All posts in category Mental Rambling

Getting a handle on my tools.

lake bluff public libraryMy early childhood was fairly peripatetic, but when that part of it ended, around 5th grade, we moved in across the street from the town library.

Having been raised by a librarian, moving in across the street from the library was somewhat analogous to moving in across the street from heaven. I can still remember exactly where the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books were located in the children’s section downstairs, and I can just about feel the industrial carpet through my shirt as I lay down to read whatever was next to them.

Throughout my life, going to the library has involved spending time with books for which I had not intended to reach out a hand. In fact I think that’s how I came on the BTT books in the first place; I know for a fact that I read some sizeable chunk of Maud Hart Lovelace’s oeuvre sitting with my back against that next to that next-to-bottom shelf on which they could be found.

As you can imagine, this occasionally resulted in a trip to the library taking longer, and yielding a much bigger pile, than I’d intended, a fact that was equally true in college and graduate school, which you can further imagine didn’t always do wonders for my workload.

But it is how I discovered Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and an entire shelf of feminist theory (which I can still see, in the library of the Naftali Building at Tel Aviv University), launching my transformation from an instinctive feminist to an educated one, so it’s not all bad — but on the other hand, let me tell you, when one allows oneself to get temporarily lost in random books in the stacks of Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, it can lead (you know: entirely theoretically) to getting actually, literally lost.

So why do I bring all of this up now?

Because the Internet.

The Internet, I have realized, is One Big (Chaotic) Library, and there you are, wandering down the stacks on your way to the “Israel/Palestine” section, or possibly the “Recipes” shelf, or mayhaps the “Interesting Stories About Scientific Advances That You Can Kind Of Understand If You Read Slowly” department, and boom! You stroll right past baby gorillas practicing thumping their chests! Or an obscure, unknown mathematician who solved an old, thorny problem about prime numbers! (And if you read slowly, you just know you can understand it!) Or a colorful and random appreciation of all things Eurovision!

And just like that, I’m sitting on the metaphorical floor of the library, enjoying baby gorillas or trying to remember what I know about prime numbers.

The up side, of course, is that I find so many utterly fascinating things in my meandering way. Our earliest ancestor! Space flight for regular folks! Everything the Vlogbrothers have ever done, alone or together!

The down side is that I find so many utterly fascinating things in my meandering way.

I mean: The day – still only 24 hours, right? If I’m wandering about the stacks, I’m not sitting on my couch reading the book that’s literally right there, waiting for me!

And I begin to feel a little unhinged when this sort of thing goes on for too long.

This is not the Internet’s fault. This is my fault. The Internet (and Twitter, and BuzzFeed, and Wired, and YouTube, and on and on) are all just tools that I haven’t learned how to use properly yet. I used to know how to keep going past that tantalizing spine in the not-where-I’m-supposed-to-be section of the library when I really had to. I have to teach myself again, is all, and teach myself that “I really have to” includes things that aren’t on deadline, but that are ultimately more important to me than the meandering bit. It’s a constant rejiggering of the hierarchy of importance, and a constant retooling of my skill set in that field. It requires a level of mindfulness that is, I’m guessing, fairly new to the human animal.

But that’s ok. As this young man would no doubt assure me, if I believe in myself, I will get the hang of it, I know it!

Thumbs up for rock n’ roll!

(And libraries).

2 Comments
by emilylhauser on May 22, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Geekery, Mental Rambling
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Posted by emilylhauser on May 22, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/getting-a-handle-on-my-tools/

“Follow your passion” – ha. Ha! Hahahaha! No, but seriously.

Um.

Um.

It’s graduation season, and as in every graduation season, one hears a lot of successful people telling halls of not-yet-successful-people to “follow their passion.” Following one’s passion is, we are given to understand, the only real way to live a fulfilling life, a life in which work is more than mere chore, a life in which one meets one’s end with a smile on one’s face.

Coupla problems with that. Number 1 being that the people doing the talking are successful.

I know that successful role models (in graduation exercises, as in magazine editorials and TV commercials) are meant to serve as inspiration, but they wind being perceived of as the norm: If you do X (where X generally equals “work hard, believe in yourself, and most of all, follow your passion”) you can be like me.

And the thing is: No.

