The Year Without Internet

Love, by Snailback

2011-01-13T09:25:00.027-05:00

This is no longer a live, getting updated every day sort of blog. It is an archival, historical, this is what happened last year sort of blog. I'm pretty sure I will blog again at some point, but not right at the moment. In the meantime, if you'd like to find out what I'm up to, you can email me at esthermstar at gmail dot com. Or you can write to me at this address.

Esther Emery
62 Holyoke St
Quincy, MA 02171

If you're not someone that I have written to, and you don't want to write me a letter, and you don't want to ask me to write you one, just know that I WOULD write to you. I would write you a blog, and I would write you a personal letter. There is somebody who would do that crazy thing, who would put some love in an envelope and send it to you by snailback.

---------------

"Frog, why do you keep looking out of the window?" asked Toad.
"Because now I am waiting for the mail," said Frog.
"But there will not be any," said Toad.
"Oh, yes there will," said Frog, "because I have sent you a letter."
"You have?" said Toad. "What did you write in the letter?"
Frog said, "I wrote, 'Dear Toad, I am glad that you are my best friend. Your best friend, Frog.'"
"Oh," said Toad, "that makes a very good letter."

--from Frog and Toad are Friends, by Arnold Lobel

Return of the Jedi

2010-12-02T13:15:00.015-05:00

Well, that was disappointing.

I had planned to reenter cyberspace somewhat gracefully. This didn’t seem like too much to ask. After all, we're talking about the new, improved Esther: Year Without Internet Esther. I was going to come right to my blog and impress you all with my hard-earned wisdom and composure. I was going to be calm, and serene – I was going to float back onto Facebook.

And float I did. I floated right out of my head: -- reaching for this and grabbing for that, having two conversations at once while also deleting masses of junk email and ticking off the mental list of pages I had to check just in case something had happened that I would just DIE if I didn’t know.

Nick came into the room and said, “I wouldn’t want to be that keyboard.”

I closed my mouth.

What the hell happened? Was it all a dream? That chrysalis to butterfly transformation that I described to my penpals: did I imagine it? The calmness that allowed me just that morning to spend thirty minutes with a guitar in my lap, practicing the transition from a G to a D, over and over again; the open space in my brain that fairly yearned for crazy hard reading, from global economics to the history of US immigration policy: is it gone? Is it over? Am I an Internet junkie all over again?

For a couple of hours it sure looked like it. At one point I literally pushed now-3-year-old Milo off of my lap, saying things like “Just…just…just a second. Go play with your trucks. I’m almost done.” I was almost done for three hours.

Only minutes before I made my not-so-triumphant return to the Internet, I had been on the phone with Liz Darlington, whose daughter, Eleanor, is the same age as Stella. We were talking about our lives, the cities that we live in – now at opposite ends of the country - and about the Internet. Is the Internet a road by which we travel to certain destinations? Or is the Internet a city – the destination itself?

If the Internet is a city, yesterday, for me, it was Las Vegas. It was a Las Vegas of skin and lights, Las Vegas as it is understood by Bill McKibben in his book, Deep Economy: “an attempt to figure out what More might mean when you’ve already had too much.”

Eventually, though, it all stopped spinning. I sped up, or the Internet slowed down. Both, actually, because I made it through those backlogged emails, and the number of people I haven’t talked to in an entire year is a finite number. I don’t have that many friends.

And once I got stopped on the street corner, at the intersection of Friendship and Purchasing, and was able to watch a couple dozen cars go by, I understood that this experience only supports my thesis. It DOES matter whether or not I go on the Internet. It does matter what I think, and how I think it, and at what pace. I am so adaptable. I am so wonderfully capable of change. I can do as the Romans, and keep up with Joneses and squish myself into whatever outfit I imagine ought to fit.

This is an odd thing coming out of the mouth of a person who still likes to take the very biggest piece of carrot cake, but I’m not terribly interested in resurrecting the Internet Binge. I might even move this blog to a page with a more appropriate title -- someday, when I get around to being on the Internet that long. I do want to tell you about my experience of the previous year. And I want to do that at a measured pace. I got free, and I liked it, and I think we would all be disappointed if I couldn’t now display some of this restraint that I keep claiming that I've found.

Promising that there is more to come, at some point, let me close this with the most important announcement I can make. I did it. I accomplished what I set out to do. I went 365 days without accessing the Internet on any device: not my computer, not a phone, not somebody else’s computer. I didn’t do email. I didn’t do Facebook. I didn’t Tweet or blog or use Google. There is fuzziness at the edges of the experiment, as it felt like there had to be, to keep the center intact. Sometimes I used an ATM card. A lot of the time I didn’t. Sometimes I mailed letters to Amy to post on the blog. A lot of the time I didn’t. I taped a piece of paper over my caller ID and refused to use electronic kiosks. But I made exceptions to the kiosk rule – notably the airport parking garage – and the piece of paper eventually fell off.

It seems like now is as good as any time to admit, too, that I failed on the first attempt. In a bizarre series of events that felt totally out of my control (but obviously were not), on the very first morning of my experiment, I found myself on a library computer, using Google. I was shocked, but mostly shocked into greater resolve. At 12 noon, I started again, and the second time it took.

Am I glad I did it? I can't tell you how glad. There were some rough spots. There were some times when the whole thing just felt absurd and stupid. But there were also times when I thought, I might have gone my whole life without knowing this, without knowing how it feels to be this free.

A Word From Esther! Month 5

2010-06-08T21:34:00.007-04:00

62 Holyoke St
Quincy, MA 02171

June 1, 2010

Dear Internet,

I can’t do this anymore. It’s over between us. It isn’t you, it’s me. I think it’s time we started considering other options. I’ve found someone else!!

It happens, on occasion, when I introduce myself and my No Internet project, that my new friend finds an inconsistency in what is and isn’t allowed. He or she appears to greatly enjoy this.

“You use a computer to type your letters? Isn’t that cheating?”

“Wait, you have an answering machine?”

“Why don’t you use an ATM card? What does that have to do with the Internet?”

There is, I assure you, method to my madness. I may not be following the rules that you, my new friend, think I should be following, but I am following some rules.

I do not use electronics to facilitate communication. Another way of saying this is that I don’t have conversations with computers. I use a computer for information storage and retrieval, assuming (maybe foolishly) that I am taking out exactly what I put in. But whenever my purpose is communication with another being or collection of beings, I attempt to keep my voice intact. I do use the phone. I do have an answering machine. I do write letters. I do not blog, Tweet, Facebook, email, use ATM’s, go in the self-service check out line at the grocery store or frequent anything referred to as a kiosk.

Nick puts it a little more succinctly. “You’re trying to live in 1980, for some reason.”

The exceptions are few and unfortunate. I have cheated, more than once, at the self serve photo printing kiosk. I have essentially cheated by asking Nick to buy me something with his credit card. And twice now, in the unattended airport parking garage, I have failed utterly to put the pedal to the floor and smash the barrier. Oh, tragedy of responsible adulthood!

And these letters! These letters are cheating, friends, there’s no way to excuse it. My purpose is communication. The method is electronic. I don’t get on the Internet to post them, true, but that distinction appears more and more superficial as my real life without the Internet becomes more and more complete.

I didn’t send anything last month and a few people that I love have commented on it. “I’ve been looking for your letter!” Ladies and gentlemen, if you want me to write you a letter, it’s very easy. All you have to do is give me your address. You may be surprised by just how much I have to say to you. You may be alarmed by just how much I have to say to you. Send me a postcard and I’ll send you a novelette. Send me a novelette and I’ll send you a trilogy. That’s just the way I am. In the months ahead, I think, those are the only letters I’ll be writing.

