Category — Uncategorized

Has there ever been a line that has described me more? From the Washington Post: “Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain.” I mean, yeah, the gain is a few extra pages read or another episode watched, but is my life appreciably better because I consumed that media then vs. later? No. But I will still stay up too late tonight doing the exact same thing.

Did you know that it matters which side of your time zone you live on? “People on the eastern side of a time zone, where the sun sets earlier, tend to go to bed earlier than those on the western side.” I live right in the middle of my time zone, though it’s a little on the earlier side. I should be going to bed earlier than people in West Virginia. I’m not.

It’s such a funny idea to think about how where you fall in your time zone could affect your whole life. We thought about where our jobs were and how much house we could afford based on how we wanted to save and where our family was located, but we didn’t think about how we’d get more sleep if we lived in place X vs. place Y.

How much thought did you put into where you live?

I mentioned last month how Elie Wiesel is linked to my family because my great-grandmother and her siblings came from the same town. When he wrote about his neighbours in Night, he was writing (possibly) about my great-great-aunts and uncles. It makes me feel close to them when I read that book.

Longreads had a piece recently about a grandson proving that his grandfather was the inspiration (and his war stories reproduced) for the character John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The two men knew each other; were friends during the war, serving on the same base. He would go on a mission, come back to the base, and share the stories with Joseph Heller who turned them into the backbone of his famous novel. So people sort of knew his grandfather without knowing they knew his grandfather.

This isn’t special in the sense that authors base characters on real people all the time. In the same way that it’s hard (impossible?) to imagine a face you’ve never seen, it’s hard (impossible?) to create a fictional character that is not based on any living human. You borrow someone’s bravery and some else’s wit and you change the details in a fantastic story you once heard and use it as a plot point. Or you borrow from your own life. I cannot tell you how many actual moments from my life were fictionalized and added to my books.

Obviously the type of character matters: no one wants to find out their ancestor was the inspiration for Voldemort, but I would love to find myself in a book one day.

Would you want to find out you were fictionalized in someone’s book?

I was fascinated by an article written by a 14-year-old for why she’s not on social media. She finally got on Facebook and Twitter and realized that even though she hadn’t been on those sites before that point, she had an online presence because her mother and sister had posted about her. Moments that most people would find sweet and non-offensive — such as a letter to the tooth fairy — were upsetting to this girl precisely because it was her story and someone else told it.

She writes,

I had just turned 13, and I thought I was just beginning my public online life, when in fact there were hundreds of pictures and stories of me that, would live on the internet forever, whether I wanted it to be or not, and I didn’t have control over it. I was furious; I felt betrayed and lied to.

The girl acknowledges that no one did this to be cruel, and her family stopped the moment she asked them to stop. But it made her think long and hard about the stories she was intending to tell online and the unknown consequences of posting. Plus what her generation has lost:

For my generation, being anonymous is no longer an option. For many of us, the decisions about our online presence are made before we can even speak.

It made me think about a piece I recently read about Apple Martin, and how she approves every time her mother posts about her, no matter how innocuous the post. The article referred to an incident where Gwyneth Paltrow posted a picture of her where you can’t see her face, Apple called out her mother for posting without permission, and Gwyneth tried to justify it rather than apologize and admit wrongdoing.

It made me think about that end scene of The Breakfast Club where David Bowie is playing as Judd Nelson walks across the field. My generation is so strongly defined by that “Don’t You Forget About Me” mentality; not wanting to fade from someone else’s memory. I think we were drawn to the internet like moth to flame because it promised to thrust us in front of each other in 30-second spotlights. Whereas our kids never got a chance to think about how they felt about being remembered and forgotten by the people in their lives. They are remembered whether then like it or not.

What are your thoughts?

My fears are well-documented on this blog. Crickets. Mayonnaise. Airplanes. And airplanes. And airplanes. And like… life… in general. I’m scared of life. Let’s just sum it up with that because it’s probably the most accurate assessment of my world. I am just scared all the freakin’ time.

So… yeah… I’m in awe of people who aren’t scared. Not people who are scared of other things but happen to not be scared of the things that scare me. Those people don’t fill me with awe. It’s people like Alex Honnold who can spend 12 hours literally on the edge of death and walk away and have a beer. Because while he claims to be scared of things — and I’m sure he is in actuality — his actions all point towards someone who doesn’t move through the world as I do, seeing danger lurking behind every emaciated tree. I’m not sure he really knows fear even though he thinks he knows fear. Or maybe he does. I’m not in his brain.

*******

I’ve been trying the visualization technique from the article. I need to fly a few times per year, and it fills me with dread for weeks beforehand. I’ll wake up every morning thinking about it, and go to bed every night thinking about it.

I’m focusing on the most realistic and common fear that I have about flying: turbulence. I’m trying to convince myself that it is like hitting bumps in the road. I don’t freak out when the car bounces around, and I shouldn’t freak out when the plane hits air bumps. But unlike Honnold, I can’t find that inner calm where my rational mind plays big sister to my fear response. I am not a thrill seeker. I am a thrill avoider. Or… I am a thrill seeker only when we’re talking about reading horror novels. I like my thrills to come in book form.

But I am counting on this to be achievable in a smaller form:

“I definitely thought about how I process fear,” Honnold says. What he realized was that, in this case at least, he didn’t. He had been in similar situations so many times that it had become normal. There was nothing to process; there was only who he had become. “This is not scary,” he said to himself, “because this is what I do.”

That’s what I’ll repeat to myself the next time I am afraid but I’ve thought through the fear beforehand: “This is what I do.”

When I reject my own idea, it feels like such a moment of superiority. I delete a sentence from a story I’m writing, deciding it’s now garbage, and I self-congratulate for catching it and making the story better.

If an editor does the exact same thing, I want to curl up on the sofa and sob.

Actually, I curl up on the sofa and sob. It’s not just a “want.”

Adam Grant had a piece in the New York Times on rejection, and he pointed out why it feels horrible:

Apparently, this was adaptive in our evolutionary past. If rejection didn’t sting, you might have been perfectly comfortable leaving your tribe, which would not bode well for your survival. But it’s left us wired to overreact to everyday rejections. If you’ve ever given a presentation and felt crushed by the one scowling face in a room full of smiles, you know what I mean.

Isn’t that interesting? It’s there to keep us a little uncomfortable, a little scared. Because if we didn’t worry at all, we would leap forward, unafraid to try and be rejected because rejection wouldn’t have the same negative meaning.

I know I went into a profession — writing — that has a lot of rejection built into the experience. Perhaps more than the average job. I love to write, but I hate rejection. It makes for a cringe-filled existence.