Wednesday thoughts

Piecemeal thoughts on a Wednesday:

“Like” and “like” and “like”—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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It is easy for me to forget that God cares about little things. I’m a little thing, after all.

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Even though I very much hope one of the candidates loses, if I am really being honest with myself, I don’t think much will change at all, regardless of the victor. Such is the nature of the American political machine. It has made me an unapologetic cynic with regard to all politicians everywhere. Machiavelli was the one to convince me not to become a political science major during my freshman year and I still think of him when I watch the debates or muddle through social media posts; it’s all a farce, all a dirty game.

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I miss my family.

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I need to read some lighthearted, dreamy fiction. Flannery O’Connor and Jesmyn Ward and Samuel Beckett all back-to-back = Violent, dark times. I need some fluttering, social web-spinning, 19th-century British ladywriters, STAT.

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Lately, I have been so thankful for my job and for the work that I do. I am grateful for my coworkers, for the camaraderie that we have, for the rarity of our very happy workplace coexistence. I love being an editor. I’m so glad I found this profession.

♦

New Life Goal: Read 100 books a year for the rest of my life.

That which you do not know

Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

I recently started Annie Proulx’s collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (which includes the story “Brokeback Mountain,” famous because Ang Lee adapted into a film). I have loved Proulx since I read The Shipping News a few years ago and was excited to begin this collection. I’m only 60 pages in, but it’s been wonderful so far.

Here’s what it’s making me think about:

Annie Proulx comes from a different universe, as far as I’m concerned. She lives on a 640-acre ranch in Wyoming. These stories are about Wyoming people: Ranchers, weathered wives, wannabe bull-riders. I don’t know the first thing about life in Wyoming, but Close Range makes me feel like I do.

This collection stands in contrast to another set of short stories I read a few weeks ago, I Sailed with Magellan, by Stuart Dybek. I Sailed with Magellan is focused on the trials and tribulations of boys growing up on Chicago’s South Side. That’s another universe I don’t know anything about. I’ve never been an immigrant boy fighting my way through life in downtown Chicago. Neither have I been an aspiring bull-rider in Wyoming. But Proulx succeeds in something that Dybek does not: She manages to make her universe accessible to people who have never seen it, who have never known it. Dybek, while also a gifted writer, drops some kind of veil between his characters and their stories and his readers. I couldn’t get close enough to Dybek’s characters to really know them.

The distinction has been puzzling me ever since. What is it that Proulx does to make her universe accessible that Dybek does not? The best I can get at an answer is that Proulx’s characters seem to have more globalized, relatable flaws and desires. Dybek’s boys are very localized; they have Chicago problems with Chicago answers. Proulx’s people live in the vast, empty planet of the Wyoming plains, but their problems are our problems, too. In “The Half-Skinned Steer,” we recognize the self-sufficient old man who thinks he can make it on his own. We know Diamond Felts and his experience of the conflicting tug between freedom and protection in “The Mud Below.” We have seen them all before.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is not related to my thoughts, but this passage is from Annie Proulx’s 2009 Paris Review interview. I love her description of the joy and arduousness of writing, as if it were like manual labor:

There is difficulty involved in going from the basic sentence that’s headed in the right direction to making a fine sentence. But it’s a joyous task. It’s hard, but it’s joyous. Being raised rural, I think work is its own satisfaction. It’s not seen as onerous, or a dreadful fate. It’s like building a mill or a bridge or sewing a fine garment or chopping wood—there’s a pleasure in constructing something that really works.

Personality and profession

Click for source.

I was speaking with two senior editors yesterday about some book proofs we’d all been working on that had gone terribly awry, through no fault of our own. We were debating what to do, when, after proposing a course of action, my boss said, “But does that make me a control freak?”

“Of course it does!” The other said. “You have to be a control freak to be a decent editor.”

This made me start thinking: How much do our jobs have the potential to change our personalities? Our habits, our pet peeves? Or do we pick our jobs because they conform to our preexisting personalities?

For example, I think about my father, who is a computer engineer, and thus has a constant compulsion to innovate, to rewire, to upgrade. Or my uncle, who is the town fire chief and has a corresponding fixation with household safety. Or my mother, who is a teacher and has a deep focus on turning every moment into a “learning opportunity.”

Thinking in that vein, here are the habits and obsessions that being a copy editor has engendered in me:

• A preternatural sense for finding punctuation errors in text. Sometimes I feel like I can sense them before I even read the paragraph.
• Compulsive need for correctness in all things, especially factually and grammatically.
• Googling like a BOSS.
• Soul-level pain if I leave out a needed hyphen, apostrophe, comma, etc.
• Need to tell everyone that “is” needs to be capitalized in titles.
• Compulsion for mental and spatial organization.
• Being obnoxious about little stuff.
• Extreme timeliness, meeting deadlines way early.
• A clean inbox. If I get more than eight unanswered e-mails in my inbox, I start to stress.
• Excessive list-making. But you already knew that.

What about you? Has your job created any personality quirks in you? Or merely amplified the ones that you already had?