However, with my excuses made, I do submit this final update. It is the six month report, the halfway mark. As I have done four times before, I am sending this in the mail to my friend Amy Chini, and asking her to post it for me on our blog. I will do my very, very best to be informative. This goes against my very nature. But there is information to be shared, and for that worthy cause I will attempt to silence the meandering philosopher within.

Unburdened by my natural tendency to expand and complicate ideas, the take home message of six months without Internet is horribly simple. There is no personal failing, no tedious requirement of living, no unpleasant reality that is eliminated by a ban on electronic communication. It still takes work to keep track of things and people. It still takes work to communicate. I continue to struggle with maintaining friendships. I continue to find it difficult to engage my intellect and parent my children at the same time. I continue to feel lonely. I continue to mismanage my time.

Similarly, there is absolutely no joy, pleasure or security that is not available to me for the asking. Letter writing has deepened connections with people I love. I have a regular schedule of phone conversations with family. I send and receive photos by mail. A steady stream of used books from local thrift stores satisfies the whole family of bookworms. The phone book turns out to work pretty well for finding things, as do newspaper event listings and paper maps. Personal finances are managed well enough by calculator, pen and paper. And human travel agents do still exist. You can find them in the phone book.

Shocking, almost, is this realization that the world doesn’t much care whether I’m on the Internet or not. No paradise. No inferno. Everything adjusts. Raised eyebrows quickly give way to forgetful apologies, which give way to silence. The ball is almost always in my court.

And so it follows that it is my own game that bears the change. Under my self-imposed conditions, I am required to observe and question almost every action that I take, from shopping to parenting to putting gas in the car. I am self aware. I am relatively unable to take short cuts. As a result, I experience a greater sense of personal integrity. I feel a little bit more like I’m telling the truth. I am better protected against Imposter Syndrome, as it appears in the larger community in its largest sense, as this vague feeling that I’ve misrepresented myself somewhere along the line and have gotten status and reward that I didn’t deserve. I am better protected against the nagging fear that at some point somebody is going to find me out.

At risk of sounding overly dramatic, I have felt a few times as though I had taken Neo’s red pill. Here I strike a note with people more or less my age, who remember immediately the image of Keanu Reeves waking up in a nightmarish world of feeding tubes and plastic pods. That nightmare reality, the red pill reality, had been veiled by a virtual world of computer-generated fiction, the Matrix, in the science fiction movie of that title.

I know well how that series of images was crafted to draw a response. Every detail, from the eerie soundtrack, to the precise timing of Neo’s rescue, to the unsettling absence of the color blue, was selected to maximize audience response. This is fiction. This is nothing like what I experience. And yet, I know that movies speak to true longings and true fears. That’s what they’re made for. I do not claim conspiracy. Nor do I claim that my physical awareness of my body is somehow inaccurate, that I have been tucked into a plastic pod, or have lost memories. I do not claim to be misinformed of the course of human history. I do claim, however, that the fragmentation of our experience into smaller and smaller pieces is, by definition, a loss of history. And a loss of history is a loss of reality. I do claim that our ever-developing capacity to imitate life through mechanical means has driven a stake between experience and truth. It is not the first such division, nor will it be the last. But this one, computer aided virtual reality, is growing. And I see that it will continue to grow. It is a Matrix without agents. It is an intentional, accepted diversion of our life force. It is the prison we choose.

Ahhh…now you’re worried for my health. But I am pretty sure that I have never been more healthy. As the project becomes more and more an integrated reality of living, and less a prank, it becomes harder to write about. It becomes harder to address these issues without being honest about my concerns, as a human being, a member of a society, and as a parent of small children.

And I still have six months more to go! Who knows how these thoughts will develop? The path forward is always more daunting than what lies behind. But as I declared above, I will do my best to see it out.

This goodbye seems to have no more or less awkwardness than any other kind of goodbye. I think we’re breaking up, Internet. It’s been great. Thanks for the good times. Have a nice life.

Yours Sincerely,

Esther Emery

A Word From Esther! Month Two

2010-03-04T13:07:00.002-05:00

Quincy, February 7, 2010

Dear Internet,

I miss you.

That’s the only honest way to start off a letter to the internet, which I’ve again asked Amy to post.

And after that…I don’t really know. The page is blank. I have fallen off my script. On the one hand, nothing much has happened around here. On the other, I’ve been launched into outer space.

For starters, I’ve gone off of politics. I didn’t blog about politics here, so it is only those who really know me who are currently picking their jaws up off the floor. I am off politics like someone goes off a drug. I am detoxing from the conflict, the name calling, the steady diet of anger, the dehumanizing of the enemy, the jealous guarding of one’s interests, and the perception of morality defined in the visage of kings. It. Is. Madness.

Now my phone is about to ring. A sister, a friend, a friend’s boyfriend… “We need you!”

And you do. I know that you do. How could I not know that, when I live in Massachusetts? This January (in a race that shall remain unnamed, like Voldemort) I was needed. At a play date with a fellow Democrat – and our three very youthful Independents – I heard that race described as a wake up call. Respectfully, I disagree. This race was nothing less than an opiate, one that kept the entire state of Massachusetts vibrating with fear and anger in the very same week that a chunk of the earth rearranged itself, crushing in the process 200 thousand human beings in Port au Prince.

In that week, my Sunday paper reports, eight million dollars were spent on the Race That Shall Not Be Named. More than four million on each side.

What does eight million dollars look like, I wonder, in medical supplies? In rice and beans and cooking oil? What does eight million dollars look like, in good will?

I had a strange moment shortly after the New Year, when, sitting on the edge of Milo’s bed, staring past Stella’s fuzzy head, through the doorway and on into the kitchen, I had a vision of myself being stitched back together. Uninvited came an image of fluid traveling freely over the seams, the whole length and circumference of my self, separating, recombining, and forming cohesive whole.

I do understand an idea of integrating partitioned aspects of the self. I have lived with this idea and even taught it: that a practice of attention, honest inquiry and forgiveness can bring back the orphaned pieces, once cut off by trauma or regret. But what part of me was being welcomed back into the fold? I couldn’t place it, couldn’t quite tell where this feeling of wholeness was coming from. Of greater concern, I couldn’t tell what breach had been repaired. I have felt so relatively healthy!

Hours later, in another moment rare moment of silence, after the kids had gone to bed, I was finally able to place it. This thing that is being put back together…is my train of thought.

I received a letter with a question; — and here I must interrupt myself to sing a song to the precious, steady trickle of letters! They are, in a word, sustaining. I’d like to brag that I have a “thread” going on gender, one on virtue, one on God, and another on intelligence and schooling. But to oversimplify these letters into “threads” is to oversimplify these people. My pen pals have the courage to share with me their hopes and fears, which is to say, they talk a little bit, every once in a while, about What Matters. How courageous! How unusual!

But that’s a side note. In a letter dated January 2, 2010, Kirsten Brandt writes, “How do we prompt dialogues? How do we have real conversations?”

And, for this month of January, I have directed myself to answering that question. It has brought me back, again and again, to the dinner table.

Cooking isn’t the only thing in my life that is moving out of Someday and into Now. Rather, my List of Things I Have Always Wanted to Do When I Have Time is seeing unprecedented turnover. My baby is in cloth diapers. I’m doing my own baby food. I’ve read the second half of the Old Testament. I can juggle three beanbags. Most everybody who ought to have pictures of my kids has pictures of my kids. Despite a truly impressive resistance to musical knowledge, last week I learned from my niece a little song, the four notes required to tune Milo’s ukulele.

