Sunday, April 23, 2006

Don't blame the blog

Something about Sarah Hepola's announcement this past week on Slate that she was shutting down her blog so as to become a better writer rubbed me the wrong way. Ms. Hepola, a freelance writer with aspirations of becoming a novelist, explains her fateful decision thusly:

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction -- all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

To which I say, "Huh?" Maybe if you see all creative output as some kind of zero-sum game this idea might hold water, but it's been my experience that writing begets more writing. In fact, it was during my most bloggingest of times that my creative output soared -- just the opposite of what you might expect if you follow Ms. Hepola's logic. Now that my blogging activity has simmered down considerably, is it any surprise that my fictional writing has tapered off as well?

I know that Ms. Hepola is a professional writer, so I won't presume to tell her how to succeed at her craft. But having actually gone from start to finish on the first draft of a novel, I do offer this tiny bit of advice: writing a novel sucks. It sucks so bad that you can and will find any excuse not to do it, regardless of how much you pride yourself as a wordsmith. Up until this point it was your blog; next month it will be the season finales of Lost and The O.C.; then summer's ephemeral allures will seduce you into putting the whole effort off until after Labor Day, at which point the procession of Fall holidays will sucker-punch you into making "Start the novel" your New Year's Resolution for 2007.

It's not the blog. It's not even you, in all likelihood. Writing a novel sucks. It seems like a fabulous idea in theory, like learning Ancient Greek or climbing a mountain, but not only is the initial resistance almost impossible to overcome, you're likely not going to start even remotely enjoying yourself until you're contemplating the whole blasted endeavor in retrospect.

Yes, there will be the occasional so-many-thousandth-word milestone or a bit of well-turned purple prose that will briefly lull you into thinking that it was all worth it, but those moments are few and far between. Just as in hiking you spend the majority of your time below the treeline, one muddy aching plod after another, and when mastering a new language you rarely feel master of anything but endlessly adrift on a sea of your own incompetence, banging out that novel is a monumental heap of unpleasantness which fools like you and I mistake for a noble cause.

Now all of that being said, I still think you should write that novel. But don't be surprised if killing your blog doesn't turn out to be the magic bullet that you think it is (and if it does, mazel tov and sei gesund!). Every writer is unique, but my experience and that of countless others with whom I've spoken suggest that chances are the first draft of your first novel will compromise some of the least enjoyable writing you've ever done in your life. Clearly you have taken great pleasure in blogging -- consider keeping that facet of your creativity alive and well, if nothing else then as a means of remembering why it is you love stringing words one after another in sentences and paragraphs so much that you do such an awful thing as commit yourself to bringing an entire book into this world.

And good luck!

Making the call

"Daddy, my tummy hurts."

It is Saturday morning, a little after nine o'clock, and we are hurtling southwards on I-95 when my daughter makes this announcement from the back seat of our car. As any parent of a toddler well knows, the tummyache is hardly cause for serious concern ninety-nine times out of hundred, but I am unsettled nonetheless. Yesterday, when picking up Andriana from daycare, I couldn't help but overhear one of the teachers telling a parent that one of the two-year-olds went home with a virus earlier in the afternoon; compound that with a seemingly innocuous if somewhat embarassing gagging episode in a local Portuguese eatery in the evening and the fact that our little one felt a little warm when we put her to bed, and all of a sudden I'm feeling slightly more worried than normal by Andriana's complaint.

We are just an hour into a long-distance drive from our home on Cape Ann to my mother's house in New Jersey, where we plan to celebrate our daughter's third birthday with my brother and his not-quite-yet fiancee before heading across the Delaware to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for Orthodox Easter festivities with some of my wife's rowdier relatives. Greek Easter is a big thing compared to its American counterpart -- like Easter, Christmas, and New Year's rolled together, with a little bit of Fourth of July barbeque in the form of a lamb (or sometimes a goat) on a spit and more Mediterranean culinary delights than you can shake a stick at.

My wife's relatives in the Lehigh Valley are infamous for their Easter festivities, which have in past included Slurpee-sized vodka tonics at dawn and generous helpings of lamb tripe soup and boiled dandelion greens slathered with olive oil and squeezes of lemon. As friends and family rove from household to household, much lamb is consumed, suspicious homebrewed alcohol is quaffed out of plastic gas cans, and grown men dance with basil plants. It's a good time, and we're excited to be able to join in the fun after missing it last year, when burned out from our recent move from Peabody we opted to stay in New England. Moreoever, it will be the first Greek Easter my mom will be in attendance, her curiosity about how the in-laws celebrate this holiday finally having gotten the best of her after all of these years. So when my daughter was clutching her stomach earlier in the morning and wincing, I chalked her aches and pains up to bolting her breakfast (as she is wont to do) and overexcitement at the prospect of seeing her grandmother on Saturday and half of Greece the following morning.