Most people who follow their passion, even most talented people who follow their passion, will not ever be as successful as the people invited to address graduating classes. Most really good ball players will never make it to the majors; most really good interior designers will not get their own furniture lines; most really good musicians will not go to the Grammys; most really good scientists will not land a position on the next Mars Rover team (and, it bears noting, most really good writers will not wind up at The Atlantic. Not that I’m bitter).

We don’t like to think about it, but this is what sports teams, and the Grammys, and any and all hiring practices represent: A winnowing down of the vast field of competition, ultimately to that small number who will wind up making it big.

Talent and dedication are crucial pieces of the puzzle, but much of this process is subjective, or biased, or blatantly unfair, and a lot of it comes right back to the simple and deeply troubling facts of economic disparities. It’s easier to achieve your dream if you can afford to work for free for a couple-few years; it’s easier still if you’ve spent your entire life around people who have already made it. There’s a point at which talent (or belief in oneself) has absolutely nothing to do with it.

“But Emily!” you say. “I don’t want to win a Grammy or even get my own furniture line! I just want to be able to pay middle-class bills with my passion!”

And here’s the other thing: Sometimes even that’s impossible. It’s been fairly impossible since the dawn of time, in fact.

The whole notion of following one’s passion is so steeped historic, economic, and social privilege that it fairly reeks. For the vast majority of human existence you were grateful if you and yours ate today and could know with some certainty that you would also eat tomorrow and next week. In fact, without access to actual data, I feel safe in saying that this remains true for the majority of humans alive today. Those of us who can even entertain the notion of following our passion are already living with some degree of good fortune, however uninspiring we may find it (“I get to eat tomorrow? That’s it?”).

Aside from that, though, certain fields have simply never been money-makers. I’m a writer, and I can assure you: Most writers do not pay most of their bills with their words, or at least: Not with the ones it gave them joy to write.

I think also of our beloved ex-babysitter, a talented lacrosse player who followed his passion to college and is finishing up what is more than likely going to be his last season of play even as I type. Here he is in his early 20s, a few months from graduation, and his passion is closing its doors. Can he play in an amateur league and/or coach, and would these things give him joy? Yes, and I would hope so. But pay his bills for the rest of his life? Probably not. (PS I can’t tell you how sad this makes me. You should see him talk about his sport. I wish I could pay him to play, myself).

But of perhaps greatest relevance to today’s graduating seniors is the economy that awaits them. As comic artist Matt Bors notes in his book Life Begins At Incorporation (and let’s not forget that a comic artist is more than a little likely to know about the topsy-turvy world of passion-following):

“Barely scraping by and taking what you can get is the new normal. Having 500 people show up to apply for jobs at Walmart, who pursues a strategy of paying people such low wages that they qualify for government assistance, that’s the new normal.”

So when we tell people to follow their passion, and hold fabulously successful role models up to them, we’re not only misleading them, we’re actually being kind of mean — unless we don’t stop there.

Follow your passion – for as long you possibly can, even if it doesn’t pay enough, even if it tires you out, even if it doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, because at the end of your life, you’ll be grateful that you tried. Follow your passion – but understand that it may cost you in time and money, and that it may never be easy, even as it gives you that jolt supplied only by doing a thing you love. Follow your passion — but work hard at everything you do, try your best at everything, let others help, help them when they need it, be kind and accept kindness. Follow your passion – but know when to let go. Know that peace of mind and being able to afford to fix your car are also good, life-affirming things.

I’m following my passion. Some of the money I make comes from the words I loved writing, but most of it doesn’t, and if I had to actually support my children, I would have to stop. My passion-following is entirely dependent on my well-employed co-head-of-household, as is the passion-following of many people around the world. This is one of the ways in which we accept kindnesses.

I would never tell someone to not follow their passion — but I would tell them that it may come at a price, that it may never be easy, and that at the end of the day, sometimes letting go is a brave and life-affirming act. Try — try your best, try your hardest, try with all your heart — but don’t be cruel to yourself if it doesn’t work out.

At the end of the day, at the end of our lives, we all of us will have to look back and weigh what we did. You’re not likely to be Bill Gates, Adele, or RA Dickey, but you can make choices that are honest and satisfying. The trick, I think, lies less in following your passion, and more in making sure you listen more to yourself than to anyone else.