Manual laborer

I know I should be careful what I wish for, but today I really want a job that requires manual labor. OK, maybe not eight hours of manual labor, but at least SOMETHING more than the few minutes spent getting up from one’s desk to go to the bathroom and replenish one’s cup of tea. I was not prepared for how utterly lethargic a full-time desk job would make me feel. Some days I practice ballet moves that Catherine showed me when I move up and down the hallways, just so I won’t go crazy. I haven’t been caught yet.

These are the outdoorsy and/or active jobs I would not mind having in temperate seasons:

• Orchid gardener
• Dog trainer
• Dog walker
• Governess
• Photojournalist
• Old rich lady’s traveling companion to Europe and The Orient
• Painter of large canvases
• Stable-boy
• Letterpress stationer (OK, not a ton of activity here, but more than I’m getting now)

What about you? Do you get to move around for your job? Do you hate it? Do you envy my slothful station?

Speaking of envy, last night at the Newlyweds’ Small Group we talked about the difference coveting, envying, and being jealous and we discovered that there are perceptible differences between each word. It was very exciting.

It’s been a quiet day over here and the snow is falling intermittently. Yes, snow. Even though yesterday we enjoyed 65-degree temperatures. It’s enough to drive a woman mad. Just when you’ve tasted spring, it gets jerked away from you again.

This weekend I finally decided that I’m going to volunteer at the local ASPCA. I am very excited about this, but I also feel guilty about it, for reasons that I may or may not decide to enumerate here.

Happy weekend!

Here at last! I’m excited. We might get to catch a film or two at the Virginia Film Festival that’s happening here this week, and we will get to spend lots of quality time with the Pratts and Granddad.

Back and forth about grad school still. Not too jazzed about it after reading this little piece in McSweeney’s: An Open Letter to my Abandoned MA Degree. The opening paragraph says it all:

Dear Abandoned MA English Degree,

We could’ve been big, MA English Degree. God damn huge! Working together, our forces finally combined with BA English Degree to form that ancient tripartite power of analysis, critical thinking, and original content. We could have taken the world by storm. There was no shortage to where we could have gone: non-paying internships at publishing houses, a PhD program, the list… well, the list kind of peters out there, but man, what we could’ve done in either of those, it would’ve really set the world aflame! But alas, here is where we must part ways. Two semesters into our supposed two year relationship I must take my leave from you.

And then there’s that exchange in “30 Rock”:

LIZ: We might not be the best people…
JACK: … but we’re not the worst:
LIZ, JACK [in unison]: Grad students are the worst!

So, today is a “no grad school” day. Tomorrow will probably be different. But today, I’m thinking, “Hey. I have a job. A pretty real job. It might not be super-fun or challenging, but I have a job. Which is more than most English MA’s can say.”

Also. OMG. This is the reason that I often wish I had straight hair and red hair. Catherine could totally do this; she’s the queen of chignons. Now that I finally found hair pins (not bobby pins, hair pins), I might try it. I’ve also been considering trying to straighten my hair every now and then. I feel like dry-ish winter is a good time to attempt such a daring and risky endeavor.

Until Monday, nerds!

Thoughts

- The only place you can go on the Internet and not read nasty comments–literally, the ONLY place–is The Daily Puppy. For realz. There are about 200 comments with every puppy and everyone just says a variation of the same thing: “Eeeeeeeee, you are so precious I want to EAT YOU UP!!!” or “OMG you CANNOT be this CUTE!!! LOLZ .” Stuff like that. It’s comforting, in this vitriolic world of totally crazy and aggressive online commenters; dare I say, it is a breath of fresh virtual air.

- Thanks, Twinings! I learned how to pronounce “rooibos” tea. Want to know? It’s “roy-BOSS.” Now I won’t sound stupid when I get it at the Tea Bazaar.

- I want to be friends with the cool girls at work.

- I am going to walk home tomorrow from work. This is because Obama is coming for a visit (stumping for Tom Periello), and all of the roads are going to be shut down near our house. He’s coming to speak at the Pavilion, which we can see from our bedroom window. We want to go hear him, but I’m worried I’m going to miss it. According to Google Maps, it’s going to take me 1 hour and 7 minutes to walk home. Adventure! I’m actually kind of looking forward to it.

- Have I mentioned that I can’t wait to see my family?

- Confession: I probably look at the “Pets” section of Charlottesville Craigslist and/or the Charlottesville SPCA once a week. Just to tempt myself with the love I can’t have.

- Hannah and I talked about Japan last night again at The Local and my longing to return was reinvigorated. I think I’d like to live there for a year. Teach English, maybe? We’ll reevaluate this plan after Guion gets his degree.

- Coworker: Calling yourself Jim Halpert would be inaccurate. We are not that cool.

- Hear me, ye Interwebs: I am NOT PREGNANT.

- I kind of want to be Very Mary Kate for Halloween. Anybody know where I can buy a sweet blond wig?

More than biology

I just processed a submission to our academic journal from a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. He used Wikipedia as a source. Come on, dude. Do you want people to take you seriously? Or maybe he’s not entirely to blame. Maybe one of his students wrote it and he isn’t a careful proofreader… Either way. Ha-larious.