But cooking is the most unexpected of my developing skills, and somehow the most important. I don’t have much to compare to, here, in my non-digital island. Is this my whole generation, or is it just me? Are there others of you who made it to age thirty and beyond without learning that pasta sauce doesn’t have to come out of a container? Or that you can make your own vegetable stock (and it’s cheaper and tastes better)? Or that it takes fewer steps to make bread than it does to make chocolate chip cookies? It’s too bad, in this, that I can’t see comments on this blog, but I will make an informed guess that I am not alone. If my mother, who literally wrote the book on country living, raised her youngest children on frozen dinners, chances are that some of you were raised that way as well.

Against the inertia of my former life, I am now learning how to cook. It’s a hard road, starting from so little knowledge, but I persevere. (Remember, without media entertainment in my life, I have really nothing better to do!) I have learned to make bread – although not nearly as well as my husband – and polenta, and short grain rice, and soups truly from scratch. I’ve nearly perfected the cranberry muffin, which success is mitigated by the fact that neither my husband nor my son really likes cranberry muffins. And, never mind that that the Sephardic bean soup was made essentially inedible by the enthusiastic addition of an extra jalapeno pepper, or that my apple muffins were unleavened, and not for religious reasons. There are successes, and there are failures, but mostly there is a sea change in my attitude towards how I sustain myself and my family. I am a creative being in the kitchen. I have a choice about what I eat. Putting food on my table can be an essay question, instead of multiple choice. And…I can invite people to dinner.

Question: How do we talk about politics without losing our very humanity? Answer: I am inviting people to dinner.

Aha! You see, those of you who were about to pick up the phone and chastise me, you may chastise me for my weakness, but not for betrayal. I am still in the fray. I am trying to go deeper into the fray. However, what I have been doing has not worked. Something needs to change. We are all human, and we are all hungry. I will not minimize, or be minimized. I will not be snowed by the infighting to the extent that I miss the greatest matter of that Race that Shall Not Be Named, which is that everybody feels betrayed. Who is betraying us? Is it really one politician over another? Or is it the unsettling possibility that we are all sitting at the table, counting our approval points, while the ship is going down?

“So what are we supposed to do?” asks my niece, who is not a resident of Massachusetts anyway, and looks as if she would like the whole darn thing that is politics to go away so we can go back to making pizza sauce and admiring Milo’s precociousness. “Vote for the person that we hate the least?”

Well, yes. That’s precisely what we are supposed to do. That’s precisely how our democracy is set up. What do we think of these people? That they are gods and goddesses? Or demons and demonesses? They represent blocks of people, not layers of stratosphere. They are not, in themselves, right action. What kind of drama has blurred the lines between politics and righteousness? Ah…but this is precisely the alchemy of a political campaign: to transform money received into messages to convert the many. Money into votes; votes into power. Money via drama into votes into power. And our media is so lifelike. We are so able to make our drama look like it is real. Money via reality into votes into power.

I don’t know, maybe I know too much about theatre. For listening to political campaigns? I should be earning union scale.

I do believe in right action. I do believe, ferociously, in civic responsibility. I don’t in any way eschew the ballot box. But my life is only so long! And my children are only this fragile, this vulnerable, for this short time! I see that the earthquake in Haiti could teach us our weaknesses. It could bring us closer to our vulnerability, which could bring us closer to one another. But, through the media lens, I see it only teaches us our fear.

I have plenty of fear. I won’t eat it. I won’t serve it. And I won’t pray to it.

Thus…After two months without the Internet, I am OFF the obsessive, multiple-choice politicking and ON to “Right Living, the Essay Question,” which is much harder, but which also gives my soul a space to breathe.

At this moment, the best thing that I can do for my country is to continue learning how to cook. Please, feel free to send me recipes.

Yours Truly, From My Kitchen,

Esther Emery

A Word From Esther!

2010-01-09T13:37:00.011-05:00

Posted by Amy Chini

Month One

First things first. By way of correction, I need to let you know that my Year Without Internet is costing 15 dollars per month less than I thought it would. I bring this up only because I wrote two whole posts on it back in my blogging month of November, and now those figures are all wrong.

When I called to cancel the internet, the nice young man on the phone explained to me that I could keep my promotional rate just by signing up for basic cable. This sounds like a racket, and maybe it is, but the end result is that my monthly bill is less than I expected, and if you want to come over, I now have basic cable. All you have to bring is the TV.

I’ve asked Amy to post this letter for me today, because I feel strongly that the conversation I started in my blogging month of November deserves to be kept alive. This is a conversation about our relationship with communication technology. It’s a conversation about love of “speed” and love of “ease,” and whether or not technology created to sate these desires is actually in any way improving our lives.

In this New Year’s week, I have heard (on the radio) and read (in the newspaper) a lot of references to science fiction. As adolescents, we used to read books that were set in 2010. These books had spaceships and aliens and artificial intelligences. It’s funny now to say, “Look, none of that has happened. None of it has come true. What fun we had with all our imagining!” It’s also funny to say, “Look, robots are real. Genetic engineering is real. Cloning is real. It’s true that we don’t press a little button on our chests in order to open a phone line, but our lines of communication are that ubiquitous, and almost as easy.”

In some small ways, these two worlds are converging. Science fiction has happened. Science fiction has come true. (Although, apparently, without the aliens.)

I am only one of a hundred voices this week that is noticing this. Many, many people are talking about how we observe and judge our relationships with communication technology, especially at the individual level. How do I, in my life, find the time to disconnect? How do I turn off the signal long enough to live here and now, in the place where I am?

My perspective on this is personal, related to a difficult thing that I have set out to do, by myself. On my solo journey, I am constantly measuring my self-reliance. Americans are a hardy bunch, and we talk a big talk about this, self-reliance. It might be the ability to trust that even without the pull of the crowd, one will still muddle along into the best possible action. It might be the faith that motivation will sustain, even in the absence of deadlines and hierarchies. Or it might be the ability to stop, even when everybody else is still moving.

This is the practice which emerges from the journey of my Year Without Internet, Month One: a practice of stopping.

This is the question which emerges from the same: Do you know how to stop?

As soon as I set out to stop, there emerge two smaller and more insistent questions. The first is “What do I do with myself?” And the second is “How do I get away?” I have tried, turning these over in my mind, to disengage them from one another. I will do a chapter on each one. But I can’t get them apart. They are the same question. “To do” is the verb for getting away. I do in order to escape.

At the end of this first month, I am very aware of the relationship between the internet and what I might call “busy work,” which is any work that you do that you don’t really want to finish. A good friend of mine, living in relative idleness after being laid off from his job, was asked, “What have you been up to?” He answered,

“I’ve almost finished reading the Internet.”

Of course he started reading it all over again the next day. But I have excluded that option. Without my bottomless well of busy work, what am I supposed to do with myself? Crossword puzzles? Or a cross stitch? Read magazines? Pick the lint off of all my sweaters?

Approaching the same problem from the other direction, it’s privacy that feels lacking. I realize that Facebook is not only a way to connect with people. It is also a way to stop connecting with people: namely, the ones who live in my house. These are the little ones, who try to connect in problematic ways like begging for another game of Airplane, or spitting food into my hand, or just endlessly interrupting my train of thought. But this is also that one person who is always and forever occupying my personal space, whose imperfections are a constant drag on my buzz, and whose traumas are the ultimate killjoy. These are my children, and this is me.

So…here I am in New England, sitting in the middle of piles and piles of snow, learning how to live with myself. And the wonderful letters seem to come around just exactly when I need them, like ceramics classes. And this household celebrated the battery-operated candle lights out of Christmas.

I am (mostly) glad to be exactly where I am, right now.

Exit, Pursued by Letters

2009-11-30T09:49:00.015-05:00

You can write to me at:

Esther Emery
62 Holyoke St.
Quincy, MA 02171

I will write back to you. (Holiday cards count. Postcards count.)

