deserves tons of kudos for how accessible she is as an author.”

On top of contributing to the teacher’s guide, Polisner also chats with classrooms reading her book over Skype, interacts with youth on her Facebook page, tweets, and responds to book reviews on Goodreads.  

Polisner says she’s still trying to figure out unique ways to market her next novel.  Perhaps there will be another tie in for teachers to use to connect with their students, or more gimmicks like the wax lips and troll dolls she’s been bringing to readings for “The Pull of Gravity”.  Polisner says that it can be a real challenge to come up with anything new to do.  Still, she’s fortunate in the way that YA authors band together and support each other.

Polisner has done group readings with other authors, even 90 second “flash” readings aimed towards younger audiences that might not be interested in longer, traditional fare. If someone isn’t interested after the first ninety seconds, Polisner says, all you do by reading a whole chapter is lose them more.  

Shorter readings, gimmicks, and fun, those are all things that YA authors turn to in order to keep things fresh and relevant to their primary audience.  But ultimately it’s not about the gimmicks or the constant push to come up with something new and interesting.  

As Forrest is quick to point out, when someone reads they’re really just looking for that connection; they’re seeking a theme or character that speaks to their own experiences, and helps them understand and respond.  That’s what Polisner demands from her own writing:  something that forges a connection.  She waits for that idea, that scene, that character that suddenly demands a whole book be written around them.  

Polisner says there’s no way to really know where that will take her in the future.  She has to negotiate the tension between what will keep her career going and what will feed her creative drive.  “I want to do I what I want to do,” Polisner says, her voice losing a touch of it’s characteristic edge, “but there’s a balance to that.”

It starts with the pain.

Like many of my friends, I can’t shake off Boston.  Though I’ve no real tie to the city, other than the shared human desire to see the moxie of the masses triumph over adversity, I still feel this sort of gut-clawing grief every time I think about the events that have transpired over the past week.

Like so many stories, it starts with pain.  It looks like here we yet again have a tale of a man turning to terrorism as a desperate last straw after his pain became unbearable.  He turned to religion as a salve for his wounds but the twisted darkness inside his soul only turned the scriptures into further torment, as he sought extremism as an answer to the emptiness he felt. 

What can we take from this?  Perhaps nothing.  All I can say is that perhaps there is another young soul out there aching right now, feeling his or her needs unmet by the surface nature of many people’s religious lives.  Perhaps there is another dark and twisted soul that needs unknotting, and for whatever reason is still balking under the hands of well-meaning mentors who teach at a distance.  Perhaps there is another soul lost to insomnia and loneliness, crying out by acting out instead of leaning in.

And what does our hatred do?

What are we doing?

I wish I could answer my own questions.

Oz: The Great and Powerful (and everything I hate about gender stereotypes in movies).

If you’ve heard me rant about strong women on TV, you know I have a huge (massive, epic even) ax to grind when it comes to how women are written for the screen.  I mean, really, do all women have to fawn over men who treat them badly?  Do women have to be good to get the guy?  And on, and on, and on. I’d heard that the new Oz movie wasn’t particularly good and not to expect too much from it.  That’s okay, we were really only going to the theater as a treat for the kids, I could lower my expectations accordingly.  I wasn’t prepared for how intensely bad the writing was.  For your edification, let me count the ways:

