A.R. Williams's Blog, page 22

NaNo 2013

Technically, I should be finishing The Camellia Rebellion, now already 52,000 words into the first draft.  But that doesn’t follow the rules of NaNoWriMo.  It isn’t like anyone is keeping score or anything, but I feel honor-bound to abide by the rules if I’m going to play.

One of my favorite LM Montgomery books is The Blue Castle.  I don’t think it is even still in print at this point – at least I tried to look it up on Amazon and as we all know, if it ain’t on Amazon, it doesn’t exist.  It is a lovely little romance with heaps of humor and kindness and I read it at least once a year.  Except, in true LM Montgomery fashion, it is remarkably sexless.  Which doesn’t exactly seem fair.  Beloved Valancey must have gotten some somewhere, it’s only right.

So for NaNoWriMo, I’m rewriting it.  Kind of like Warm Bodies is really Romeo and Juliette.  It is, but it isn’t.  The goal is to reconnect with writing just because it’s fun and my fantasy life is an improvement over my real life.  Well, only in some ways.  My friends are WAY better than my fantasy life has ever been.  I couldn’t have imagined the lot of them if you’d given me a million years and a bunch of LSD.  They’re astounding and I’m incredibly lucky.  But other than that, my fantasy life is more fun than my real life.  Because you can deal with the sticky parts of life with a montage and a good song in the fantasy and in real life, you just have to slog through it.

That’s the plan in any case.  Let’s see what I get done tomorrow.  At the very least, I’m at least having loads of fun dreaming up a truly dreadful family of origin.

The Only Constant is Change

And things are changing.

I’m guilty of finding profound changes for humanity in the works just because I’m feeling the daily effects of an old system falling apart.  It isn’t that I think I should be exempt.  As previously noted, I’m really not special.  It’s that it’s all theoretical until it happens to you.  And then you see the ground eroding under everything.  I’d like to think that there’s a plateau, a new normal, something that we can all get used to and a framework we can learn how to be in.   But I’m not sure that’s coming.  If you look at the acceleration of revolution, compare how long it took for each of our previous revolutions to make their effects felt:  Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Social Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, and the Technical Revolution.  Hell, our technology is having a new revolution every couple of years now.

We can keep up with the basics of learning the technology, but keeping pace with the implications?  I’m not sure that we’ve caught up with the emotional impact of rampant individualism (as exhibited by anonymous lives in anonymous cities with no extended family to be seen) and that’s been a reality for a long time.

The Russell Brand thing; a recent quote from someone in the CDC that the age of antibiotics is now over (see the post on risk and how our avoidance of it has created even more risk); the Government shutdown and the ongoing battle over federal spending; unemployment and the people who aren’t on the unemployment rolls anymore because they’ve given up thinking that a job is going to save them; spending the morning with TED Talks as my soundtrack; all of this (and more) is contributing to an overwhelming certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same.

This is a terrifying prospect.  That doesn’t make it a bad thing.  I just wonder what we’re all going to do as more and more of us are faced with a reality that isn’t comprised of sunshine, glitter, and rainbows.  Not that it’s been sunshine and roses since …  well, probably since 2001.  We had Enron in 2001, which wasn’t the first time a big company has let everyone down by being full of greedy, amoral arseholes; but it certainly set the stage for more of the same.  And then we had 9/11.  Between the two (at least from a house in DC) those two threads have played out again and again in the 12 years since.  Shady accounting, corporate malfeasance, a blurring of the lines between corporate profit and politicians, and a barrage of enemies that we are trying desperately to neutralize at all costs.  And your average American following words of wisdom from our second President Bush… Do your patriotic duty: shop.

It can’t go on.  Nothing is ever going to be the same and I don’t know anyone with a strong sense of 1) what the new “normal” looks like or 2) how to bride the gap from here to there.  I kind of feel like I might as well wander into the unknown as hold on to whatever it used to be.  I’ll have to make the journey one way or the other and I’m not sure it’s going to be any easier a year or ten from now.

If only I had the first clue what next looks like, I think I’d feel a lot better about this whole thing.

