September 2007

We have a new person in our office. She started yesterday and since she works right next to me I decided to pop in despite the fact that no one bothered to introduce us or even tell me that she was starting. Why didn’t anyone introduce us or let me know about her starting? Because she’s a few levels above me - whatever that means.

In any case, we’re neighbors so I popped in to say hi. I told her my name and that I was right next door if she needed anything in her first days.

She was nice and everything, but the first thing she asked me was, “What’s your title?”

I told her I was a marketing assistant and tried to move on. But then she asked who my manager was and then asked where my manager’s office was. I told her those things, too, but I was feeling smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter with every question. I tried to recover by asking her a few more… friendly… questions - we’re both from Boston, for example, and have that in common - but the entire atmosphere had changed and she was cold. Since then, she hasn’t as much as looked in my direction.  

Now, I don’t think this is a problem of this specific person, who may or may not be a nice person (I will perhaps never know, unless I get promoted and therefore suddenly materialize before her). But I do think that it’s an unforgivable problem in my workplace and in offices in general. Why must we treat people differently, depending on their title? Why can’t we talk to each other like equals? This woman is probably around the same age as me. She looks around the same in appearance. What separates us beside our paychecks?

I mean, I didn’t ask her how many degrees she had or where she’s been published. Or what her family tree looked like. I didn’t try to find out who had the richer creative or emotional life. I didn’t ask for her SAT scores or her pants size (obviously bigger than mine, I might add, just because I’m bitter). I just stopped by.

It reminded me of when I first started working here and one of the editors emailed me and asked me to sort an Excel file for him alphabetically since he didn’t know how. I called him and asked him to open the document and walked him through the process (the clicking of a single button, mind you) and then suggested that he take a tutorial on Excel (which my company offers) since we use the program so much. He seemed deeply offended, but why? Why shouldn’t I share my knowledge with him or make a (much needed) suggestion that would help the company as a whole? I certainly wasn’t mean or condescending about it. Is there just a general problem with me speaking my mind?

And I’m trying to walk the fine line between letting it show that this class/authority/title stuff bothers me and keeping it all knotted up inside. As much as I wanted to yell at that woman, “YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” or, “AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL INTIMIDATED?” or, possibly, “ARE THOSE MATERNITY PANTS?” and stomp off, I guess I’ll be slightly more mature than that. I’m going to keep approaching her and talking to her like an equal. I hope it makes her as uncomfortable as she’s made me.

Is it necessary to treat people in the workplace according to their “status”? Does this happen in every workplace?

It’s been two weeks since Ripley decided to reclaim her life. She now eats 1/4 cup of dry food twice a day (at seven in the morning and seven at night) and gets regular exercise by chasing a toy I bought her that consists of a kitty fishing pole with a feather and bell lure. By following this regiment, we hope, she will shed many of her 22 pounds.

However, our experiment has taken a sadly ironic turn. When we tried to weigh Ripley tonight, on the 14th day of her diet, my digital scale answered not with a number but with the sad words, LO BATT.

I looked up my scale on the internet so that I could order a new battery, only to discover that my scale had a lifetime lithium battery that should, in theory, last for as long as the scale. I dug deeper and found a disclaimer on the website that stated that if the scale was used extremely heavily - like in a gym locker room - the battery could die over time. But I had only had the scale for about three years and weighed myself about once a week — maybe twice a week during bouts of low self esteem. How could I have worn out a lifetime lithium battery?

Ben figured it out as soon as I put the question before him. Ripley broke the scale. Since we moved to New York a year ago, Ripley’s favorite place to sleep at night is, yes, on top of the scale. And the scale was probably constantly reading Ripley’s weight for hours at a time, all through the night, crying out for someone to please, please help this obese cat! Twenty-two pounds! Twenty-two pounds!

It must have died quietly sometime in the last two weeks. At the end it was probably only whispering: twenty-two pounds… twenty… two… pounds. The constant weight of my enormous sumo cat was too much for it, lifetime guarantee or no.

So. I don’t know if Ripley is losing weight. She seems hungry all of the time, when before she wasn’t. I take this as a good sign. She has gotten very good at bothering us at almost exactly seven in the morning and seven at night. She has even started begging whenever we’re eating anything, which she’s never done before. On the plus side, she seems to be much more energetic and active - not spending quite as much time in The Office.