I am closing comments on all the posts except for this one. If you would like to talk to each other, please do so here. If you'd like to talk to me, all you need is a stamp.

Thanks for reading.

Apples and Apples (Envy)

2009-11-27T10:32:00.039-05:00

I've been saving this topic. This is my most personal reason for taking a year off the internet. It isn't metaphysics or philosophy. It isn't a plan to write a fascinating book, or to contribute to feminist theory, or even to build a beautiful argument for a simpler way of life. It is simply me, and what in this life is hardest for me.

I presented a thought experiment a while ago, in which I mentioned my "creative drought." That really happened. You might also call it burn out. It started on a Sunday in February, built gradually for almost a year, and then, one day, it overcame. The cause was not really motherhood, and it certainly wasn't the internet. It was more complicated, and less: this strange, deep conflict between working and living that I have spoken of here in so many different ways. At that moment, my work wasn't very good for my life.

I am an accomplished person. I excel. I understand that to be a verb, as in, "to show superiority; surpass others," and it is a practice that I have cultivated. Upon entering any arena, any field, I perceive the definition of success and I chart a course towards it. I take the advantages that I am given, shrug off the failures and, "just keep doing 'til it's done." Historically, if I thought I was not going to be able to succeed in something -- or if I didn't want it badly enough -- I wouldn't particularly try.

This isn't my favorite thing about myself. But it is the quality that has built my resume. It is a quality that makes me who I am. And it is the quality that burnt me out. Even without my practice of excellence -- which, depending on the mirror into which it peers, can also name itself perfectionism, workaholism, ambition, or OCD -- my art is one that slides easily into vanity. With vanity comes envy, and with envy comes distraction, and distraction, when you're trying to make art, is crazy-making.

This morning, sitting down to a post-Thanksgiving breakfast of pumpkin pie, I trailed my two older brothers to an Idaho summer about twenty-five years ago, when we lived for a short time in the basement of a soft rock radio station. We discussed some damage once received by that radio station's satellite dish, wondering if a poor, innocent woodland creature had received undeserved blame. And Jacob and I team-told our favorite bad kid story, about how we once pulled a couple of darts out of the remains of a car wreck on the highway, and Jacob accidentally sunk one about an inch into my thigh, and we worked together, brilliantly, to make sure that no adults ever found out so I wouldn't have to get a tetanus shot. (Never before or since have our unique motives been so precisely aligned. It taught me the definition of politics.) And then I remembered Jacob's records, which he loved, and then he remembered that I had taken one of his records, which he loved, and smashed it with a hammer.

I didn't remember that.

"You were jealous, I suppose," he said. "I really liked that record."

I don't like this memory. I'm taking immediate steps to re-forget it.

And that's why this post is personal. Envy is not digital. My envy is not digital. I have sisters, too, whose very existence has been a frail excuse for my most dangerous mirror-gazing. My sister's body is exactly like mine, except... Whether that is vanity creating envy, or envy creating vanity, it is a sure way to become distracted from whatever you care for most.

My sister in law, Daiquiri, once gave me permission to share her stories, because, as a blogger, she shares them herself, and today I'm going to take her up on that.

Daiquiri is married to my husband's brother. The first time I ever visited their home, I was 18 years old, and Daiquiri must have just turned 24. This now appears to be relevant. But at the time, the difference between us didn't seem to be explainable by something as insignificant as age. There is a Norse myth in which the Norns are said to spin and cut the threads of men: a gray, coarse thread for the laborers, and a finer, colored thread for the craftsmen, and every once in a while, a thread of pure gold for a king.

Daiquiri seemed to have gotten a really good thread.

When I was 18, like one third of college women, I had disordered eating behavior. I couldn't cook myself spaghetti. Daiquiri was hosting Christmas dinner. I had just dropped Organic Chemistry and was mourning the death of my future as a scientist. Daiquiri was a Mechanical Engineer. I was struggling hard with money, bouncing checks and barely staying in school. Daiquiri lived in a house, decorated like a catalogue, with two cars in the driveway. She was beautiful. And she was good at Christmas. And she was blonde.

She was blonde, and I was green, and dinner was not yet on the table when I said something unkind. Daiquiri told some version of these events on her blog more than a year ago, and, with her characteristic generosity, she indicated no fault on my part. But my ability to perceive the human heart is given, not learned, which is to say that I knew what I was trying to do then as well as I know it now. I spotted a weakness, and made an offhand remark, and watched it land. A similar effort to cut someone down a size has occasionally been helpful in the rehearsal room, but I do not recommend it around Christmas. I have deeply regretted it since.

There's a unique relationship, between sisters in law. We are not blood. We did not grow up together. We did not choose to be friends, but we are family. And Daiquiri and I are apples and apples. Even before I began to realize the sort of stunning degree of similarity between us, we were of a kind. Our husbands are like different shuffles of the same deck. Even our courtship stories are similar. It's almost impossible to keep from drawing the comparison.

Ten or twelve years later, I think I would have grown out of that comparison, or at least gotten over the sting, if I hadn't started reading Daiquiri's blog. "You mean," I said to myself as I read about twenty posts in one sitting, "she's also a writer?" And I'm thinking now of my friend Amy Chini, who is similarly competent in everything that I do, and many things that I don't. She's a playwright and a poet, and a very skilled painter -- much better than I am -- and crafty as hell, and she also is a musician whose recording of Hallelujah is treasured in our house because Milo and I both love it, and...oh, yeah, she also cooks. It might be nice to be angry at her for all this, but there she is, in perfect humility, just loving the hell out of me and my imperfections, so there's nothing left for me to do but to survive it, and allow my ego to be obliterated by her talent. In the end, there's no better feeling than that. That's the best part of friendship.

Theoretically, I feel the same way about Daiquiri. And, as long as I'm in a strong place, meaning that I'm already feeling good about myself, I do feel exactly that way about ultra-talented, inspiringly humble Daiquiri. But she also writes a blog. And my ugliest moments -- the moments of deepest insecurity -- are often the ones in which I find myself reading blogs. Lisel mentioned this phenomenon in a comment very early in our blogging month, so I know that I am not completely alone in this. If administered (in)correctly, the tonic of mommy blogs can make you feel completely terrible about yourself. All the other moms sound so smart, and so talented, and they always have these great ideas, and even though they're clearly human in the sense that they have the same experiences that I do, they are inhuman in the sense that they recover neatly from their traumas and wear them like pretty jewelry to their best advantage. I have problems. These other women have beautifully written, blog-sized moral tales.

When I'm feeling alone, I want friends. And I go to blogs. And blogs are not really my friends, even when they are written by my friends.

And here, some of you are saying, "Wow, she has some imagination, thinking blogs are her friends. They're just pixels on the computer screen."

But just as many of you are saying, "Blogs are my friends. She isn't using them right."

We know that blogs do not live or die on the social impulse alone. Daiquiri is a good writer. There's no other reason that I would have kept reading, since her conservative point of view has been a sore thumb in my liberal blogroll, and on half a dozen occasions she has said things that really, really got me steamed. And here it may feel like I'm headed to a revelation about jealousy -- that I'm going to find that my addiction to her blog is actually an expression of the envy itself, but, as always, it's more complicated than that...and simpler. I keep reading her blog because she's a good writer. She's a real writer. Like me.

But we are not only writers.

This is such an elementary lesson, about the dangers of oversimplification. We are not apples and apples. We are people. Daiquiri posts little slivers of herself, for her own entertainment and mine, and for her own edification and mine. Her words have purpose. But they also have virtual life. I can get confused. I can think we are actually talking to one another.