Which I suspect means that you should feel free to ignore every word of the above. Which is ok, too.

7 Comments
by emilylhauser on May 10, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mental Rambling, Humanity
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Posted by emilylhauser on May 10, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/follow-your-passion-ha-ha-hahahaha-no-but-seriously/

Found words, tucked into a used book.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citrus_x_limon_-_K%C3%B6hler%E2%80%93s_Medizinal-Pflanzen-041.jpgAbout ten or eleven years ago, my friend Shaun came on a visit from London. He was reading Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon at the time, and he left it for me — and a decade or more later, I finally read it, this week. Levy won all kinds of accolades when Lemon was published back in 1999, and with good reason, because it’s a really lovely piece of work. It feels a little like two separate novels to me, but not so much as to make it any less lovely to read. If you have room on the pile of books next to your bed, I would highly recommend adding Fruit of the Lemon to it.

But this isn’t about that!

This is about the card that was left in the book, I have no idea by whom, and I have no idea when or where.

It’s not Shaun’s, and if memory serves (and it really might not) Shaun had gotten the book second-hand. But what is written on said card is simply so random — so much as if ripped from the story line of a different novel, possibly something like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca — that I simply had to share.

Picture a plain white card, a little bigger than an index card. In the upper right corner, in fancy type face, you’ll see the words “Simply Ionian,” with a little travel stamp overlapping that reads “Simply Travel.” A quick Google search reveals that this must be a note card provided guests by Thomson Holiday’s Simply Travel division, specializing in “off-the-beaten-track holidays – characterful, one-off properties squirreled away on the road less travelled.”

Below what looks like a phone number and room location (“Panorama No. 7″), here’s what the card says:

Dear Dr. Winsor & Ms. Wheater & baby,

Welcome to Lefkas! I shall be around to visit you at 7:00 pm tomorrow evening. I would like to meet you at the ‘Café Del Mar’, which is situated as you bear left towards the beach from your apartments. I look forward to our meeting. Many thanks.

Matthew.

I ask you! Is this not a novel in the making?

If you write that novel, please thank me in the acknowledgements. You can list me under “Muse.”

5 Comments
by emilylhauser on March 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Good Stuff, Mental Rambling

Posted by emilylhauser on March 14, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/found-words-tucked-into-a-used-book/

Here’s the other thing about how writers are paid.

Typewriter keyboardThe current discussion/mudslinging about how writers/journalists/reporters (etc) are or are not paid is, I think, important, enlightening, and long overdue. I made my own wee contribution here; here’s National Treasure Charlie Pierce saying it better. I agree with every single thing Mr. Pierce wrote, up until his last six words — I can’t tell The Atlantic to “go fk itself,” because I don’t think The Atlantic is the problem, and as one of the few magazines out there with a working business model and growing staff, it may well be part of the solution.

Having said that, whenever we have this discussion, there’s this one wee thing that no one ever seems to mention, and it’s something that actually has an enormous impact on any writer’s bank balance: With every passing year, the writer is expected to do more.

Not more writing (eta: actually, in the era of ever-updating blogs, we’re also expected to write more, now that I think of it), and God knows not more reporting (“reporting” might require plane tickets or recording equipment, and those, God knows, cost money), but more of all the work surrounding the final product.

In the course of slashing budgets and caring more for corporate bottom lines than for content produced and/or what the advent of the Internet might mean for same, news and opinion outlets have hacked away at their editorial and graphics departments, their marketing and their fact-checking — virtually everything and anything that supports a writer/reporter in his or her work and produces a highly-polished and attractive final product.

Writers have always had to market ourselves, of course, particularly when starting out, but nothing like today, when it’s often considered part and parcel of the gig to not only produce copy, but also to blog about producing copy, tweet/FB/tumbl about the copy you produced, and engage with commenters over their opinions of the copy you produced, all while working on your next piece.

Writers have also always been asked to turn in clean copy — the cleaner, the better — but we used to write safe in the knowledge that copy editors would catch the typos, and editors would catch the sentences that went nowhere. These days, far too many Serious Outlets are content to let writers fend for themselves, typos and unintelligible run-on sentences be damned.