In any case, I’m mailing the scale back to the company tomorrow and should get it back in a few weeks. In freak cases like this, they replace the scale for the cost of shipping. Despite not knowing our progress, we’ll keep Ripley on her diet and exercise plan and in high spirits. I’m just worried about where she’ll sleep in the meantime.

Read the first installment of Ripley: Cat on a Diet

I don’t mind reading best sellers. In fact, I like some pretty mainstream authors who a lot of “students of literature” might look down on. Especially after reading a few heavy classics, I love to read something fast moving and plot driven - something by Stephen King, James Ellroy, or J. K. Rowling, for instance. If I see a lot of people reading some book on the train and in the park, I assume that there must be something there worth looking into and check it out.

But.

The Lovely Bones has got to be the most baffling, poorly written, jaw-droppingly bad book that I have ever set my eyes on. It is truly a black, black tragedy that the words in this book were placed in that particular order, published, and distributed. How could this have ever possibly been popular? Is it for the same reason that the song “My Humps” hit number one?  I mean, I don’t technically believe in burning books, but this novel really got me thinking.  About burning it.

If it serves any use at all, it might be a perfect guide on how not to write a book. Here are some of my gripes, problems and issues that we can hopefully use to prevent something like this from ever happening again to us, our children, or our children’s children:

It is filled with some of the worst sentence-level writing that I have ever encountered. From bad description to horrible grammar to utterly confusing metaphors, Sebold covered it all. A tell-tale way to spot a weak writer? They can’t stop weirdly describing people’s eyes.  Don’t believe me? Try this sentence: “Her eyes were like flint and flower petals.” Or this one: “The tears came like a small relentless army approaching the front lines of her eyes. She asked for coffee and toast in a restaurant and buttered it with her tears.” Really? She buttered the coffee and toast with her tears? Or this one, this time about someone’s heart: “Her heart, like a recipe, was reduced.” What the hell?

And here’s my favorite eye description in the book: “Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.” That’s right. Ferocious olives. I’ve read MadLibs that make more sense than that.

It seems to lack a plot. You know, that thing that books are supposed to have. I’ll never forget my first workshop with Brady Udall, in which he threw my story onto the table and said, “This isn’t a story, Sarah, it’s a situation.” And as much as I despaired when I got home, he was right. Sebold has the same problem: her book is a really long situation. A girl dies and watches her family from heaven. Okay. That’s nice. But what do the characters want? What drives the story forward? Nothing. The characters get older and keep bumping into each other. Things change, and things often do, but there is no forward movement and certainly no building of suspense.

Since there’s no plot, the ending is just a bunch of weird stuff happening. I read the last thirty pages on the train this morning, and couldn’t stop a few outbursts: “Oh, no she didn’t!” I’d say, talking to Alice Sebold and her crazy ways. She is just plain bold when it comes to doing whatever she feels like, and she feels like doing the weirdest stuff ever. It’s not that I don’t want to write spoilers here, it’s that I can’t even explain to you what happened at the end of the book. And I bet she can’t either. I’m not exaggerating.

She doesn’t create a world I believe in. I can handle magical realism. I can handle science fiction. Hell, I can even handle the idea that when we die we go to heaven and look down on our relatives. But the worlds that are created have to be consistent and believable. It seems that she makes up rules for her world as the story goes on and as she needs to force her characters to do certain things. It’s like she’s an insane god lording over the pages of the book. By the end, it’s almost scary.

Her characters never have interesting or complex thoughts. Not even the serial killer or the mother whose daughter was murdered. It seems that Sebold’s characters do one of two things: they laugh (which means they are happy) or cry (to butter their toast, somehow, when they are sad). As you might guess, there is a lot of laughing and crying in this book. When a character is confused, they laugh and cry at the same time. This also happens often.

I feel a little better after venting. But I’m still deeply sad and angry. I feel like my own writing might have been permanently damaged by reading this book… like a couple of… ferocious… olives?  

Ben and I have always struggled with Sundays - the depression, the sloth, and, many times, the lingering hangover. Sunday is the perfect combination of regret for your wasted weekend and dread for the coming week. A sadly ticking clock.