Daiquiri knows from reading my comments on her blog that I can debate politics, and I can. I do. But in person, Daiquiri brought up one of our differences and I almost burst into tears. She doesn't know, from reading my carefully composed words on her computer screen, which issues I can talk about with confidence, and which ones make me panic and fall apart. She didn't grow up with me. She isn't really related to me. What makes us think we know each other? Where did I get the idea that this was real?

This is the point in a post where I usually say, "The internet didn't create this problem. This is human nature, and digital media only expresses it." And then I link the other posts where I've said something to that effect. Except, I can't say that here. The internet did create this problem. The internet is this problem. The strange phenomenon of the virtual serial confessional and her virtual audience IS the phenomenon of the internet.

We are not apples and apples. Mommy bloggers, sisters in law, politicians, actors, directors. We are not equal units of humanity to be categorized and compared. We are people. And we are in great need of one another -- not just the knowledge of one another's traits to go in the little black book of who has what -- but our living vulnerability to one another: our precious ability to be affected, to forgive and to be forgiven, and to share the growth, and change -- and some would call it Grace -- that makes us human.

And there it is. This is the most personal reason for my Year Without Internet. Mommy blogs make me jealous, and I have a problem with jealousy. And now I am at home with these two babies, and it's the hardest job I've set out to do so far. As I face the challenges of full time parenting in a time and place that isn't especially appreciative of full time parents, I need every resource I can get. I can't afford to lose a single real friend to digital envy.

Deep Cuts, Trk 2

2009-11-26T22:03:00.012-05:00

Early in this blog month, I gave a post the title Deep Cuts. That title was meant to be a reference to the compilation albums that are 0h-so-helpfully created for me by iTunes Essentials: The Basics, The Next Steps, and finally, the Deep Cuts, where you'll find those lesser known gems and prized oddities that are only known by the lucky bastard who goes deep, preferably staying on iTunes as long as possible, double clicking on 30 second sound bytes of songs until his bank account balance drops by the double digits, seemingly entirely of its own accord.

On November 26, just a few days before I unplug, it feels like the right day to add a track to that compilation album. It has a 90 second drum solo, that only a purist could love, and that's the telephone. It doesn't offer the total anonymity of the internet. And it doesn't offer the soul-calming ease of being with someone face to face. It means listening to hold music. It means keeping track of phone numbers. It means practicing being a generous listener with the phone in one hand while Milo is threading figure eights around my legs.

And I'm not good on the phone. If I were to take one of those fun quizzes that test, "What Kind of Learner Are You?" -- and I am bravely resisting the impulse to do that, right this second -- I am certain that it would define me as a visual learner. Unlike the parrot I have for a son, I have a hard time remembering -- or even responding correctly to -- things that I hear without matching visual cues. After several years of racking up a mess of phone call slip-ups in which I spoke the wrong date, name, theatre company, or even play title, I actually made a point to move my professional interactions into cyberspace.

In that light...what I'm doing right now is crazy.

But, here I stand, with a goal and the will to achieve it, and I have many more reasons to leave the internet (for a while) than I do to stay. Prime among those reasons is the realization that the type of interaction that I've been having, even on this blog, is completely accessible to me through other means, if I'm willing to make the effort.

Toast to the Turkey

2009-11-25T14:53:00.006-05:00

I'm a Thanksgiving person. Like there are cat people and dog people, I'm a Thanksgiving person.

I think very fondly of the years that I sat at a table spread by Adam and Ben, who probably will read this at some point, and toasted our gratitude so elaborately that we might have fallen off our chairs before we ate. And I think very fondly of that one college-era Thanksgiving of "tequila rapido," with our friend Forrest's mom, who observed in the wee hours that I was too drunk to keep playing her games and so administered cold turkey, instead of letting me go to bed. And let me be clear that this isn't an alcohol thing, although those two vignettes are obviously from the days before pregnancy and breastfeeding. There's just a pure spirit of celebration that comes with Thanksgiving. I've successfully separated it in my mind from any historical events, and I celebrate it as ritualized gratitude for gratitude, in which you eat and give thanks and eat and give thanks until you can't eat and give thanks any more.

This year, I'd like to toast the turkey, and...

The chef, who is never me.

The many friends with whom I have reconnected.

All the forgiveness that I didn't deserve.

That I have someone in my life who actually believes that turkeys say, "gobble gobble."

Hot cocoa and every part of the distribution chain that brings hot cocoa to me.

That my husband stole a flower for me on the way home from work today.

That my husband came home from work today.

And...

Your blogs.

If you are a blogger, and you are reading this, I do mean YOUR blog. Even if I don't comment, I read it. And even if I don't read it very often, when I do read it, I tend to read back to the place where I left off when I read it before. And, just in case you still don't think I mean you, if you have told me something in conversation that I already knew from reading your blog, I probably didn't let that show.

Tomorrow, in my post-turkey state of regret and resolution, I will post about how reading blogs is bad for me. Given my particular weaknesses and imperfections, which include gluttony -- and there's the real reason why I love Thanksgiving -- that is true.

But today is the day before Thanksgiving, and I'm celebrating gratitude.

Today I'm saying thank you to all of you for letting me read your personal thoughts, and your poetry, and your rants, and your prayers. I'm saying thank you to all of you for letting me know that I'm not alone in so many things that I'm not alone in, like...injured kids, and sleep frustrations, and poor housekeeping, and work stress, and obnoxious theatre patrons, and being inspired to laugh by your baby for no apparent reason, and crying on your kitchen floor, and being deeply concerned about the world, and having a love/hate relationship with Starbucks, and WalMart, and Disney princesses.

Thanks for writing to me.

Some Bullet Points on Memory and Learning

2009-11-24T09:01:00.008-05:00

Although I am not yet off of blogging (as you can see) and I am not yet off of Facebook (as most of you can see), I have begun to change the way I access information. Right now I'm observing how changing the way I access information affects how I store information. It seems like I'm going to keep more of it in my brain. Here are a few observations clustered around that idea.

1. Telephone Numbers. I have to dial them. They are written down, and then I read them off the page and I dial them. If I were to be lost, without my address book, there are now several people whose numbers I could dial from memory...if I could only find a phone.

2. Directions. My map doesn't tell me what to do. The only way to choose between Mass Ave and Storrow Drive is to know the difference. As a result, I am more quickly developing a map of the city in my mind. I am my own MapQuest.

3. Books. Technically I can still search collections of books, by walking up to a human being and asking for help. But this is not the path of least resistance. Instead, weaning myself off of AbeBooks and Amazon, I am starting to browse. This takes a long time. The side effect of reading rows and rows of titles and authors is that you learn titles and authors. The advantage here feels counterintuitive, since my search engines organize the information so neatly according to my wishes that they could almost be writing me a personalized textbook. But, as countless college students have learned, textbooks don't do you any good unopened on the floor next to your bed. Learning only happens if I study.

4. Addresses. How many times have I asked you for your address? For those of you who know me -- my siblings in particular -- it's probably a lot of times. There's a change in energetic principle, here, from the back-end impulse in which I obtain the information from the source every single time I need it, to a front-end impulse in which I obtain the information from the source only once and write it down. I think of my stepmother and her address book, which was overflowing with information about her peers and her contacts and her loved ones. She never went anywhere without it.

5. Cooking. I am beginning to get all my cooking information from the same cookbook. It's a standard, Better Homes and Gardens. And to make this point I have to confess that I am historically very uncomfortable with cooking.

I can get the cooking done in a way that I couldn't have done five years ago, and I'm grateful for that, but it has remained a psychological strain. All the Epicurious recipes that I have found and then forgotten -- with that back-end energetic principle, like the addresses -- have not made a dent in my insecurity. I still don't know how to cook. I don't know those recipes. I don't remember how I did that crazy pineapple-duck for Christmas that one year. I don't even remember how I did the potatoes.