Writers have also always been expected to actually do their work and be as rigorously truthful as humanly possible — but again, no one is perfect, and some writers are lying assclowns. So, you know: Fact-checking, the process by which a Serious Outlet would make at least a minimal effort to determine that the writer had not Gotten It All Wrong was a pretty important task. In the current environment, far too many Serious Outlets expect writers to fact-check on their own (and, one presumes, to give the managing editor a head’s up if they’re going to lie).

Finally, in addition to reporting, writing, promoting ourselves day-in/day-out, and typing and fact-checking without a net, there are also a long list of outlets (less Serious than some, but still Kinda Serious) that expect their writers to find illustration for their work, as well. AND MAKE SURE IT ISN’T COPYRIGHTED.

And, of course, the many, many of us who aren’t on staff are also doing all of our own bookkeeping and if we are lucky enough to be paid? It’s on us to remind the Serious Outlet to fork over our dough. Often over and over and over again. Because accounting departments were slashed, too.

All of these things take a tremendous amount of time and energy, and sometimes financial resources. All of it comes from my bottom line.

And all of it is part and parcel of the modern day write-for-free model everywhere present in the publishing world.

5 Comments
by emilylhauser on March 12, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Give Me A Job, Mental Rambling, Social Justice
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Posted by emilylhauser on March 12, 2013

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On not paying for work done.

Typewriter keyboardI still have the aforementioned oddly fever-ish condition, so I’m not likely to be of much use today, but I wanted to say this:

A kerfuffle arose yesterday when a writer blogged about being offered to publish in The Atlantic Online in exchange for zero dollars; you, gentle reader, may or may not recall that these were the precise circumstances under which I wrote for The Atlantic Online, twice, about Troy Davis.

In his blog post, Nate Thayer sounds righteously annoyed, and I can’t say that I blame him. Work deserves recompense, full stop. I will confess to a small shudder of annoyance when the editor with whom I worked at The Atlantic told me that she couldn’t pay me, and I was honestly grateful for the tone of regret in her email — because though I was willing to accept zero dollars in exchange for my hard work, work deserves recompense, full stop.

I will also note that though I was pleased and quite proud to appear in The Atlantic, the fact of that byline has opened no doors, nor has it led to a single offer for paying work — when editors talk about the value of “exposure,” I can only hope that they’re ignorant of what a chimera that is. (It might have been the reason that Robert Wright knew my name, and thus may have played a role in our collaboration for The Atlantic during the recent war in Gaza, but I approached him and volunteered to work with him, knowing ahead of time that his publication wouldn’t be able to pay me and shrugging off his evident discomfort with that fact).

The fault is not with The Atlantic, though. This is a system that exists across platforms and across readership levels. Working in the creative fields has never been a path to wealth, but during the last decade or so, with the advent of an increasingly nimble internet and increasingly mordant outlets saddled with increasingly desperate business models, working in the creative fields hasn’t even necessarily been a decent way to keep yourself in rent and tacos. This has been especially so since the summer of 2008, when the cratering of print media presaged the cratering of the entire world economy.

The problem is so big, and reflective of so much social malaise, that I don’t know how to even start getting my brain around it. On the one hand, you have the consumers of culture who think they should never have to pay for anything (“information wants to be free!” or some such codswallop); on the other hand you’ve got corporate-owned producers of information and art that are more interested in paying CEOs and big shareholders than in paying the people who produce the information and the art; on the third hand you’ve got the rolling introduction of entirely new modes of information-transference that no one really knows how to make a living off of; on the fourth hand you’ve got editors and managing editors who are really struggling to tell important stories without the budget they honestly need; on the fifth hand, you’ve got an entire economy predicated on the rich getting richer while everyone else struggles to doggy-paddle; and on the sixth hand, you’ve got the producers of content themselves, those writers, photographers, reporters, artists, etc and so on, who do need to pay bills but for whom the product itself can sometimes feel even more important than bill-paying.

A few years ago I decided that I would never work for free again, with exceptions for cases wherein I felt that the story was more important than my taco budget — such was the case in all the work I prepared for The Atlantic, for instance. I have not stuck entirely by that decision (The Hairpin, which I presume makes some money, didn’t pay me, for example; Feministe, which I’m assuming does not, didn’t either), but in every case in which I’ve broken my word to myself, I was consciously taking a chance that in allowing my work to be undervalued, I might advance my career. In twenty years of occasionally taking that chance, I can think of exactly one case in which that proved true (not any of those mentioned here).