Kachoozies

I am sick.  Not in the usual, slightly twisted and prone to making inappropriate jokes variety of sick, but in the mainlining lemon and honey in hot water kind of way.  This awful feeling in my throat hinted at its coming to stay as I crawled into bed.  By the time I woke up at 1:00 because I’d had so much water the day before, it had moved in like Aunt Marge and her brandy-drinking dog at Privet Drive.  (For you non-Harry Potter fans out there, the gist here is that my inflammatory guest refuses to be ignored.)  My glands are swollen, it hurts to swallow, and my head is throbbing.  Sneezing is agony.   It occurred to me that, were I gainfully employed in a full time, show up at the office kind of way, I would call in sick.  But the dogs still needed walking, and my office is in the next room…

With this auspicious beginning to a Monday, and spurred on by a friend who sent me this TechCrunch Article, I’m thinking about reinvention.  That thread is all tangled up with the recent Russell Brand brouhaha over global revolution and our good-for-enabling-billionaire-arseholes-but-not-much-else political class.  Mix in the snotty cloud that is interfering with my thinking and you come up with … not much.  An acute (if vague) sense that things can’t go on like this.  It isn’t exactly a utopia that I’m after, but that we’ve tried this grand experiment made up of:

Increasingly large distances between us and anything real
Rampant individualism which is just a nice way of saying profound isolation
Fear-mongering in the media because the fastest way to get someone to spend money is to introduce anxiety into the picture
Too much asking “how” instead of asking “why” or “is it sustainable”
Turning everything into a commodity and marginalizing anything that successfully resists
Divorcing work from meaning
Paying the people that add the least to society the most money and driving the people without whom our world would fall apart into near-poverty
Putting money ahead of just about every other value
Disposable everything
The systematic destruction of critical thinking skills because people who think are not so easily led
An education system built around compliance and memorizing instead of problem-solving and building capacity
The sale of our government to the highest bidder
Abdication of our duty to think through the second and third order effects

(I could go on) and the experiment has failed.  It’s failed miserably.  So maybe we need to come up with a new way of looking at things – something outside of the “isms” that insist there is one good answer and only one, which happens to be the one I’m espousing at any given minute.

Now I’m going to go sneeze some more.

 

Risk

No one likes it.  We like sure things – put x into the system and get y out of it.  Believe me, I’d like nothing more than a guaranteed outcome right now (and one better than the ultimate promise: death and taxes.)

It seems like there is a collective nostalgia for an era when risk wasn’t so much of an immediate presence.  You know, when men wore grey flannel suits and black fedoras and you started at one company and retired from it 30 years later with a pension and a house that was paid for.

Collectively, we’ve got a pretty wobbly sense of risk and how much of it we should have to manage.  Because it seems like we all kind of believe that we should do whatever it takes to get rid of our risks.  We call this risk mitigation strategies when we’re in business meetings and really, anything goes when it comes to getting rid of risk.  The government mitigates risk by pushing it off onto businesses.  Businesses mitigate risk by pushing it down to the individual level.  And us peons at the bottom of this list?  We aren’t big enough to say no, so we just optimistically believe in our ability to skip out on the whole risk thing because we’re that smart, or that lucky, or that good.

We aren’t.

Truth number one.  Risk has always been a factor, we just managed to mask it for a while.  And by “a while,” I mean maybe the ten years between 1954 and 1964.  Starting from our cave-dwelling ancestors, survival has always been a crap shoot.   One unexpected tree root and an ungraceful tumble was all that stood between the biggest, smartest warrior and death by saber toothed tiger.  As we became more agrarian, the risks shifted to locusts and drought.  As civilization has progressed, we’ve pushed progressively harder toward predictability and comfort.  It seems the greedier we get about predictability, the bigger the risks we’ve created.   The more we individually and collectively seek protection from all that could happen, the worse the things are that could happen.  We’ve gone from sticks and stones to IEDs and nukes.  From sweating it out in August to putting the whole damn planet into the microwave.

What if we all (government included) decided to accept that life is full of risks and just get on with it?  If everyone were willing to take on a proportionately-appropriate level of risk instead of trying to heap it on the entity with the least ability to deal with the worst case aftermath?  Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for everyone to manage?  I mean, it isn’t like there is any of us so pretty or so promised that we should be exempt from discomfort.

I’m Not Special

And yet…

I don’t want to do it anymore.  It isn’t working, or being productive that I have a problem with.  It’s the layer of BS that gets added to every professional transaction.  I know what I’m good at: I can take any kind of prose, make it comprehensible to a given audience, order it logically, impose plain language standards on it, and otherwise make it professional and compelling.  I can do this for reports to Congress, scientific findings, engineering reports, and novels.  I can provide coaching on writing issues for individuals and groups.  I have this nascent idea about working with individuals who have something that they want to work out of their system through creative writing, though I have no idea how one would actually make an income with that.

