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I recently said something in a Twitter chat that didn’t seem radical but got a big response. I admitted that blogging sometimes affects my mood.  Like in a bad way.

Sometimes it also affects my mood in a good way — actually, more often than not, I would say blogging is a positive force in my life. But there are also times when I find it difficult not to carry feelings from blogging into the rest of my day.  On certain days, it affects my productivity because my mind is elsewhere, such as on a negative comment or lack of engagement.

I was surprised that people were surprised that I said it mostly because I THINK WE ALL SAY IT.  Okay, maybe not directly, but what about all of the posts out there where people have written about feeling hurt by a comment or a lack of readership or having their words misunderstood?

Of course it hurts!  Of course it would affect your mood.  Blogging is just a form of communication.  What if other forms of communication operated in the same way as blogging?

What if you were telling someone about how you felt watching the news and they looked you in the eye and responded, “You are such a stupid, fucking idiot.  I hope you rot in hell.”

Or

You were standing in a group, explaining how scared you were to try something new, and all the people silently stared at you for a bit and then walked away with no response.

Or

You were talking about how much you loved your child’s teacher but you really wish she’d include instructions with the homework so you could help your child at home, and the person you were talking to snarled, “So you hate all teachers and hope that they drown?”

That would be weird, right?  People understand that interactions like that affect your mood.  If that happened to you at the grocery store and you came home and told people about it, they would give you a hug.  Because when it happens in the face-to-face world, it’s remarkable.  But when it happens online, you’re expected to just shrug and move on.

Sometimes I do.  Shrug, I mean.  Sometimes I’m really good at shrugging and moving on.  And sometimes I’m terrible at it, and I think about something said to me online while I wash the dishes and drive the car and try to work.

I’m a human being.  If you say rude things to me, I will have my mood affected by those rude things.  If you say kind things to me, I will also have my mood affected by those kind things.  I hold certain expectations in my head.  When they’re not met, I feel unhappy.  When they are met, I feel happy.  It all feels pretty simple, you know.

Sometimes people forget that there is a human being on the other end of each screen.  But if you remove the computers between the individuals, all you have are people communicating.  Sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but communication in the end.

I’m going to answer the question I ask in the title in a moment, but to do so, we need to go back to late aughts when I was hired to write an article explaining the housing market collapse.  I didn’t think twice about taking the assignment even though it was outside my wheelhouse.  I often write plain English translations of muddy ideas; how hard could this be?

I ended up sobbing at my desk after reading through two hours of notes on the topic.  This was so. over. my. head.  There were several terms that all sounded as if they were the same thing… sort of like how wolves and wolves in sheep clothing are both Canis lupus, you know?  I couldn’t write this article.  But I had to write this article because I had accepted this article.  It took hours and it was fairly shitty in the end.

A little bit after that, I wrote a post for BlogHer about the Goldman Sachs fraud charges.  See?  Not much better.  Pretty confusing.

I wanted to see the Big Short because I still think about that assignment.  Well, I think more about lying on the living room carpet and saying to Josh, “I am so stupid, so stupid, so stupid.”  Was I that stupid or was it that complicated?

I may be that stupid, but it was definitely that complicated.  It’s a wonderful film that explains how the housing market collapsed, how the banks built a fraudulent system, and how some people profited while other people lost everything.  Even if anything economic in nature is outside your general interest zone, the movie is fascinating.  I can’t say enough good things about it.  I hope it wins a zillion awards.

(I didn’t actually see who was nominated for Oscars, and I am too lazy to Google the list.  I’m just going under the assumption that the Big Short is nominated for everything and will win everything.)

But I almost didn’t get to see it.  We got to the movie theater with plenty of time to get tickets.  Like enough time that if we had gotten tickets, we also would have read a few chapters in our books while we were waiting.  But the theater recently refurbished, removing about 2/3rds of their seats and doubling the price of the ticket.  The 50 seats in the theater were filled except for the front row.

I don’t run a movie theater and perhaps this was the most economical decision for the owner; a plan that would keep them in business.  But I can’t believe that filling 50 seats at $15 is as good as filling even only 100 seats at $7.50.  Because at least some of those extra 50 humans would have also purchased popcorn or candy.  Instead, we wandered out of the theater without staying and went home.

Josh suggested we try again the next morning since the kids were with my parents until the afternoon.  Maybe there was an 11 am film showing somewhere.  He scanned his phone and said, “This can’t be correct.”

There was a 9:15 am showing at a nearby theater.

Could that possibly be right?  Who gets up at 9:15 on a Sunday and says, “You know what?  I hate sleep but I love movies.  I’m going to go see the Big Short.”

The next morning, we drove to the theater, certain that we were going to find out that it was a typographical error and the movie was actually at 9:15 pm.  But no, the theater opened at 6 am and started showing movies around 7 am.  Would our fellow theater goers be in their pyjamas?  Drinking coffee and chowing down on breakfast while they watched a movie about banking?

We were the first ones there

It turns out that a really odd mixture of people go to the movies at 9:15 am.  Some were alone, some came in groups.  Some seemed to ignore social conventions.  (Really?  So many seats but you needed to choose the one right next to me?)  Others quietly curled up next to one another, yawning.  It was actually the nicest time I’ve had in a movie theater in years.

This experience may have converted me into an early morning film goer.  What do you think of morning movies?  Brilliant time for a film or too weird to consider?

So I’m cleaning out my bookmarks and dumping them on you, one by one, probably on Sundays.  If you’re playing along on your own blog, leave a comment with a link to your post in the comment section below.  I’ll scoop those up and post them as a “second helping” at the bottom of my post next week so that your post gets another round of eyes.