Aside from the obvious ethical implications of asking people to work hard in return for literally nothing, however, there is the not inconsiderable issue of what this means for your talent pool: I can occasionally write for free (and, indeed, can regularly write for peanuts) because I have a spouse with a good steady income. If I did not have said spouse, or said spouse were unemployed, or also a creative, I would be SOL. I can’t help but feel that a model that excludes people who cannot afford to not be paid isn’t a great one for expanding our knowledge base.

I don’t know how to fix this, and I do not blame the editors who have solicited or accepted my work without recompense. I think it would be a step in the right direction if publications could institute a system whereby such work could at least receive a small honorarium, as a kind of good-will nod to the fact that it’s actually not right to pay people nothing, but I understand that even $50 a pop would add up pretty quickly. The argument could be made that if you can’t pay people, maybe you shouldn’t publish — but again, that’s not on the editors. And when I hand over my copy for free, I know exactly what I’m doing.

So anyway. I don’t know how to fix it, and if I ever again have the chance to publish something that really matters to me in a prestigious publication that cannot pay me, I will take it.

But can we all, at the very least, admit that it’s wrong?

19 Comments
by emilylhauser on March 5, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Give Me A Job, Mental Rambling, Social Justice
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Posted by emilylhauser on March 5, 2013

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Seeking: Poorly paid position as lackey.

http://pixabay.com/en/old-printer-paper-style-press-41945/

(Back in high school, I did actually work on a printing press for a couple of years. Not one quite this old, though).

Yesterday I learned that my friend Shaun, a writer, writing teacher, editor, and director of a small independent press, is looking for a (paid!) intern. I tweeted out the information and then tweeted that I really wished I could take the position — but alas, it’s not to be. Shaun and his small independent press are located in London.

Being my friend for something like (hold on – doing the math) 25 years or so, Shaun (or his current intern – who can tell!) tweeted back “we wish we could be your intern!” Which, you know, was very nice and all, and I certainly wouldn’t mind an intern, or at least a personal assistant, BUT — but it occurred to me that Shaun probably didn’t realize how dead serious I was.

I would love to be his intern — well, maybe not his intern, as we’d never get anything done for all the talking, TV watching, and chocolate-covered-almonds-consuming we’d be doing (you see, we also used to be roommates, because once upon a time I needed a wee bit of saving and Shaun saved me) (I seem to be digressing a lot. I’ll stop that now) — but I would actually love to work 10-15 hours a week at a small, independent press.

And this got me thinking: I’d love to intern just about anywhere, really. As long as you paid me enough to buy my supper and I got to learn something I’d never done before. I recognize that this would likely come bundled with a lot of envelope-stuffing and coffee-purchasing, but I can do that. Who cares about doing that? My masters degree hasn’t gotten in the way of running off photocopies when volunteering for my kids’ teachers — at least in my imaginary internship, I’d be getting paid!

In fact, two or three years ago I even tried to intern at WBEZ (the Chicago NPR affiliate). I got as far as a wildly successful interview, was told to expect a call about meeting the producer and — nothing. Silence. I followed up, I did everything one must, and all I ever got back was silence, and to this day, I kind of have a hard time listening to the show in question, because really, now — at least call me back, right? I really wanted that gig. Really, really, really.

But if I’m not going to learn how to produce a story for radio, I can think of a lot of internships/apprenticeships I’d like to try. I’d love to work alongside a carpenter, or at the aforementioned independent press, or maybe as a roadie, with a small film crew, on an archaeological dig, or for a handy-man (or, you know, -woman. No sexism). Florists, too — ooh! And hot air balloon rentals! That would be cool.

As long as I’d be learning new stuff, would be paid a little something, and would still have time to do some writing, I think any of those options would be just grand.

It just can’t be in London.