But - a year or two ago we started Sunday Dinners. On Sunday night, we decided, we would cook, eat, and forget about how we would inevitably feel in the morning. We would relax and celebrate the freedom of the weekend until the minute we went to bed, filled with delicious comfort food.

Cooking is something that I’ve become increasingly interested in as I’ve gotten older. My mother, my aunts, and my grandmother are all accomplished southern cooks bursting with recipes that have been fine-tuned through the generations. And although I try to hold off on the gravy during the week, Sunday is the day to break out the sausage, the flour, the beef, and the butter.

Even the most depressing act of Sunday night, making your Monday work lunch, is transformed into lovingly placing some leftovers in some Tupperware and whispering to yourself, “it’s always better the second day.”

Cooking is also very relaxing for me - a creative outlet that doesn’t, for a change, involve me weeping in front of a keyboard. I get to chop and grind and mix and I get a finished product in a few hours that doesn’t ever get workshopped. Just eaten.

In any case, I thought I’d share with you my recipes each week and see if I can’t start improving Sunday nights everywhere. I’d also love to hear about your favorite recipes. This week I made my mom’s beef stew (Ben made garlic bread and cleaned the kitchen afterward). It’s hard to screw up, cheap, and awesome for the first real week of fall. And - your apartment smells like stew all day (which I think has been proven to have the same effects as Prozac).

BEEF STEW

1.5 pounds beef
2 large potatoes
2 carrots
1 celery stock
1/3 cup of flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 capful Kitchen Bouquet  (you can find this old school product in any grocery store, usually in the instant gravy section even though it’s more of a spice)
other veggies (whatever you feel like or have around - green beans, corn, peas)
spices (salt, pepper, bay leaf, parsley, oregano, thyme, rosemary, garlic, whatever you feel like, fresh is always better)

Heat oil and garlic in a large Dutch oven or pot. Cut beef into bite-sized cubes. Dredge cubes in four, salt, and pepper. Add to pot along with chopped onions and finely chopped celery. When the beef is browned but not cooked through, add water until the beef is just covered (add more water if you like a thinner stew). Add the Kitchen Bouquet and spices. Cover and simmer for about an hour. Add diced potatoes, carrots, and any optional veggies. Cook on low for another hour or two - longer if you like it mushy and thick, shorter if you like the potatoes and carrots firm and completely intact. If you like your stew really, really thick, take your spoon and mash some of the potatoes against the side of the pot.

Serve with warm, buttery garlic bread made by your boo. Watch Sunday night football. Whatever you do, don’t check your work email or think about Monday morning.

First, some gushing: Geoff Dyer is my favorite non-fiction writer ever and probably the best and most interesting author that you’ve never heard of. In these desperate days of tell-all memoirs, dry scholarly works, and self-help books, Dyer has forged ahead at full speed, writing self-deprecating, smart, and funny genre-bending essays and books. And you can tell how much fun he’s having.

His book Out of Sheer Rage, which is simply impossible to categorize, forever changed the way I look at writing. The book, which is about him wanting to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, read like a 300-page preface to a book that doesn’t exist and promoted replacing literary criticism with, well, more literature. Reading it felt like someone embracing me and whispering in my ear, “It’s okay to have fun, Sarah. It’s okay to try new things. Really, it’s probably what you have to do.” In fact, in writing about him publicly, I feel like I’m giving away a secret.

So - why did it take me so long to read But Beautiful? I bought it a few years ago just because Dyer wrote it, but never read it because I didn’t really have an interest in or knowledge of jazz. Fortunately, though, I picked it off the bookshelf last week and found myself in love all over again.

How should a person write about jazz? After a typical Dyer-esque inner struggle in which he tried everything and then dismissed it all, the answer was clear: he would follow the rules and ways of the music. The result is a collection of eight chapters, each focused on a different jazz legend: Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Chet Baker.

Are these chapters fiction or non-fiction? True or not? Well, Dyer says, um, yes and no. He took from a lot of famous stories and quotes (standards) and then adapted them (improvised) and basically did what he felt like. The result captures the spirit of jazz more than any academic essay or novel or biography ever could. As I learned the tenets and tendencies of the music, I saw them being utilized by Dyer in his own prose at the same time. And this is all on top of his beautiful, funny, and straightforward writing style.