The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook is doing something different for me. It's always there. It's always the same. I can put my hands on it, and open it in the same spot on my kitchen counter. And as a result, I recognize that I am doing the same cooking activities over and over. The book has little insets, that function for me like a security blanket. That's how you pre-cook the meat, and how you defrost it, and how you chop the vegetables. And as I learn these stable guideposts, I'm starting to make a map in my head, not unlike my mental map of Boston.

I'm pretty comfortable with driving directions, to the extent that Nick and I do a little negotiation before we drive together: Is the hard part of this trip going to be the parking, in which case Nick should get into the driver's seat, or is the hard part of this trip going to be the navigating, in which case Esther should drive. I hadn't imagined that I could navigate cooking like that. I never thought I could relax in my kitchen, knowing that if I miss the turn to Leverett Circle I can just get off at Copley Square.

This hasn't happened yet. Please, don't invite yourself for dinner without giving me at least 24 hours to prepare. But I can see now, with no distractions and no excuses and no searchable Epicurious, I could actually learn how to cook.

Who Took My Five Minutes?

2009-11-23T08:13:00.021-05:00

Aside from Fuzzy Bear and Ben Bear, Milo's favorite toy is his Little Touch Leap Pad. It's a pink, bean-shaped, plastic thing, and when our friend Missy gave it to us, I was skeptical. I'm the sort of person who would go a Year Without the Internet; I'm also the sort of person who is suspicious of electronic toys. But, for many months now, this interactive book has been Milo's favorite -- and sometimes only -- solo activity. He turns the pages, and he presses the green "Go" circle, and in return, his pink, bean-shaped friend tells him stories.

His favorite of the books that go with this favorite toy is A to Z Adventure. It's been missing for more than a week. They're pamphlets, really, that you change out along with a corresponding cartridge, and it's a miracle that I haven't lost them all. But Milo is unforgiving. Once every day and sometimes twice, he tries to crawl up onto my lap -- even when I'm standing, in the way that toddlers do -- and says, "A to Z A'venture? We find it, mama? We find it?"

And I answer with my best Sympathetic Mommy voice, "I know, honey, it's missing. That's too bad. When I get some free time we'll do a big search, and I'm sure it will turn up. How about Animal World?"

On this Monday morning, reentering the weekday routine, I set out to find his precious book. I brought my full attention to the task, imagining that I might have to move every single toy he owns, only to find that A to Z Adventure was in a basket with his other books, pretty much right where we usually put it. I had forgotten that "lost" means something different to grown ups than it does to toddlers. Milo's book wasn't lost at all. It was behind something.

All this inspired me to do some math. The search took about two minutes: one minute for getting myself focussed, and another minute for flipping through his book baskets. Avoiding the search every single day of the last week? That was more than two minutes.

I've been meaning for a while to collect some scattered thoughts on time and technology, since I've been living my bare bones social life now for four weeks without a cellphone. I'm thinking today about the preciousness of a Five Minutes, and to whom that Five Minutes belongs, and how best we should try to protect it.

I met D.W. Jacobs a few weeks ago at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which is the oldest garden cemetery in New England. The poetry of a garden cemetery under fall colors is too obvious for me to do it justice here. You'd have to go yourself, to feel that it is almost impossible to exist in that place without imagining -- at least in a fleeting way -- that life is meaningful after all. At least, there is a deep interconnectedness between the life cycle of the human creature and the corresponding cyclical grandeur of something larger than ourselves.

D.W. travels a lot, and it has happened before, while breezing through the town in which I live, that he has suggested that we make an appointment for coffee. On previous occasions, we relied on our cell phones.

"I'll call you when I'm in the neighborhood."

"Okay, I should be around."

D.W. and I have in common that we are both thoughtful people, which sometimes manifests itself as daydreaming, and (in the recent past) both freelance theatre artists, which demands a certain kind of slavery to our work. And I'm no better at keeping personal appointments than I am at keeping personal friends. It has happened more than once that D.W. and I have missed a connection.

But this time, we had set an inflexible time for our meeting; without a cell phone, there is no other way to do it. And I was late. D.W. would have liked to hear that I was late because I had been lost in meditative contemplation under a poplar tree. In fact, I had forgotten to replace Milo's car seat after having made room in my car for a guest the night before. But either way, just after 11:00 am on Friday at the grave of R. Buckminster Fuller, we did not miss each other.

I can't help but wonder if the impression of awe that I carried away with me that day, which has caused me to feel unqualified even to post pictures of the cemetery with this writing, could have stood firm against the usual flurry of digital communication. "Don't wait for me; Be there in five; What grave are you at? Oh, there you are. I think I see you."

It's a beautiful idea, to live without being plugged in. I think most people would agree. But it only works for casual social engagements in garden cemeteries. For anything more pressing, we need our cell phones. In the business world, in particular, time is money, and cell phones keep us from having to waste time waiting for each other. By saying "call me when you get there," you are saving precious time. At least...your time.

When discussing letter writing a week or so ago, I almost linked Lewis Carroll's Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing. I didn't, ultimately, because the misogyny is a little distracting. You find yourself wanting to say to him, "Are you aware that institutional higher education for women came to exist in the West in the 19th century, contemporary with your clever little jabs? Do you think that, perhaps, the comprehensive failure of the female sex to adhere to your arbitrary set of rules has something to do with not having shared the handbook?"

But Carroll's five-part essay on letter writing is engaging and on point. He writes:

Here is a golden Rule to begin with. Write legibly. The average temper of the human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this Rule! A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly. Of course you reply, “I do it to save time.” A very good object, no doubt: but what right have you to do it at your friend’s expense? Isn’t his time as valuable as yours?

I save my time at the expense of yours. Zero Sum Game, Part One Hundred and Eighty Nine: Selfish Communication = Failed Communication. If I cheat, you lose.

As I compare our present-day misbehaviors to those of Carroll's contemporaries, I begin to see the cell phone scheduling dance as a game of poker. The cards are the amount of value we each place on our face-to-face interaction, and the currency is one another's time. "I don't want to show my hand," is my unspoken subtext, as I announce that I'll call again when I am a couple of blocks away. "Something more important (better?) might appear while I make the drive."

I'm not at all draconian about my time, and have always thought that I kept my appointments flexible for purely considerate reasons. I want to protect my companion's time from things I can't control, like traffic and parking. But when the cell phone option is off the table, you also think a little differently about those supposedly uncontrollable factors. Knowing that there may be traffic on I-93, if I want to be on time, I have to leave sooner. I have to give up a little bit more of my time, in order to protect yours.

If time is money, consideration for others could become very expensive.

All this negotiation takes on a crueler face in the mechanism of electronic dating, which I have personally, very thankfully, escaped. I have listened, open mouthed, as single friends and relatives have recounted to me the labyrinthian procedures of "getting to know one another" via text and cell. Every decision is to be guarded, including when you call, when you don't call, how many times you call, and how much information you reveal.

The resulting power position -- created by veiling your romantic desires so skillfully that you might eventually have trouble revealing them even to yourself -- may press your opponent to lay down his measly two pair, telling you that he will wait, in which success you will have dominated the game. Your prize? Well, mostly the domination. A date? Maybe, but probably not. You have to stay strong in your advantage.

"Do you actually want a relationship?" I ask, in exasperation. Spending your precious time negotiating over which party will be the first to say, "I want to!" doesn't sound like very good preparation for sharing one's life.

Again, I don't imagine any of these impulses to be created by technology. That has been a recurring thread in this blog. I don't imagine that targeted advertising created corporations, or that reality-based internet entertainment created our appetite for watching train wrecks, and I certainly don't imagine that text messaging has introduced cruelty and superficiality to the mating game.