But now I'm not so sure.

"My tummy hurts, Daddy!"

This is not Andriana's customary tone of voice when complaining about her minor discomforts. I instinctively slow down and crane my neck around to check on my daughter -- a completely pointless and unsafe thing to do, as my wife is already sitting in the back seat -- when she begins to retch. Fortunately Maria is quick to produce a Dunkin' Donuts bag to prevent Andriana from either throwing up all over herself or the floor of the car, and I take the nearest exit off the highway so that we can at least deal with the situation while not moving at seventy miles per hour. We pull over onto a dirt parking lot in front of a landscaping company and attend to our daughter, who is now crying.

"Shit."

I feel her forehead -- she's burning up. Why didn't we take her temperature before leaving the house? Now I'm angry with myself for letting my enthusiasm for our road trip get in the way of taking Andriana's symptoms more seriously.

"Shit!"

What now? Our thermometers are back at the house, and suddenly the six to seven hours of driving ahead of us feel more like sixty or seventy. Driving across state lines with a healthy child can be an epic journey in and of itself; the prospect of pressing on with Andriana feverish and absolutely miserable is not a pleasant one. Still, the momentum of already being on our way is seductive. Putting off a day's activity on account of sickness is one thing, whereas turning around and heading home when you're packed and sixty-odd miles down the road is quite another. But I look at my daughter and her expression is glassy. She's clearly not going to make it to Rhode Island, much less New Jersey.

"Shit. We have to turn around."

My wife, to my surprise, does not fight me on this. I know how much Easter means to her, and I also know that she can count the amount of times she's celebrated the holiday without her parents on her thumbs. But she's worried about Andriana, too. Neither of us wants to drag our poor daughter back and forth over three days of driving, no matter how much it'll disappoint both the grandmothers and the rest of the family.

As if on cue, my mother-in-law calls on Maria's cell phone. She relays the bad news as I make a u-turn on the local road and get back on to I-95, only this time heading back northbound in the direction of home. I feel strangely leaden as I merge into oncoming traffic, the fact that we are doubling back weighing me down as much as my concern for Andriana. What if it's a false alarm, I think, and we decide that she's well enough to travel after all? Every mile traversed seems like a taunt, as I prepare myself for the fact that we may very well be covering the same stretch of road some three times before this day is out.

Maria calls the pediatrician's office, and while we wait for them to get back to us I call my mother to give her the heads-up. She suspects the worst even before I tell her anything, and already being an emotional individual to begin with is in tears by the time I do so. I do feel bad for her -- not only was she looking forward to celebrating a late birthday for Andriana (with a cake and all, no less), but she really did want to join the Greeks for Easter.

In a way I'm gratified by this, as my family has been rather hesitant to attend any functions on my wife's side. Even though Maria and I have both made it abundantly clear that the Greek sense of immediate family being much broader than the nuclear ideal of American suburbia, my folks would have been more than welcome at the numerous weddings, baptisms, and holiday parties which have been thrown over the years, they've always managed to find an excuse not to go until this Easter. Of course, this makes it all the more difficult to inform my mother that we will not in fact be coming down as planned.

Andriana, although sick, is also upset when she realizes what's going on. "I don't want to go home," she cries. "I want to go to Babci's house!" (Babci is the Polish word for grandmother)

This is the point at which being a parent absolutely sucks. While turning around is clearly the right thing to do, it will make no one happy. Fortunately -- or is it mercifully? -- my daughter succeeds in crying herself to sleep, so that the heartbreak is not too much to bear. We take advantage of the fact that she's out cold to duck into the nearest pharmacy and buy some Pedialyte and an instant-read thermometer. Her temperature comes up at over 103 degrees. We relay this fact to the pediatrician's office, who tell us to keep Andriana hydrated and not to give her any children's Tylenol on an empty stomach.

"Shit."

The last few miles seem to go on forever, and as we turn onto our street I reflect on how perfectly miserable this weekend has turned out to be. The funny thing is that less than twenty-four hours ago Maria and I were thinking the exact opposite was true -- having skipped out of work an hour early, we had managed to go and get the oil changed on the car without even having to wait in line, a remarkable bit of good fortune which should have had us on high alert for the correction in Karma which would inevitably ensue. Now not only would we not be able to enjoy the Easter holiday with our loved ones, but suddenly an empty long weekend loomed before us.