4 Comments
by emilylhauser on February 22, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mental Rambling

Posted by emilylhauser on February 22, 2013

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A few notes on Girls [& not just that one episode] because apparently that’s what everyone does now.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lena_Dunham_TFF_2012_Shankbone_3.JPGAs anyone who pays attention to pop culture knows, Girls has raised something of a ruckus since its first airing. At first the ruckus was good, then it was a little back-lashy, then Girls had the weight of American culture placed on it, and that’s never helpful. That’s pretty much why I never wound up watching the first season — too much ruckus.

But I got on board with the second, thinking (I think) that maybe the noise had died down some? Heh.

The ruckus continues. As is so often the case with pop culture phenoms, the noise surrounding last week’s episode had nothing to do with the actual content of the episode, the humor, the drama, the knowing sorrow, but with bodies. Specifically: Lena Dunham’s body as the 24 year old character Hannah, and that of Patrick Wilson, who played the hot 42 doctor with whom Hannah has a sudden, typically explicit, two-day love affair. Naked bodies everywhere. The general consensus among many was “he’s so hot, he would never do someone who looks like Lena Dunham.” Which oh my god.

I’m not going to get into that, though! Because better people than I have handled it already, and also I just can’t go down that rabbit hole. It’s too awful.

However! Last night I discovered that Dagmara Dominczyk, Patrick Wilson’s own wife, had weighed in, and done so kick-assed-ly: “His wife is a size 10, muffin-top & all,” she tweeted at one hater, “& he does her just fine. Least that’s what I hear. ; ) rule #1 – never say never.”

And this led to me thinking about the power of Lena Dunham’s naked body.

Which led me to the other things I’ve been thinking about Girls, which led me to decide to write them down. And hereunder be random spoilers (and approximate quotes, as I’m working from memory), if that matters to you.

Going back to the first episode of the season, we see Thomas-John present his brand new wife (Hannah’s friend) Jessa, whom he married on a whim, with a basket full of puppies. Surprise! Big happy gift! Then he runs out the door to work. Jessa and Hannah take the puppies to the park, Jessa says she’s “really well,” better than she’s ever been. In a later episode we learn, completely in passing, that the puppies were all returned, and then we go on to see what starts out a very sexy evening with the newlyweds but turns into an absolute nightmare as the two go out with Thomas-John’s parents. Jessa gets annoyed with their upper class judgmental natures, and lets fly with all her sordid past, in pseudo-pleasant passive-aggressive style. They go home, Thomas-John declares her the worst mistake of his life, calls her a whore, copious tears, breaking of things, he demands “how much will it take” to make her go away.

Much has been made of the fact that Jessa’s essentially a grifter, but a) there’s this wonderful pause when she’s storming up the stairs and she turns to look at Thomas-John as he says that hateful thing – and she decides she might as well get something out of what was clearly the worst mistake of her life, too. We have no reason to believe she’s lying when she tells Hannah she’s “really well” in the park – but b) let’s look at Thomas-John, shall we? I think the puppies are the key here: He picked up something he thought would be fun and delightful without really thinking about the consequences, and then when the consequences turned out to be too much for him to handle? He returned it. I think Jessa is a puppy in a basket for Thomas-John, and her failure is only in her inability (apparently consistent with her past) to recognize that ahead of time.

Next!

In one episode, Hannah’s holding a dinner party for friends, the kind of dinner party you hold when you’re in your twenties and still have roommates and your apartment is tiny and adding fairy lights and matching chairs makes you feel like you’ve really spruced the place up. The party falls apart around her ears, as all the guests are awful to each other or themselves or storm off or whatnot, and through it all, Hannah’s really trying to be calm and collected and a grown up – she keeps serving food, and talking calmly about the upset as if it doesn’t matter, and then there’s this one moment when you see her with the dessert, a bundt cake (a bundt cake!), and a fork, and she’s just eating it, her enormous brown eyes looking up at the insanity around her, and I just want to say: I loved that moment so much I wanted to give it a hug.

Next!

In last week’s Patrick Wilson episode, the affair starts to fall apart when Hannah starts to reveal more of herself than she has heretofore, the side of her (which is kind of All Of Her) which insists that she gather life experiences, the weirder the better, in order to write novels about Life later.