I can write anything, so long as I don’t have to be the SME.  I know social media, so long as we aren’t trying to BS anyone.  I don’t think BS is a sustainable marketing approach, therefore I’m not a proponent of it.  I can do internal communications, however I am convinced that there has to be an internal alignment between leadership behaviors, company values, and organizational culture.  You can’t have any one of these things opposing the other and expect for a message to drown out the dissonance.

Sign me up to do any of those things.  Don’t ask me to praise the emperor’s pants when he isn’t wearing any.  I think my intolerance for BS has finally become so acute that I am no longer fit for employment.  The truth is that I simply have run out of the will for it.  I should be terrified by the prospect of another round of unemployment, this time without the benefit of unemployment insurance.  That fear should make me appropriately compliant.  Yes sir, whatever you say sir…

I’m not afraid.  I’m also not so special that I should be exempt from working.  We all have to do things we don’t like to get through things like student loans and keeping our cars in gas and oil.  I know this.  It isn’t that I think I should be exempt for any particular reason.  I just don’t know why it should be so hard.  I just want to do what I’m good at and be left alone to get on with it…

Which I think comes out as an extended whinge.  It can’t be helped.  I am feeling deeply whingy.

The F-Word

By which I mean feminism…  why, which F-word did you think I was talking about?

Yeah.  Feminism isn’t something I think much about as a general rule, but there are a lot of disparate threads wafting out in the ether right now that are semi-sorta-feminist in nature in that they are all about the boundaries that women should (or shouldn’t) observe.

Let’s start by re-affirming the obvious.  Feminism isn’t mutually exclusive with adoring men.  I, for one, am completely enchanted with the xy of the species.  I love the way they walk, the way they smell, the way they are so unmistakably different from me.  I am a full-on, full-time man lover.  I also happen to think that I’m no one’s inferior simply because I have indoor plumbing.  And that, really, is the crux of what feminism is all about.  Of course, there are implications and those implications we are seeing played out rather publicly in the sphere of pop music.

Miley says that she took inspiration from Sinead O’Connor.  Sinead warns Miley about being exploited by her record label and tells her that her body should be for her and her boyfriend.  Miley makes fun of Sinead’s mental state.  Sinead calls her names.  And the whole world weighs in pro or con.  This is fundamentally a feminist question, with a number of reasonable answers.

So let’s start with Miley’s provocative VMA performance.  Any more shocking than Madonna kissing both Britney and Christina?  Probably not.  More risque than Madonna simulating masturbation in her concert?  In the annals of shocking behavior, Madonna’s name comes up repeatedly and I don’t think anyone would mistake Madonna as a woman who isn’t in charge of her image and her career.  Why should that same benefit of the doubt not be extended to Miley?

Miley’s body is ultimately hers to do what she will with.  Whether or not that is “tasteful” is a separate question.  It’s telling that Robin Thicke, a man who put out a video for his latest video full of topless women, tried to distance himself from Miley’s performance…  So the risque and provocative is okay when you’re the one paying for the models in question, but an artist under her own volition is to be given sole responsibility for a joint performance?  Somehow, I don’t think that bothers Miley too much because at the end of the day, she did what she wanted to do.  And let’s face it, she is getting rewarded for it.  As she herself said (paraphrased) “look, it is two weeks later and people are still talking about it.”  There is no other news story that hangs on in the media for that long.  Not chemical weapons being used against children in Syria, that’s for damn sure.  So who is really to blame here?  Miley the exhibitionist, or a nation of voyeurs?   And if we are so damn determined to watch, why shouldn’t she shake her groove thing any way she wants?

Which is to say that Miley is of age and like every other adult I know, will have to take the consequences of whatever she chooses to do – be it getting out there and dancing or retreating to mourn the death of her relationship (as I think the tut-tutting hoards would find more comfortable).  Either way, at the end of the night, Miley is the only one who has to live with what she does.  The rest of us can turn off the TV.

What I think Sinead fails to realize is that exercising one’s autonomy over one’s body and how it is monetized is 100% the purview of feminism.  She chose to do it in the 1990′s by shaving her head and wearing a turtleneck.  In the 2010′s, Miley is doing it by riding a wrecking ball in the nude with no more on display than you’d get from side-boob on the red carpet.  From either side of that divide, they are both observing their feminist-won right to do whatever seems best to them at the time.