While there's nothing like an unexpected free evening (or even a whole day every now and then) materialize out of the blue, the reality of having a weekend of planning fall through on you is always a bit of a shock; and the fact that we were going to be nursing a potentially very sick three-year-old through it wasn't exactly helping the situation. Already as I pulled the car up in front of the house, I began to second-guess our decision. Were we too rash? After all, it was only a fever -- couldn't we have kept on driving and hope it broke in time for Easter, rather than jettisoning the whole thing right there and then. What if she was fine by midafternoon?

But then again, what if she wasn't? What if on the way down she became worse? It was relatively easy, if somewhat a pain in the ass, to turn around halfway through Massachusetts -- what if she became violently ill in the middle of Connecticut, or worse, what if she had to be taken to the hospital while we were down in New Jersey? Andriana's special medical considerations always made me leery of entrusting her health to anyone but the pediatricians and specialists who've known her since birth, though I suppose this is probably true of any parents and their children. Who wants to deal with foreign hospitals and strange doctors when your child is suffering?

In the end, being a parent means you have to make the call and live with the result. False alarm? Well, then you're going to feel like a total moron for a few months. Press on and make your child even worse? Well, you know that that isn't going to feel too great, either. The reality of the situation, however, is that most of the time you're just not going to know one way or the other whether you did the right thing or not. If the fever breaks on Sunday morning, is that due to the fact that you went straight home and put your daughter to bed, or would the fever have gone away in less than twenty-four hours no matter what you did; same thing if she got worse -- was it because you didn't let her rest, or was the bug simply that strong?

As it turned out, Andriana woke up on Sunday morning with a normal temperature and a hearty appetite. I'd like to think it was a direct result of our careful ministrations and a good deal of bed rest, but that's probably so much ex post facto rationalization on my part. All I know is that my baby was not well and I had to make a decision right there on the spot. Was it the right one? Maybe. Am I happy with making the call the way I did? Not really. But would I make the same decision over again, if given the chance? Without a doubt. We may have missed out on the whole roasted lamb, the 32-ounce vodka tonics, and seeing the extended family, but there will always be other opportunies to eat, drink, and be merry. In the meantime my wife and I would eat lamb chops on the broiler, split a bottle of retsina, and celebrate the holiday reveling in the simple joy of seeing our sick daughter become well again.

Happy Easter.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

South Beach update

Well, after eight months on the South Beach Diet I've managed to lose just about eighty pounds -- about ten pounds a month, or 2-3 pounds per week! My ultimate goal is to lose a hundred pounds, so I'm fully 80% of the way there now. The funny thing is that it really doesn't feel like I'm dieting anymore, as since I've learned simply to leave things like pasta, rice, and white breads out of picture I'm more or less cooking and eating as I always have, just minus the extraneous starches.

It helps immensely that there are now myriad whole wheat/lo carb breads out there that actually taste like bread: if you're living in the New England area, I recommend the whole wheat pita and tortillas from Joseph's Middle East Bakery, both of which I've served to guests who've found them just as delicious -- if not more so -- than their white flour counterparts. However, the best way to make a diet like South Beach work is not by running out and purchasing "lo carb" replacement foods but by reconsidering from scratch what you eat every day and why.

Consider the bacon cheeseburger, for instance. While I miss eating it and other similar sorts of sandwiches in theory (although less and less so as time goes by, to be perfectly honest), I've reached a point in my dieting that I can have one every now and then without derailing my progress. Are they as good as I remember them being? Hell, yes. But would I want to go back to eating such fare every day? Not a chance.

Except on Good Friday, that is!

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The (second) most wonderful time of the year

As the Easter season descends on us in a orgiastic tide of tree pollen, Cadbury Eggs, and Marshmallow Peeps, I encourage all of you to get out there and strike a blow for religious freedom and Eat A Bacon Cheeseburger on Good Friday. While I have nothing against organized religion per se, in this era of easily-offended spiritual beliefs I think we may have lost sight of the fact that what makes Western Civilization worth fighting for is its slow but hopefully inexorable and irreversible progress towards a society that just doesn't really give a shit about who this God fellow really is and what he/she/it wants from us.

By Eating A Bacon Cheeseburger on Good Friday, we signal our commitment to religious plurality and tolerance. Catholics and Orthodox Christians traditionally prohibit the consumption of meat during Lent, while Judaism is not cool with either mixing meat and dairy or the consumption of pork under any circumstance (something it actually agrees on with Islam -- don't tell anyone, though!), the Hindus do not eat beef, and the Buddhists eschew the taking of animal life in general. This makes the bacon cheeseburger the ideal vehicle for simultaneously violating the dietary restrictions of every major faith on the planet.

