Category — Uncategorized

Electric Lit had a great piece on hoax diaries. According to the article, “a hoax diary [is] a work of fiction that is passed off as an authentic journal. Not to be confused with a memoir, a true hoax diary is somewhat rare—and their outcomes and reception are not always predictable.” Meaning, memoirs are sometimes fictionalized and challenged (cough, James Frey), but hoax diaries are “found” (though really created) works in diary form, pretending to be real journals.

Why make one? Because “there is a thrill, too, for readers to believe we have access to a once-private document, to pry into someone’s psyche.” Memoirs are written to be read. Diaries are not.

Though it made me wonder if they still hold the same weight after the advent of blogs. When so many people write out their diary online, is it as thrilling to find one offline? And to that end, there have been plenty of fake blogs over the years, though it feels like it has been a long time since I’ve seen one. But there were a handful in the early years of the ALI blogosphere—fake infertility or loss blogs. And perhaps there are still but I’m out of the loop.

Your thoughts?

The twins accidentally dressed like twins one day, wearing the same t-shirt and shorts, and didn’t notice until late in the day when we commented that they were dressed identically. The same thing happened the next day, except the ChickieNob and I both got dressed without seeing the other one and ended up in Breton shirts and overalls. The third day in a row, it was the twins again in identical shirts and jeans. The rest of the week, everyone was really careful to peek outside the bedroom before going downstairs.

Anne Helen Petersen recently had a piece on mother-daughter dresses. It was my first time hearing the term “nap dress,” but I got the concept instantly. It’s a simple dress, and in this case, she’s highlighting the trend of producers to create two versions—a child-sized one and an adult-sized one.

She writes:

Historically, these mother-daughter dresses have exploded in popularity in times when culture, as a whole, was occupied with reasserting the strength of both the nation and the domestic sphere. Historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell traces the first instance of high fashion mother-daughter matching to 1908, but it wasn’t until the late 1930s, when the United States was just beginning emerge from the ravages of The Great Depression, that what Life called “the mother-and-daughter custom” became popular.

It’s kind of a weird idea, especially when it pops up in societies that simultaneously value and promote individuality. We’ve never been a dress-like-each-other home (even if, strangely enough, the ChickieNob and I both own Breton shirts and overalls), especially not the twins when they were little, though it has inadvertently happened to them sometimes after years of getting the same camp or event t-shirts. I also don’t remember ever matching with my mum, though I always wanted to match with my sister. (Which only happened with a t-shirt or two.)

Maybe I see the trend in another light due to infertility; that it feels in some ways the same as baby clothes—sections of box stores I still avoid. So I read the article feeling a little raw.

Kottke posted an image from Robin Dunbar’s book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. What struck me was the differentiation between close friend and best friend; namely, close friend was closer to you than best friend. Doesn’t “best” connote… well… best? As in the top?

Kottke quotes Dunbar (I need to read this book) in The Atlantic:

The innermost layer of 1.5 is [the most intimate]; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of five is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them.

So the 1.5 intimate means you can have a romantic partner and maybe one other just-as-intimately-close person. The shoulder-to-cry-on friends include your partner and maybe that one other intimate, and 3.5 to 5 others. The best friends are those 5 plus 10 more who are trustworthy enough to go on vacation with or—if you have children—leave your kids in their care.

And that includes family. Dunbar makes that clear when speaking about the Dunbar number: “That includes extended family as well as friends. In fact, people who come from large extended families have fewer friends because they give priority to family members.”

I think the whole exercise of looking at your social circle is fascinating.

The written side of Post Secret is an amazing project. People unburden themselves of secrets, and readers can sometimes silently nod, “me too.” But the flipside of the Post Secret is just as interesting—seeing what visual people paired with their secret.

A postcard garden starts on that side—show us a postcard from where you are; the message is almost optional. Or most seem to be a little snippet of life in that space. Each location is a flower in the garden. Weed-like messages are pruned and put on a compost heap.

I love this idea. I didn’t contribute the one from Maryland, though I smiled at all of the symbols on the postcard.

I’m on a Chincoteague listserv, and someone started a thread recently about being a kid and making friends with random other kids that are playing near you on the sand. The first person told a story about twins she befriended and the hermit crab they took care of together for the day. The twins took the hermit crab home, and they tearfully exchanged email addresses so they could keep in touch. And they did—for about one email exchange.

It sent me down a rabbit hole of finding beach “friends” on Facebook. I was successful with two, remembering their names because we exchanged years of letters back and forth (no email back then) that petered out by middle school. Though one lived about an hour away, and our parents allowed us to get together once. The other used to write me on stationary with bicycles, and his Facebook profile is all about biking.

I left both alone because I couldn’t imagine how to start that letter. “Hey, remember 30+ years ago on the beach how we built that sand castle?…” But it was nice to see that they still existed.