Just like Duke Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane ” Or Charles Mingus’ “Open Letter to Duke” (see how much I learned about jazz?), Dyer’s book is a tribute and also a work of art in it’s own right - it steals, echoes, references, riffs, and retells. It’s word jazz. Those who know a lot about jazz will pick up on many more of the allusions and the hidden quotes while those who don’t know much can just sit back and enjoy the music of the prose and learn as they go.

Not to mention the heartbreaking portraits it paints of the artists themselves and their often-tragic lives on the road and on stage - in between drug and alcohol addictions, discrimination, violence, mental illness, and, well, the blues. As someone who has always had trouble listening to jazz, I can now access it and understand it better - envisioning Mingus sitting at the piano that could only fit in the kitchen of his small apartment, composing among the daily lives of his wife and children. Seeing Lester Young’s young talent be destroyed by life in the army (the most jazz-killing environment you can imagine). Sitting in the car with Duke, perpetually on the road.

And for those readers still itching to know some facts and read some traditional criticism, Dyer attached a 30-page essay to the back of the book. Although the essay is interesting and solidifies much of what you’ve just read in the body of the book, it seems a bit like an apology for being so whimsical (or, perhaps, something his editor made him add). Either way, it doesn’t take away from the bulk of Dyer’s project.

This is just one of those books - I want to scream its name from the rooftops.

I think I need a new word. Ever since Ben started to travel about a week out of the month, I’ve started to have a new and strange feeling when he’s gone. It’s like missing someone without the sadness because I know he’ll be home in a few days. It’s not anticipation, exactly, because I kind of revel in the feeling of missing him. And it’s not a yearning or longing or craving - those words are too active or aggressive or melodramatic for this feeling.

It might be like when you’re driving long distances alone and you get hungry but keep passing exits and then you pass a few more exits after that, instantly regretting it when the turnoffs zoom past. At the same time, it feels like you’re finally getting somewhere and you have that nice feeling of knowing you want something.

No, it’s not quite like that at all. One of my non-fiction writing teachers, Danzy Senna, once told us that detail and precise description can travel much farther and go much deeper than metaphor ever could. She said, “Every night before bed my grandmother would apply red lipstick and then turn off the light. No metaphor can capture the feeling in that.”

So - let me try again:

First I notice the things that only he uses and how still they are. I’m used to these things shifting and transporting themselves throughout the day, propelled through the apartment by his everyday tasks and habits: his desk chair pushed in and then pushed out, his shoes disappearing and reappearing their way through our rooms, the red tablespoon he stirs his coffee with jumping from the cutting board to the drying rack and back to the cutting board again.

Then I notice the empty places hovering around the still things and I try to fill them up. I use his towel instead of mine. I drink water out of his coffee cup. I sleep on his side of the bed and drape my arm across the covers to where I’m newly missing. Do I miss me instead now?

I do all the things he doesn’t like and revel in them. I embrace his pet peeves - I eat one forth of a donut and put the rest back in the box. At the same time, I avoid doing things that both of us like. No Jeopardy, no reading in bed, no darts or videogames, no diner food. It’s not that these things are sadder to do alone or that I think Ben would be sad if I did them without him, it’s more that I want to cleanse my system of our pretty content life together. I want to fast from it.

The only thing that bothers me is the silence. The city noises leak in louder than usual and the sounds of my own small fidgeting bother me - fingernails scratching skin. About six months ago I figured out that the Food Network turned down low is about the best white noise you can get (I learned how to braise things and I barely noticed) and I often leave it on over night. I leave the lights on, too, which I think is silly even when I’m doing it.

Ben calls in the middle of the night from bars. He’s just gone to the weigh-in, the fight, the promotion, the radio show, the interview, the photo shoot. The noise in the background vibrates through the ear piece loud enough to fill my empty room.

I know he’s not missing me in the same way that I miss him because he’s on a whole different planet while I’m still in the midst of our normal life and apartment. But I know he probably misses me in a whole different way, from his week filled with strangers and strange humming hotel rooms, the adrenaline of late nights and early mornings. That muted loneliness that comes from business, too many beers and a room full of milling people. He might even need a whole new word for it.

I realize it might be weird or possibly offensive to review these two things together, but stay with me here. I hope it goes somewhere.