Mind you, I'm not telling you to go out and eat a bacon cheeseburger every day -- or even every month, for that matter. Bacon cheeseburgers aren't exactly the healthiest things in the world, and by now we all probably know enough about modern-day American agribusiness to pause before putting any combination of cow and pig into our mouths for fear of causing ourselves and our environment serious harm. But I ask you nevertheless to put aside such considerations for at least one day and do what needs to be done. In this world of polarized belief and white-hot zealotry that causes people to blow one another up for their choice of imaginary heavenly benefactor, Eat A Bacon Cheeseburger on Good Friday and by doing so show your fellow man that while religion is just ducky (when it's not killing anyone, that is), there are more important things in this world and the next.

Like bacon cheeseburgers.

(Now if you're just a devoted theomachist and have no time for this religion thing whatsoever, the War On Easter might be more your cup of tea, though I suspect it's only a matter of time before these guys get their asses kicked. Until then, though, it promises to be a wild and wooly ride!)

What is that? That freaky thing?

That's right, it's a Google banner ad!

(Pardon the Kim Possible reference -- it's a favorite show of both Mrs. and Not-So-Baby-Anymore Exile)

Well, I've gone and done it: I've decided to sign up with Google AdSense and rent out my bit o' the blogosphere out to a thematically-appropriate advertiser. I figure that if I can deal with looking at ads in my Gmail account, then why not allow them on the blog as well? Back in the day Blogspot made you carry ads gratis (to the blogger, that is), so potentially getting paid for the favor is definitely an improvement! That and Google Ads have a tendency to be somewhat entertaining, as you see what the keyword algorithms try to suss out what the average reader of The Jersey Exile might want to spend his or her hard-earned money on.

And good luck with that...

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Comic Reviews

The Winter Men (#4 of 8)

If you haven't had the good fortune yet of stumbling across The Winter Men, by DC/Wildstorm, then you're missing out on the best damned comic out there right now. Chronicling the exploits of an ex-Soviet superhero trying to make his way through modern day Russia while his past inevitably returns to haunt him, The Winter Men is equal parts mystery and dark humor, with top-notch writing (Brett Lewis' characters speak a Slavonized English that is alternately broken and erudite, worthy of a play by Chekhov) and artwork by John Paul Leon that is worth the 2-3 month wait in between issues. After carefully unrolling a densely-woven plot that reaches from Moscow to New York to the war in Chechnya over the first three issues, the miniseries takes a breather of sorts and follows a day in the life of its protagonist Kris as he makes his police rounds and attempts to sort out the larger forces at work. I won't spoil the best part of the book, except to say that it involves a dining table at a Moscow McDonald's...

Mad rhymez, yo

Just discovered RhyzmeZone, a great online rhyming dictionary.

Words that rhyme with "librarian":

agrarian, barbarian, bavarian, bilzerian, bulgarian, contrarian, hungarian, kasparian, kazarian, magarian, markarian, najarian, nazarian, ovarian, planarian, sectarian, skenderian, wagnerian, zakarian

"Bilzerian"?

Opening Day

How is it that only two years after winning the World Series, the Boston Red Sox feel cursed all over again as if the 2004 season never happened? While you meditate upon this holy mystery of Boston sports faith, here's the opening paragraph to my short story "Bambino," written in the Spring of 2003. I've decided to make it an Opening Day tradition to post a link to it here at The Jersey Exile. Enjoy!

Seventh son of a seventh son, Flynn had been a hot dog vendor at Fenway Park since he first could lift the big metal steamer and strap it over his shoulders. His father had sold franks at the beloved Boston ballpark until he was an old man and permanently stooped; so, too, did his father's father, when they were still called frankfurters and the Red Sox were still winning the World Series. Grandpa Flynnie may have been a seventh son himself, if he'd known how many brothers he actually had, but Mother never mentioned the ones that died early, either here in the States or back in Ireland. Selling hot dogs wasn't just something Flynn did for some summer cash - it was his birthright, and he accepted the family vocation with the same seriousness that a scion of a prominent Brahmin on Beacon Hill would reserve for his decision to go to Harvard, like all of his other distinguished ancestors.

(Click here for the whole story!)

Monday, April 10, 2006

Have d20, will travel


You gotta start 'em young...