But technology is intended to give us what we want, and in that, I'm afraid, it is fairly successful. In this case, it offers us a way to avoid the challenging path of forthrightness, that one terrifying, self-obliterating moment when a person of any age has to say, "Hey, I think you're cute." My concern is that, if you've never had to look someone in the eye and say, "Hey, I think you're cute," how can you ever look them in the eye and say, "I do?"

If I set a firm appointment and leave five minutes early out of respect for my companion, and my companion doesn't do the same for me -- or maybe she does do the same for me, but any one of a million different things about life intervenes and she is late anyway -- are those minutes now lost to me forever? Isn't that a terrible waste of time?

Except, I suppose, there is always the world there for me to look at. Some days it is prettier than others, but it is always there. And aren't we always bemoaning the lack of stillness in our crazy, busy lives? If only I could get a moment to stop and think! So when that moment comes, why don't I take it? Why am I always so unprepared?

I begin to feel that my lack of preparation is a matter of being otherwise engaged. The more I plan my time, the less I use the unexpected pockets of time when they appear. Maybe the best way for me to have the time is to keep from guarding it at all.

"Tackle uncertainty," says a billboard on the I-93, just before I reach my exit on the way home from Mt. Auburn Cemetery. The advertisement is for life insurance. And I find myself thinking that, philosophically, that isn't terribly good advice. I've yet to met the man who tackled the specter of death and came out standing, regardless of the magnificence of his insurance plan.

But then again, maybe that isn't what the advertisers meant. For this day only -- I have no promises about tomorrow -- the message going up on my cork board is "Expect uncertainty." I don't know that it will ease every one of my anxieties, but it might help me to recover my Five Minutes.

Stop Moving

2009-11-22T23:25:00.006-05:00

It was almost impossible for me to get to the computer today. The binge is working. I don't want to blog anymore. A Year Without Internet sounds like a wonderful idea.

Nick stopped me this morning. I don't remember what exactly I was doing. It might be that the task seemed too urgent to allow itself even to be named, or maybe there were so many tasks intertwined that I couldn't distinguish. I've sung a few sad songs here to the effect that my husband works too much (and what is too much?...etc, etc.) but this last week he has actually been in tech, and everybody here who does theatre is nodding sympathetically, "Oh, yes, tech, the time when production departments start work at their usual time in the morning and then don't stop until until sometime in the early hours of the next day."

Yes, tech.

This morning I had one small window, squished between events, during which I was not the primary caregiver for our babies, and every domestic, personal, interpersonal and intellectual pursuit clamored for preferential treatment.

"Pick me! Pick me!" That's the laundry. "You're going to be late." That's the clock, counting down the minutes to my next obligation. "Yoo hoo!" There's my car registration, who is apparently in character similar to a yodeler, reminding me that it will save time in the long run if I can just get ahead on all my paperwork. The hardwood floors are reminding me that Stella is going to crawl any day now -- she's already mobile via rolling and wiggling -- and under the radiators is disgusting, and those three books I just ordered are sitting on my desk, probably gathering dust, because I'm not much with a dust cloth, and...Oh! I have got to get on the phone because Thanksgiving is practically tomorrow and I haven't even asked what we're supposed to bring.

And Nick stopped me. I guess it was for a hug, or just to get me to notice that he was home, which is the rare event that started the whirlwind in the first place. And for a moment, I stopped, and the world seemed very simple, and manageable -- if only for a moment -- and I thought, how powerful this is: the gesture of stopping. You can, just stop.

I'd love to tell you that when I started moving again all those pressing concerns were magically gone. They weren't. But, then again...I don't know. We made it where we were going on time. Stella hasn't started crawling yet. I still need to take care of the car registration, but the paper pile didn't combust, or even grow.

"Stay put."

So says the angel, America, to her unwilling prophet in Part Two of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Halt the mass migration, she demands. It is causing tremors in heaven. Your constant, incessant movement is disrupting the fabric. There is no continuity. There is no zeitgeist. You must find a way to stop moving.

If you could, would you un-invent the automobile? Would you undo the industrial revolution? Would you return to an era pre-Enlightenment?

Well, sure, if it didn't also mean I would lose my right to vote. And my washing machine. And American democracy.

We can't stop the flow of progress. There's been quite the campaign, for as long as I can remember, asking Time to (please) reverse directions. We just can't seem to get that bill to the floor.

But we can use these imperfect instruments, ourselves, as best we can, to keep discerning our direction. And artists are a part of that, as storytellers are. We are the mirror -- not James' mirror now, that cold piece of glass, but Shakespeare's living players -- aiming, with the highest level of our consciousness and the very best of what it is that makes us human, "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

In my case, this means that I have to stop talking long enough to hear what I have just said. I have to catch the self-conscious preening, or the invective, or an unsupported statement like, "the American work week is getting longer and longer," by which I mean that my husband's work week is getting longer and longer, because the next show is about to open and he is in tech. I found all three of those mistakes in Thursday's post and then fixed them, feeling strongly that I had worked on it for a too-short period of time and with a too-cloudy mind.

You see, this is what a bunch of blogging does to me. It makes me sloppy. Experiment over. Can I go?

But this is also my directive. Blogging, for me, is an experiment only in the sense that I tend to look at everything as an experiment, because I am an ongoing learner and passionately interested in cause and effect, particularly in the field of human motivation. As much as it might tempt my theatrical imagination, this is not Woyzeck and his diet of peas. There is no Doctor, paying me to do dangerous things to myself so that he can take notes on my gradual descent into madness. This is not really an experiment. This is my life.

And, more specifically, this is my work. I've created no unnatural impulse here. I have a certain set of skills and impulses that lead to this. Whether on a blog, or in the theatre, or someplace else I haven't been yet, this is what I do.

The above is my explanation -- for you and for my tired self -- of why I don't get to take a day off. And why I'm here, even though it is barely under the wire, and it is night, and I am tired, and I risk making more mistakes. As my husband very kindly offered, it is a matter of discipline.

Stop moving. It requires an act of will. Stop moving, and look around.

Ten Ways to Simplify Your Life

2009-11-21T09:48:00.010-05:00

It's a little out of character for me to do a list like this. But I've looked at many, many versions of this list in my recent journeys. And so it happened naturally that I came up with my own.

Here are Esther's ten tips for simplification. These can serve you (and me) whether we're working on the carbon footprint, or the monthly budget, or creating space for more spiritual pursuits.

1. Let Yourself Run Out of Things.

The day that you run out of ziplocs is the day that you figure out how to reuse the bread bags. And, on the day that you are running out of dish soap, you may find that you use only half as much.

2. Write it Down. Say it Out Loud. Hear Yourself Saying It.

"Purchased hot beverage...four dollars, seventy-five cents."

"Purchased hot beverage...one non-recyclable paper cup."

"Purchased hot beverage...9 minutes driving, 6 minutes in store = 15 minutes."

3. Do the Math.

Cost/Hourly Wage = Value in Work Hours

4. Use Your Imagination.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. "My life without this object/habit/distraction looks like..."

5. Share.

Kim and Rick share their car. Elaine shares her house. It's generosity and simplicity at the same time. Or, you could say, free storage for your things when you aren't using them.

6. Take the Challenge.

Some people do crossword puzzles. Some people do Sudoku. Some people come up with creative ways to simplify their lives.

7. Make Tiny Changes.

Failure isn't fun. Don't set yourself up.

8. Keep the Chaos, Lose the Container.

Every kind of chaos can be contained...in the appropriate container. If your stuff won't stay where you put it, you might need to change where you put it. If you can't get yourself on time, you might need to change the schedule. If you keep the container the same and try to change the chaos instead? You might make yourself very tired.