If you’re watching closely, you’ll see the moment it happens: Hannah says something about possibly being touched inappropriately as a toddler, and Joshua, trying to connect with her, reveals that he “let someone touch my penis” when he was nine — and Hannah poo-poos it, because he “let it happen” and she didn’t have a choice. Patrick Wilson’s face reveals it all, the attempt to understand, the instant distancing when someone rejects your (likely pretty painful) story, the desire to not have this be happening, and that’s it: He’s gone. And then she drives the final nail when she insists on calling him “Josh,” which he’s repeatedly asked her not to call him. Everything else she says in that moment is more of the same, and it really is who she is (at least in this moment of her life): a person so busy trying to see her own life that she can’t be bothered to really see anyone else’s. Sometimes this leads to humor (Girls is a comedy, after all), and sometimes it leads to that kind of painful moment, where I literally had to cover my eyes.

And finally!

Lena Dunham’s naked body.

I’ll be brief, because (again) a lot of pixels have been spilled on this already but it boils down to this: In a world in which conventionally beautiful — nay, conventionally gorgeous — women like Beyonce, Megan Fox, and Penelope Cruz are regularly photoshopped (to see what I mean, and how ridiculous it is, click here), the vision of an un-retouched, un-butt-doubled, un-apologetic female form that does not conform to the standards set for us by someone’s photoshop version of Penelope Cruz is borderline revolutionary. It shocks the sensibilities in a way that threatens to re-wire thought, and has power in ways that I don’t think we really even know how to calculate.

And that’s what I have to say about Girls.

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by emilylhauser on February 17, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Body, Entertainment, Mental Rambling
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Posted by emilylhauser on February 17, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/a-few-notes-on-girls-not-just-that-one-episode-because-apparently-thats-what-everyone-does-now/

Things that always take too much time.

clock 2In the grand scheme of things, the fact that we get a full twenty-four hours in every.single.day seems like a decent number of time units. I mean: 24! That’s not a small number, you know?

And yet.

They come, they go, they’re like the damn sands through the hourglass.

And there are a certain number of activities that, bluntly put, take up WAY too much of that time.

Like cooking, for instance — and by this I mean: Any preparation of any food. Ever. Pouring cereal is stupidly time-consuming. Food should appear in my bowl (and coffee in my cup) when I and my family need it. And the occasions on which meal prep is fun (Thanksgiving, pretty much the whole week of Passover, when my kids are excited about it, baking) do not negate this fact in the least. They merely mitigate the suffering.

Also? Showering. What is up with that? The truth is that my time actually under the water is pretty consistently 10 minutes, no matter how fast I’m hurrying or how much I’m luxuriating (these tend to subtract or add about two minutes, respectively), and showering is, you know: Ok. I don’t mind it. So that’s ok.

But all the time surrounding those 10 minutes! The warming up of the water, the getting out of clothes and later into a towel. The hair care — omg the haircare! Who has five minutes for that?

Furthermore, sleep. Now, I know that you all are going to say “But Emily, we need sleep to live,” and ohhh-kaaay. Fine. We need sleep to live. But why on earth does it take so much time to be useful? It’s true that I cheat almost every day of my life, getting somewhere between six and seven hours of sleep, and thus am able to snatch another hour or two from the sleep monster, but come on. Why can’t we make do with five hours? Or four. I could probably spare four. In a pinch.

Other things that take too much time include: Errands of any nature, driving anywhere, blog maintenance (not the writing. Just the pulling of the levers).

I mean seriously. I have books to read.

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by emilylhauser on February 4, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Good Stuff, Mental Rambling

Posted by emilylhauser on February 4, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/things-that-always-take-too-much-time/

Why I’ll never be fancy.

fancy pantsI will never be fancy. I can fake it, if needs be, but I assure you dear reader: It’s all a ruse.

First of all, there’s the walking.

I fall off my heels. I fall off my heels when I’m barefoot. I trip over curbs, and over the seams between sidewalk sections. Once, when wearing my fanciest dress and my fanciest heels, I took a step off a stage — and slid down the rest of the stairs, in front of God and everybody. The ability to locomote with some degree of confidence is, if I’m not mistaken, a key element of being fancy.

Then there’s the food and drink portion of any event dedicated to fanciness. For starters, I don’t drink. I mean, I do hydrate and all, but I don’t drink alcohol, so the whole “fine wine and/or champagne” thing is lost on me. To make matters worse, when it comes to wine, “I don’t drink” is really just my excuse for not drinking, because I actually hate wine (and/or champagne). It tastes awful — what are you people thinking?