Or maybe just "fever"

Definitely feeling the funk today. I've been battling a head cold for the better part of a week, which now seems to have transmogrified itself into an all-over malady. Add that to an unexpected solo stint on the desk (work-study has a paper due) and a bevy of book paging requests from the Stacks -- every hour, on the hour thus far this morning -- and I'm going to be toast by the time any relief gets here at 2.

Yug.

I guess the only silver lining to my predicament is that since through want of any morning desk coverage I'm obliged to work through lunch, I can leave an hour early with a clear conscience. Although I was supposed to do an Information Session for prospective library school students this evening, I'll be lucky if I just get through the work-day, and the last thing my alma mater needs is a semicoherent lunatic trying to sing its praises while popping Sudafed and trying not to fall on his ass.

Did I say "yug"? Because I mean it.

(Oh yay, almost time for the next book page...)

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Saturday night blogging fever

What -- you thought I was kidding when I said I'd post more often? O, ye of little faith!

My job search continues. This afternoon I got a rejection postcard in the mail from a library to which I had sent my cover letter and resume, but truth be told I was somewhat pleased by this turn of events, as the college in question is over an hour and a half away from our Cape Ann digs and would have presented a logistical nightmare just to get out there for an interview.

Of course, I've already travelled a lot farther for a job prospect. This Jersey Exile was actually briefly contemplating invalidating his exile status and pursuing a library position down in the Garden State, going so far as to interview with the institution in question before deciding that there must be a pretty darned good reason why there is a whole genre of literature and film which has grown up around the simple truth that you can never really go home.

(That and the prospect of leaving Widener Library and its millions upon millions of books left me chilled to the marrow!)

But the interview process was good nonetheless, as it forced me to answer what had only been a theoretical question up until this point: am I willing to leave New England, if the price/job/opportunity were right? The answer is no, at least for the time being. I love New England. I love working for Harvard, living on the North Shore, and driving up to Maine for lobster sandwiches at Bob's Clam Hut or hot dogs at Flo's when the spirit moves me. And as much as they try one's patience, I even still love the Red Sox. The Boston area has a certain energy about it that I've never encountered anywhere else, an intellectual dynamism that turns grown men and women into perpetual grad students and keeps people like myself and my lovely wife working in higher education when we could be making hand-over-fist more money in the private sector.

Like it or not, this place got under my skin when I came up here some seventeen-odd years ago, and I don't think I'd ever feel quite as home anywhere else. I had always suspected as much, but it wasn't until I was faced with the actual prospect of leaving that I realized how deep-seated my affinity for my adopted home was. Maybe in another 17 years I'll want to run screaming from here, but for now I'm more than content to wait for the right job to come along that won't force me to uproot myself from this life that I've built for myself. My current gig as Reading Room Supervisor may not be a professional one, but it's a great place to be while I contemplate the next move. There's nothing worse than being Necessity's chew-toy, and for the first time in my adult life I feel that I actually do have the luxury of biding my time until I find a librarian position worth jumping ship for.

And that's a pretty damned good feeling.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Excuses, excuses

1. I was too busy to post.

2. Jeff Jarvis has taken all the cool out of blogging.

3. Last post was #1000 and I wanted to hold on to the moment for as long as possible.

Take your pick-- feel free to choose more than one excuse, or create your own...

Jason Clarke (of Biggerboat) and I have been neck and neck for Most Time Elapsed Between Blog Posts Without Dying for quite some time now, but since he went and broke radio silence last week I felt that I no longer had to keep up my Cal Ripken-like streak of postlessness.

So let's catch up, shall we?

"Confessions" is finished. Weird thing: I completed the first draft on the third anniversary of my having begun it on March 3rd, 2003! The final word count was 153,000, which comes out to almost 500 double-spaced pages in 12-pt font. How awesome is that? And although I know that everyone says not to let people read your novel until at least the second draft, I just couldn't help myself. I've allowed three people whose artistic opinion I value more than anyone else's on the planet to give the manusript a thorough going-through, and thus far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.

I still can't believe I wrote an entire goddamned novel! Even just a few years ago I would have laughed at the very thought that I'd be capable of finishing so much as a short story...

In other news, as recounted at the Library Ass, I finished my Master's degree in Library Science in December (another start-to-finish I never thought I'd pull off!) and am only three classes and a thesis away from my MA in History as well. And our daughter Andriana turns three in just a little under two weeks. Crazy. One moment she's a little peanut who can't so much as roll over without your help, and the next she's riding her tricycle down the sidewalk all by herself and muscling me off the computer to play games on the Sesame Street website.



I promise to post again before two more months go by. No, really!