Guion read his work last night at the weekly MFA reading series that happens at The Bridge. He was a great hit, of course. I was very proud. Whenever I hear him read his work, I am reminded all over again what a truly gifted writer he is. It’s a nice phenomenon. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.

In other news, I can’t WAIT to go home for Thanksgiving! I miss my family so much. This sprawling family-wide e-mail chain that we’ve got going is only compounding my homesickness.

The Feminine Mystique is good, but it’s not exactly exciting to read. I think it would have really rocked my world–as it rocked everyone’s world–in 1963, but in 2010, so many of these observations aren’t true anymore. One critical one being that women now outpace men in receiving both bachelor’s and doctorate degrees. This also means that the problem of women forcing themselves to get married and make babies as soon as possible–thereby forfeiting their intelligence and their identities in the cult of sacred motherhood–is no longer much of an issue anymore. Women get jobs now. They still don’t earn as much as men for the same positions, but they are working. So, there’s that, which is something I’m sure Friedan, were she still alive, would find encouraging.

I think the main thing I’ve learned from The Feminine Mystique is a point that is very subtly laid beneath the text by Friedan. Essentially, it’s this: Women count as human beings, and they count as far more than their mere biological, reproductive capacity. I reject the notion that is especially popular among Christians, that a woman should bear and raise children and do nothing more. Men are allowed to exist and function in the world beyond their mere reproductive function. Why can’t women?

Anticipate me

We’re setting our 2011 goals for ourselves at work. For some reason, all I can think of is Tracy Jordan, screaming at his attendants: “You need to anticipate me! Where are the French fries I did not ask for??”

Last night, we went to the weekly MFA reading series that’s started up at The Bridge (the hipster arts cooperative a block from our house). It was really fantastic, even though I had to leave before the slam poet read. We listened to a funny, sad, thoroughly postmodern short story by one of the fiction writers, Joe. He was great and the story was great and we hung on his every word. I admired this little community of writers, who have been so welcoming to me even though I am not one of their own. I felt like we were in a Bible study or something, the way everyone leaned on each other and sought vulnerability. A Bible study with gleeful obscenities and 40-ounce PBRs.

We are jetting off for the beach this weekend for the long-awaited nuptials of Rose and Kemp! We’re staying in a house with a bunch of friends and I’m really looking forward to the escape. Let’s hope the hurricanes will hold off for the weekend… Talk with you again soon.

Sugoi!

Best day of work so far, probably, for a totally nerdy reason… I heard one of my coworkers complain that there was another difficult transcription to do. I just received the transcribing software and pedal, and so I offered to do it for her. “Are you sure you want to do it? The guy’s Japanese, so it’s kind of hard to understand.” I smiled. “I actually speak Japanese, so I would love to!” She shrugged and handed it over.

You can imagine my delight when I discovered that almost half of the tape is the subject speaking back and forth with his translator: in my almost-mother-tongue (i.e., Nihongo). Absolutely delightful. I feel like my head is going to explode. It’s great. All of these old vocabulary words that I used to know are coming back. Even though it’s rather difficult to understand–nothing like listening to a foreign language you’re still a bit rusty in when the conversation hinges on financial market examinations–I’m loving it.

I really need to get all of my old Japanese textbooks and dictionaries from home. I’m going to get better at this! I am. I wonder if I could audit basic Japanese classes at UVA? Is that allowed?

謙虚さを身につける。

How I found myself speaking Japanese at a table in Qdoba:

Two weekends ago, we took Caleb to the farmers’ market. I quickly noticed a man and a woman, dressed in yukata (Japanese cotton robes, worn in the summer) and selling Japanese bread (“pan”). Of course we tried some, and of course it was delicious, and of course I had to say so in Japanese. They were excited, and John, the man, handed me a flyer for a Japanese language table that met every Monday night at Qdoba.

Initially, I was very excited. I had been praying for some kind of opportunity to continue my study of Japanese, which had severely lapsed since I stopped taking classes at the end of my junior year. But as the days drew closer to Monday, my stomach started to fall. I knew my ability to speak had declined dramatically. I was embarrassed. I told Guion that I didn’t want to go anymore, but being the good husband that he is, he told me, “You are not allowed to back out just because you’re scared. If that’s the only reason you don’t want to go, then too bad.”

So we went. I was terrified. Even after we walked in, I wanted to step right back out and go home. But we sat down with Chase and the other guy (whose name I forget) and I started fumbling out what little Japanese I could remember. Then John, his wife, Kumiko (from the farmers’ market), and Suzuko (a professor of African American studies at Chicago State University) showed up. They were all pros, and I did look like a stupid child, but I can’t tell you how my heart jumped to hear Japanese spoken again. It was like learning how to swim all over again. I started to remember certain forms. Even though my tongue felt like it was made of brick, I was so happy. I am planning on going back next week. I hope that if I stick with it, I may even be able to obtain the level I had reached in Tokyo two years ago. Maybe. Thanks for making me go, Guion. 心の底から感謝します。(I thank you from the bottom of my heart.)

Also, coworkers: I am really sorry for eating those lovely little Fuji apples every day. I know I sound like a beaver during lunch hour. But I can’t help myself. They are just that GOOD.

(Title translation: Learn humility.)