When Ben travels for work, which is about once a month, I try to fit all of the things that I enjoy doing alone and that also tend to annoy Ben into one glorious evening called Sarah Night. Sarah Night often involves reading O Magazine while watching the Oprah show in the background. Sarah Night usually involves gossiping with old friends on the phone and ordering so much sushi that the restaurant puts two pairs of chopsticks in the takeout bag. Sarah Night always requires the watching some combination of my Sex and the City box set, a Netflix’ed documentary, and corny reality TV shows, probably while in my sweatpants.

Now you might understand how that last night, after polishing off bento box like it was my job, I watched Born into Brothels, the Oscar-winning documentary about the children of prostitutes living in the red light district of Calcutta, and Kid Nation, CBS’s inspirational new reality series about children working together to run a ghost town - you can watch and enjoy it with your whole family!

As weird as this might sound, watching them back to back was pretty moving - it was like spending three hours inside the minds of children during what is a truly strange and baffling age range, between eight and fourteen years old. Not more than a few minutes in to the documentary, I began to realize something: before this, I was a terrible kid-ist. Watching Kid Nation right afterward solidified the point.

As I watched, I began to pick out parallel scenes in the two shows (purely coincidence, of course) that sometimes seemed like echoes of each other and at other times seemed like responses or reactions. Really, the differences and the similarities between these two groups of kids were equally surprising.

Here are some things that stood out to me:

Adaptation:  In both shows, I was blown away by the children’s ability to adapt and accept whatever came into their lives. Perhaps this is a function of being so young that they aren’t sure what’s normal yet, or perhaps it’s because they still implicitly trust adults. But I don’t really think that it’s either.  It seemed like it was much simpler than that - children seem to be more willing to shift perspectives, change their opinions, or concede that they’re wrong. They’re not embarrassed to learn things or admit to feeling scared, trapped, homesick, etc. They’re just plain curious.

Dreams for the future: I think the big difference in the two groups was the scale of the children’s aspirations. The American kids want to be presidents and beauty queens and firefighters while the brothel kids had utterly accepted their lot in life and understood their situation. On of the  kids even said, “my mom used to joke about sending me to study in London, but we don’t even joke about it any more.” I find both outlooks equally weird: the almost-harmful idea that you can do anything that you set your mind to (not exactly true, we find out in our teens) and the definitely-harmful-but-probably-true idea that if you’re the poverty-stricken uneducated daughter of four generations of prostitutes and drug addicts, you’re stuck with your lot. Either way, though, both perspectives seem like coping mechanisms for understanding the future when you are young.

Play:  Kids play. No matter what. And, corny as this sounds, it is joyful to watch. One of the brothel boys flew a kite on the roof of his building while his mother “worked the line,” one of the other girls found time to play even though she worked cleaning houses from 4 AM to 11 PM. The same phenomenon happened in Kid Nation - hungry, scared, and homesick, the kids quickly developed games and imaginary worlds anyway. It was awesome.

Oh, and: All of the kids seemed… smart. Or, more like little adults than I usually think of them. Even though they acted more immaturely and emotionally than adults, the complexity of thought was there even in the eight year olds. In Born into Brothels they interview a girl who calmly explains the logic of why she would have to join the line even though she didn’t want to. In Kid Nation, there was a surprisingly moving scene when one of the boys delivers an almost old-timey speech about what they were in the ghost town to accomplish. It seemed like, except for their size and some fine-tuning, kids were more or less like you and me.

I spent some time that night thinking back to when I was that age. I have this one very distinct memory of my tenth birthday. It being 1991, my best friend gave me a ridiculously oversized button of Jordan from the New Kids on the Block and I hated it. Not just because I hated the band, but because I was broken-hearted that my best friend didn’t seem to know me at all. When I cried about it to my mother she assumed that I was upset about the gift and not about the exposed ignorance or thoughtlessness of my friend. I remember thinking: Oh, God, she thinks I’m a kid. What a terrible misunderstanding.

None of this may be very surprising to people who work with or have kids of this age, I suppose, but it was very affecting for me. Kid Nation suffers from some bad production and super-stupid artificial team challenges, but there are smaller, more subtle moments of real humanity in it that were impossible for even a prime time reality TV series on CBS to completely eradicate.