The question of whether or not all of this sexualization is good for our daughters and sons is a completely different question.  But by G-d, feminism fought for the right for the woman inhabiting the female body to have absolute dominion over it.  This is what it looks like.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have 16-year-old pop prodigy Lorde.   She is in the news this week for a number of things, including saying that she didn’t want to put herself out there with the cool, unattainable perfection that Taylor Swift projects and saying that she didn’t want to write songs about being on call for a guy like Selena Gomez.   First, if no one else thanks her for being intentional about wanting to remain as authentic as possible to the flawed person that she most certainly is  (because let’s face it, our external image be damned, being flawed is universal), let me be the first.  Thank you Lorde, for being thoughtful and as smart as only a 16 year old can be. There’s too much Keeping up with the Kardashians and not enough clear-eyed, occasionally sullen, always outspoken critics of that version of reality.  Our cultural landscape needs you desperately.  (For the record,  I was that smart when I was your age and then I grew up and started making mistakes my 16 year old self would never have made.  It happens to us all. )

And here in lies the point.  We have allowed the boundaries for our young women to narrow.  They must be smart, but not too smart.  They must have toned bodies and display them, but not too much.  They must be sexually adventurous, but not with too many people (a target that is forever moving).  They must have something to say, but that something should involve how they are subservient to their need for love.  They must be strong, but not so strong that they threaten their man.  They must keep quiet about anything unlovely or uncomfortable.

How are any of us supposed to navigate this landscape where we are forever told that we are not enough in one respect and too much in some other?

And why must we deny feminism, who’s only contribution here should be to defend the right of all of these young women to be exactly what they are: In your face with her pastiche of sexuality, Ms. Miley.  Coolly perfect and forever writing songs about dumb ex-boyfriends and how they did her wrong (and not much else) Taylor Swift.  Selena Gomez dancing her butt off to “your boyfriend’s a douche-bag” in one week and singing about being at his beck and call in the next.  (Don’t get me started on the stupid, stupid nature of using douche bag as a pejorative.)  Sinead with her shaved head and chest tattoo and Vegas wedding and mental health issues and relentless determination to be herself, whatever that means from day to day.  Outspoken, smart Lorde who, at 16, is already delivering amazing music.  And more…  Pink, who invariably kicks ass.  Jill Scott, who goes her own way and does her own thing and is all the more beautiful for it.  Lissie who isn’t boxed into the pop-star mold.  Algebra Blessett, who more people should have heard of because she’s awesome.   Britney who wants to find some balance between being a mom and a sex symbol.  Emile Sande, who genuinely seems like a nice, grounded person and seems driven to put a little more love into the world.  Tori, G-d bless her, who wrote about her rape and then built RAINN, a charity for survivors of rape, abuse, and incest – a force for good in the world that is so much more than a vanity project.  Adele, who carries herself with dignity and grace and is phenomenally beautiful without having caved to the standards of beauty for an entertainer.

There are so many more to name and consider  - none of them cookie cutter stepford-types.  They are women.  They have the incontrovertible right to be who they are and get some things right and other things wrong and to learn and (hopefully) laugh along the way.

Feminism denies the boundaries set up to confine our person-hood to what is comfortable for the powers-that-be.  So why are we, the direct beneficiaries of this gift, be so damned determined to set the up around each other?

(If you need to find your inner feminist, go watch Caitlan Moran.  She’s genius.)

Harumph

Can I just say for the record that I wrote it first?

There is this, just posted yesterday…  ”What if superpowers were a STD… and fatal?“

And this, written and re-written, starting in 2009 and published in 2013…

Oh well…  My fan club gets tattoos.  So there.

 

Anything But…

Welcome to the government shut down and day two of burning through my vacation as a mandatory measure.   On one hand, I’m totally digging going for DAYS without speaking to my boss.  I mean, really.  This is the definition of bliss.  I’m also resolved that I will use this time to blow through the 40,000 words standing between me and a completed first draft of The Camellias book two.

On the other hand, I’ve made it to a routine doctors appointment, gotten my prescriptions picked up, and gotten re-suckered into watching back episodes of Ink Master.  Vortex of TV doom: 1.  Progress on book: 0.

I mean, I did re-read what I’ve got thus far and there are chunks of goodness there.  There are just a lot of gaps between the good stuff…  So.  I am resolved that I am not going to let another day go by before I add on to what I’ve got…  Just as soon as I get done catching up on the blogs I follow and take care of the very necessary task of telling everyone about my procrastination.