And fancy food generally means fancy meat, and while I do eat meat, I don’t get it. I would almost always prefer a nice bowl of oatmeal, frankly. I will admit that I recently discovered the joys of a well-prepared pan-seared rib eye (and yes, it is in fact possible to keep kosher and still get a good steak) but probably my favorite meat dish is meatloaf. And I think we can all agree that meatloaf is not fancy.

Furthermore, at any given moment, at least one part of my body looks (or in fact is) banged up. I hurt myself in the most mind-boggling ways — the scab I’m currently sporting on my right index finger, for instance, is the result of (and I am really and truly not making this up) being cut by a loaf of bread. A loaf. Of bread.

Now, of course, it was a very crusty loaf of bread. And it was just out of the freezer, and some bits of crust were kind of breaking off and were rather sharp because they were frozen. But still and all. It takes real skill to be injured by a loaf of bread that was not, I don’t know, shot out of a t-shirt cannon at one’s head. (Unless one is Jean Valjean, in which case it was really poverty and a repressive system of government that did the injuring).

I can’t even get a really good manicure, because (follow-up to the above!) I once slammed my left hand in a car door and 30 years later, one of the nails still doesn’t grow properly. I’ve been told that the fact that said nail always splits when it gets past about a millimeter long (actual measurement, BTW) indicates that I must have “damaged the nail seed.” Which, of course. Of course I would “damage the nail seed.”

I do clean up pretty well. Give me a nice dress, a flat-iron, and my makeup basket, and I’ll look ok at your fancy do. And I tend to smile a lot, which I have found can cover a lot of bases.

Plus, it eases everyone’s mind considerably if you’re smiling as they help you up off the floor.

14 Comments
by emilylhauser on January 17, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mental Rambling
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Posted by emilylhauser on January 17, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/why-ill-never-be-fancy/

Things I miss.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typewriter_adler3.jpgI miss the sound of manual typewriters.

Typewriters sound like you’re actually doing something, like sentences are being yanked into the world, possibly against their better judgement, and when all is said and done, you will have A Thing to hold and show the world. I should probably note that I don’t miss actually using typewriters (manual or not), because word-processing is much kinder to my bad typing and changing thoughts. But I miss that sound, what sounded to me like the heartbeat of words.

I miss handwritten letters — real letters, not thank you notes, not yearly and uninformative Christmas cards, but real letters. The kind in which my best friend and I would go on for 12, 15, 20 pages, the kind in which people would tease out their thoughts and feelings even as they wrote, thoughts and feelings they might not have shared, had they had access to a backspace button.

I miss LPs. They felt like something substantial, they felt like they really were one step away from the artists themselves. I miss big, 12 x 12 inch cover art, I miss the gatefold of double-albums, I miss the ritual of cleaning the record, cleaning the needle, setting it down, then there’s that scratchy bit and – sound. Much better sound that MP3s, of course, and possibly better than CDs, but I will admit that my ear isn’t sensitive enough for the latter. I miss judging people by how they treated my records, and I miss knowing that that judgement was accurate.

I miss going shopping for school supplies. It’s true that I actually do go shopping for school supplies every year, not once but twice, but the supplies are not for me. I don’t get to choose the folders, or the pencils, or (indeed) the clothes. I don’t get to wake up of a September morning and feel new and shiny. Indeed, at 48, I very rarely feel new anymore, if I do occasionally feel shiny, but the real point, I think, was the pencils and the notebooks. And sure, now I can buy a bunch whenever I want to – but that’s not new. Or shiny. That’s just having a driver’s license.

More than anything, though, I miss my babies and my toddlers. They were lovely, you know? Well, perhaps you don’t, but they really were. Here, see?

the-boy1

The boy.

The girl (and a bee).

The girl (and a bee).

The world is a better place without typewriters and LPs, and my children are a delight at any age. But some things, some times, will always be missed, even if that which comes after is a blessing.

And some things I will never miss. But perhaps that’s a different post.

14 Comments
by emilylhauser on January 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mental Rambling

Posted by emilylhauser on January 14, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/things-i-miss/

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