A kingdom full of intensely powerful witches really can’t handle crap for themselves.  They need a powerful, male, wizard to come straighten things out for them.
The protagonist is a shallow and selfish egomaniac who has never done anything good for anyone, even his best friend. Yet the audience is clearly expected to identify with and applaud this absolute nimrod.  Why?  Because of his roguish grin?  Because he’s attractive?  Because for three nanoseconds he shows signs of having a conscience?  I don’t understand why men in film get incredible license to be absolute jerkfaces that their mother would be embarrassed to call their own but audiences still cheer for them- but what do you call a woman who is that selfish and ignorant of the consequences of her actions?
All of the women fawn over this selfish brat.  Even the smartest woman in the film, Glinda the “good”, is completely reliant on him and ends up falling for him.  (Even though when she first meets him, she says she knows that he’s a selfish liar.)
Do we really need another movie whose romantic plot boils down to a selfish man who leaves a chain of broken hearts in his wake with no thought to consequences just needing someone good, pure, and innocent to believe in his better nature so that he ultimately becomes a better man?  What’s the moral there?  Your actions don’t have consequences because when the right one comes along you’ll be different?  And girls, it doesn’t matter how much of a rat a guy is, your love can change him?
It’s not like it’s a redemption story.  Oz becomes all powerful by using the same cheats and sleight of hand that he always did, but do we ever know that he does it for a different reason than what he always had?  Did he do it to be good, or to become more powerful?
There’s a dual story arc I find troubling.  Oz, the character, is selfish and self-serving and is ultimately rewarded with a kingdom.  The two evil sister-witches are selfish and self-serving, and are rewarded by being made ugly and exiled from society.  Whaaaaat?  It’s okay to be selfish, as long as you’re male.
Glinda’s power is being good, and she shoots rainbows and bubbles.  In the Oz universe this is logical.  But in the real world, how far does sweetness and innocence get a girl?  Maybe this is just me being jaded, but the fantasy can only be taken so far, and the trope of the sweet innocent girl’s love changing the jaded heart of the bad boy is so done.  Plus, her goodness wasn’t enough to protect her people  by itself.  She needed a man who cheated and tricked others in order to stay safe.  Wonderful.

Okay, okay, so it’s a fantasy movie.  And, to an extent, it had to be faithful to the fantasy it precedes.  Everyone knows that Oz is a trickster and Glinda is good and on and on.  Okay, so there’s that.  Did they have to make this movie?

But I can only be so bitter. It gave me something to get my blood boiling for an afternoon, and the heaving bosoms were glittery and abundant, so that’s always nice in a film.

le sigh.

Executive Potential

So the other day Sheryl Sandberg was on the Daily Show, and she said something that stuck with me.  She was talking about how when boys start telling other boys what to do on the playground they are applauded as “natural leaders”.  Girls, in the same situation, are told not to be bossy.  If you really want girls to be equal, the language used to describe them should be equal. Why can’t a girl who tries to organize and get people to cooperate with her simply be told she has executive potential?

This came up this morning as Princess was trying to get everyone up and around.  We’d told the kids we’d see a movie this afternoon if the morning went well.  ”Hold on,” Princess said, “I want to get the rules right.  We need to get dressed and eat breakfast and play nice, and then we get the movie, right?”

Right.

A few minutes later we heard Princess lecturing Fighter on why he needed to stop goofing off and get dressed and go downstairs for breakfast.  My husband and I shared a knowing glance and groan about Princess’s constant need to have things organized and running like a well-oiled machine, including her brother who always flies by the proverbial seat of his proverbial pants.  But when Princess came back downstairs my husband gave her a hug and said, “guess who has been exercising her executive potential?”

Princess looks at me.  ”What’s that mean?”

“Well,” I said, “one day do you think you’ll be running a company and making sure everyone follows the rules and gets their work done on time?”

“If they don’t I’ll ask them if they want a job,” Princess says with a grimace.

“The executive is the person who writes down the rules for everyone else,” I said.

“I’ll write down the rules for being good at the movie theater,” Princess said, and went off in search of a pen.

There’s this principal in psychology called perceptual framing.  The same set of circumstances can have completely different emotional outcomes depending on the way in which the events are framed.  If a person believes that something is good, they will likely experience a good emotional outcome from it even if another person, who believed it was bad, experienced a bad outcome.  This can be seen in people who have debilitating injuries, some people view it as an unexpected blessing and others as a curse.  What we choose to think of our everyday lives is really the wheel that steers our emotions, and not the other way around.  And, personally, I’d much rather be raising a daughter with executive potential than a bossy pants.  Choosing to frame her in that way, it’s clear how I can help her hone her gifts to the best possible reward instead of squelching them.  Then, I wonder how many other areas of my life I’ve killed good growth in because of how I chose to view challenges.

As my political science teacher says, “judgment can only come after testing, testing can only come after wondering, and wondering can only come from an honest observation of how life works.”

How often do we do things in the opposite order?  As Princess would say, first we need to understand the rules.