I’m such a dope.

Almost 40

I was out with a friend yesterday afternoon and the whole notion of aging came up.  Not exactly sure how, but out came “well, you’re almost 40.”  Technically speaking, I’m 35 which already feels surreal.  Like seriously, when did that happen?  I still sit on chairs cross-legged because my feet don’t always reach the floor.  So I’m closer to 40 than I’ve ever been, but five years seems like a long time to put off that particular milestone.  Particularly since I still get accused of being 10 years younger.

There’s something that you’re supposed to feel about aging.

(Wait, I remember why the aging thing came up.  We were talking about old Bond movies and Sean Connory’s Bond.  Frankly Sean wasn’t as handsome as a younger man as he was by the time Hunt for Red October came around.  Which got us into a conversation about how men become more themselves as they get older but women seem to lose their value in the marketplace.  Which led to a discussion of gravity as it pertains to the girls and me being ‘almost 40.’)

Like there is supposed to be some kind of dread there, and G-d help you if you don’t find someone to love you for the real you by the time you get to a certain age because no one is going to want to look past your seriously falling tatas to find out that you’re funny and compassionate and make a killer banana bread.  Or whatever it is that you’re good at.

At the time, I pointed out that I have no intention of jacking up my face as is the current trend (we all saw those pictures of Meg Ryan, right?  Who ever did that to her ought to be prosecuted…)  However, if the girls descend to my waist, I’m getting that lifted, tucked, rearranged, hoisted, whatever has to happen.  I’m not going down without a fight.  And my friend observed “so you’re going to be a hot old lady, then…”

And I didn’t say this out loud, but I thought about it.  I’m resolutely determined to be nothing more or less than the same me I’ve always been.  There’s this thread of continuity from the 4 year old that refused to go back to ballet class because the teacher had been unfair to the 35-year-old who chafes at the stupidity of banning jeans from the workplace as if what my butt is clad in has anything to do with my ability to be productive.  It’s all the same person, and I can’t imagine not being that person in the future, my gravity-bound breasts be damned.  I mean, look at Jack Nicholson.  He’s in his eighties and is living under the inescapable tyranny of aging, but I’m pretty sure he still spends plenty of time ogling attractive women.  So maybe what he *does* about it is limited by reality, but I can’t imagine that there is any profound change in who he is just because his body doesn’t obey his desires in the same way it used to.

So to whatever extent possible, I’m going to ignore the question of age and satisfy myself with an ongoing determination to carry on in a body that has given outward expression to the cocktail of electricity and chemistry that comprises what I think of as myself.

And when that doesn’t work, I’ll remind myself that time fucks everyone (if I’m allowed to quote myself).  If Audrey and Elizabeth and Lauren and Josephine and Katherine and Sophia all followed the same basic trajectory, surely the same path is destined for Scarlett and Jennifer and Amanda and Angelina and Anne.  It’s easy to get worked up about the unfairness of aging until you realize that all of those people that are held up as the paragons of beauty can’t run fast enough to get away from time either.

Now I really am going to quote myself…

The old woman coughed on that last word, which started up a series of hacks that shook her body and bent her over double. Through it all, she kept her left hand extended, the cigarette safely away from the furniture and scattered papers. When she was done, she placed the cigarette back to her mouth and inhaled again. Another cloud of blue smoke, and she went on. “What do you need?”

“I’m headed to Bethesda to save my friends.”

Briefly, Morrigan looked surprised, then closed her eyes and sighed. “I’m a little old for futile acts of derring-do.”

“I wasn’t expecting a partner,” Ian amended.

Morrigan opened one eye and looked down her nose at Ian. “Thirty years ago, doll…” she let the thought trail away. “Don’t worry, time will fuck you too. Just wait.”

– from The Camellia Resistance

Someone Smarter Than Me Said It

A long time ago, I posted (perhaps not quite so brilliantly) about the secret existence of two levels of welfare – the welfare state for people who go to college and the welfare state for those who didn’t.

This week, a very smart anthropologist wrote a piece about bullshit jobs.  I particularly like the part where he says:

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

I kind of want to jump up and down like Donkey in Shrek, saying “pick me, pick me!” because I talked about it seven years ago.  But really what that’s about is wanting to be smart enough so that I can have a job that isn’t BS.