The 1500’s version of Facebook was called alba amicorum.  They were books that people passed around when they were hanging out with other people, and they would jot down thoughts in the pages.  Mental Floss writes,

They would draw in each other’s books, share secrets, scribble inside jokes, and gossip about their romantic prospects. As a result of being passed around from friend to friend, these books tend to be a little more cluttered and a little less photogenic than the neatly organized recommendation books men created.

Oh, the men got to fill their books with recommendations from people they met on their travels, sort of like LinkedIn.  Women were left to giggle about song lyrics.

On one hand, there’s no delete button when you’re writing in ink, and if you cut a chunk out of your book, everyone would know.  But on the other hand, you don’t have to worry about people continuously dredging up old pages of your book if you never bring it out again.  You really own it, whereas I don’t feel like I truly own the words I write on Facebook.  I just sort of set them there, and they sit there.  Like a lump.

I really love this idea.  Not the fact that people apparently used it as a measure of popularity, but the idea of women in the 1500’s lounging around, writing witty things in each other’s alba amicorums.  Or the idea of spending an afternoon looking back at your book.  Or really, just the act of schlepping this leather-bound book with you to a party so people could jot down things on the page.

If you gave me a choice between the offline or online version of social media, I’d take the offline one, hands down.  Sure, Facebook is easy, but it also leads to so many hurt feelings or confusion or frustration.  Most of the time, people write on their own wall, informing others of things.  This is very different from someone writing on your wall and giving you the enjoyment that comes with listening.

Plus it reminds me of things like playing MASH on the school bus when we were little.  Do you remember MASH where you learned whether you’d live in a mansion, apartment, shack, or house?  And whom you would marry?  And how many kids you’d have?  And your job?

What about you?  Would you rather have an offline or online version of social media?

I was standing in my bedroom this morning when I read that Alan Rickman died.  My first thought was that it had been a good move to purchase digital copies of all the Harry Potter films even though we had DVD versions of the same movie because, yes, there are times when you need to access a Harry Potter film from your phone.

There are times when you need to rewatch the magnificent humanity Alan Rickman brought to a difficult character.  There are times when you need to remind yourself how lucky you are that the casting agent got this role so right.  There are times when you need to sit down and watch three minutes of a film and feel whatever you’re going to feel knowing that someone — even someone you didn’t know at all — is gone.

Thank you, Mr. Rickman, for filling up the role of Severus Snape so completely that you spilled over the top and got under all of our skin.  You will be missed.

Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen via Flickr

Sometimes I’m too stupid to exist.

A month or two ago, I pulled up into a carpool line and turned off the car to read a book.  Oh, I should probably mention that I was near the front of the line, just to let you know how annoying I’m about to become in this story.  So the moment comes for the kids to be released, and I go to turn on the car and the battery is dead.  I was reading my book for twenty minutes with the car off but the headlights on.

Everyone’s favourite person.

There was a wonderful woman who ran over with a jumper cable power pack, and she got my car working again with only minimal honking behind me.  I drove around town for a while and then headed home feeling a little sheepish.

Fast forward to this week.

We get to the twins’ art school early, and we decide to sit in the car while I read them Hunger Games.  I am totally in character, doing a very passionate Katniss speech when I glance up and realized I HAVE LEFT MY LIGHTS ON AGAIN.

For the love.

After begging around the school for help and finding no one with jumper cables, I call AAA who comes to save my ass.  The man gives me a look as he walks up to my car as if he, too, agrees that I am too stupid to live.  I smile and say, “I may have left on my lights, BUT I also backed into the space which makes it really easy to get into the hood.”  This, apparently, does not redeem me.

You may be wondering when the squirrels are going to make an appearance in this story.  You know, those squirrels who have mad, passionate sex in my backyard?  Yes, those squirrels.

So we pop the hood and the man says, “What did you do here?”

Here?  Where?

I lean over to see what he is looking at and see that the SQUIRRELS HAVE EATEN MY CAR.  As in they have chewed a child’s fist-sized hole underneath the hood of the car.  The man can’t stop laughing, especially because the squirrels left behind a few acorns as payment.  He tells me to patch it up with putty.  I tell him that I’m actually going to close it with waterproof tape, and he promises me that waterproof tape doesn’t exist.

And here is where we need to pause for a second.  I own waterproof tape.  I use it to tape my silkscreens.  I have been using it since I started printmaking at 15.  I feel pretty secure in its existence.  Not just because I’ve used it before, but because I currently own an enormous roll of it.

When I went to buy it at Home Depot, every man I encountered (3 of them!) promised me that waterproof tape didn’t exist.  Yes, it does, I told them, and they gave me this patronizing smile and told me that it was cute that I thought tape could get wet.  When I finally got myself a roll of waterproof tape, I wanted to drive back to the store and shove it in all of their faces and scream, “I’M RIGHT, ASSHOLES!”

But I didn’t.  Because I’m a woman and I have better things to do than educate men.

So back to my squirrel-ravaged car: I start to explain to the man that, yes, waterproof tape exists and while it’s usually used to protect wood frames in printmaking, I’ve also used it many other times — even once on a sink where it got wet dozens of times a day and continued to work for years.  And he wanted to argue with me about this, so I just smiled and said, “Sure, I’ll use putty.  Thanks for the suggestion.”

Because I’m a woman and I have better things to do than educate men.

Like I have to go write myself a post-it note and leave it in the car so I remember to turn off my lights.  And then I have to go talk to a few squirrels.