9. Don't Have Stuff You Can't See.

If you can't see it, you don't use it. And if it isn't a part of your life, why is it a part of your life? See Item #4. Are you going to need it later? See Item #5. But you really, really, love it? Then bring it out and let it make you happy.

10. Keep a List of Things You Don't Want To Do, But Are Going to Do Anyway.

Avoidance wastes resources. Admit that you don't feel like doing it. Pout for as long as you need to. And then get it off the list.

Rest

2009-11-20T16:36:00.009-05:00

The Man In The Mirror

2009-11-19T17:20:00.044-05:00

There is a screen shot of me in the Now post that is about as accurate as portraiture can get. There I am, with my hair uncombed, wearing the reading glasses that hardly anybody ever sees, not because I think that they're unattractive, but because my value system reveres clear vision to the extent that I dislike seeing myself using technology to augment mine. I'm 20/20 or bust, in metaphor and in life. I do eventually have to wear my glasses, or I get a headache, but that it isn't how I present myself. It's private. It's like looking at myself in the mirror.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall...Who is the fairest of us all??"

Move over, Disney. I have the most interactive mirror in the world.

There's a Bible verse that has followed me all my life, in and out of religion. It's James 1:23, and my intention here is not to start a conversation about the Bible. There are many other places where you can go to have that conversation. Rather, I recognize this verse to function as well in isolation, rendering a simple truth of the human condition. Warning the reader about the difference between "hearing" and "doing," James draws a figure who looks at himself in the mirror, and then walks away and forgets what he has seen. I have a hair trigger response to hypocrisy, as we all do -- ironically, that sensitivity exists only when we're looking outside of ourselves -- and I recognize this figure from a thousand real life interactions. In the personal, the political, and the personal as political, people simply cannot remember what they look like. And the logic follows: if you go to the mirror to cleanse yourself, it is likely that you will end up with some very shiny glass.

At the age of ten, I was a better Bible scholar than I have been since. Ten-year-olds have a way of being sure of things. And, like most ten-year-olds, I didn't understand pop music. I did like it, but I didn't understand it. Who needs nostalgia before you have lived long enough to lose anything? And this -- this particular blend of wisdom and ignorance -- is what led me to to have a disagreement with Michael Jackson.

A Facebook friend linked this youtube video shortly after he died: Michael Jackson at the Grammy's in 1989, bringing the house down -- come on, sing it with me, now --"I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm asking him to change his ways." When I watch it now I think, "What an amazing performer he was!" On that giant stage, that whole choir full of passionate voices just disappears behind him. They can't compete. He's terrific.

But in 1989, I had a better idea of my own intelligence. "Michael Jackson, you may be the most extraordinary performer I've ever seen. You may share with Jack White and Chita Rivera the ability to put off your skin, to sing your vocal cords right out of existence so that the audience can see through to the beating heart within. But, Michael Jackson, this will never work. You see, I know this one. You can't change yourself by looking at your reflection."

Eventually I turned eleven. And then I turned twelve, and so on, and I guess I forgot. I certainly didn't have that wisdom when I was fifteen and trying to fit into a certain pair of jeans, by looking at myself in the mirror. I didn't have it as a director, trying to get to be a better artist, by looking at myself in the print reviews. I didn't have it as a parent, trying to raise better kids, judging my parenting by what it might look like to other parents. It will never work, Michael Jackson. It's a genuine, heartfelt, beautiful desire. But it will never work.

I mentioned this last night to my brother Jacob, as we were driving down Mass Ave, taking Beth back to her dorm room with a new-to-her microwave in the back of the car. Jacob is nothing if not thoughtful, and had an intimidating supply of salient points on the subject. "Have you had a chance to look at the research," he asked, "that finds that people are actually more productive when there is a mirror in the room?"

I hadn't.

"It's a function of self-awareness," he said, "and the construction of the exoself." It's a little challenging for me to quote Jacob, because in the hierarchy of intelligence as measured by knowledge, which I dislike and find false, yet also recognize to be observable, Jacob is smarter than I am. But there is one point that didn't escape me at all:

"The image of yourself keeps you motivated, because it allows you to to compare what you are doing with what you should be doing."

We all know a little something about that.

Desiring maximum productivity, Jacob has strategically placed his mirrors. I thought briefly about moving the big mirror from the hallway a little closer to my desk. But then I remembered that my desk is currently wearing a book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I don't have the time to read. Unlike Jacob, I don't have a job. And I don't want to be productive. For this one special, magic year when my kids are still babies and I'm not yet tired of New England, I want to just live.

The growing awareness of the conflict between productivity and life is like a rabbit hole, like Neo's red pill. The more I stop working, the more I realize how much life there is to be led, if I only I could stop working. And the only way to stop working is to stop desiring success, and the only way to break my love affair with success is to try to tear my eyes away -- like Narcissus -- from my own pretty reflection in the pool.

These are not original ideas. Those lilies of the field... They toil not, neither do they spin. Neither do they spend too much time looking in the mirror.

Aside from the issue of personal spirituality -- that loss of open space -- I've been beginning to address the effect of 24/7 media access on the locus of control. I've written a half a dozen posts about how I want my decision-making back. I want to decide how I hold the people I love. I want to decide how to spend and save my money. I want to decide how to be a feminist. But all the while, I keep wanting to know how I look. How does this feminism look on me? Does it make me look fat? How about this Christianity? Does it make me look stupid? How about this quiet of the soul? Does it make me look like a lazy housewife?

I'd better go check the mirror. I'd better check my image in the mirror against this full-scale bitmap of the world.

I don't imagine it to be conspiracy, that keeps us in the thrall of our own reflections. I don't imagine it to be conspiracy, either, that makes us work as hard as we do. We're all too smart for that. We wouldn't fall for it. No, this can only be happening because we want it to happen. But why is that? Are we over-performing for our omnipresent mirrors? Is this nonstop drive to accomplish only another facet of our nonstop, every-second-of-the-day awareness of ourselves from the outside in?

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."

I am concerned about the repercussions that our mirror-watching may have on our mental health. I am concerned about the extent to which we already live outside of ourselves. We split our identity from our attributes and work the two against each other.

"I hate my body."
"I am not in control of my anger."
"I don't feel my pain."

Are we trying to live our entire lives in that mirror?

It will never work, Michael Jackson. It makes a great pop song. It's a beautiful, true impulse. But it just won't work. We can't stare our bodies into imagined states of perfection. We can't live our lives without experiencing anger. And even if we hide our faults from everyone -- including ourselves -- they won't just go away.

And this brings me to the edge of it; in these concerns, I am officially out of my league. I probably shouldn't even have brought it up, since even my Year Without Internet is not the training that I need to address that kind of darkness. Maybe I will someday get that kind of training.

In the meantime, I will keep listening to my Michael Jackson, understanding now what nostalgia is, and how that might apply.

Is She Still Talking?

2009-11-18T07:12:00.014-05:00

I can't blog today. I can't spend another minute listening to my own voice. And the book that Kirsten recommended, Three Steps on The Ladder of Writing, has arrived. As Milo would say, "Bye bye, mama."

But I am here to fulfill my posting obligation. For anyone who comes here because these posts make you think, here are a couple of topics to think about, on the subject of writing. And, if anybody else wants to talk for a while? Please, feel free!

1. Can I Get An Editor in Here, Please?

Hurrying to get dinner started, I felt like yesterday's post went out before it was finished. Then, reading it back, realize that it is too personal for me to be able to tell. This is like my experience with playwriting; at some point it gets too close for you to be able to see it anymore. I'm not comfortable with that. It seems like an editor would be of use.

And...I didn't mention this at the time, but about a week ago I had a very strange typo. I think I tried to make up a word. Nobody said anything, and I noticed it and fixed it a couple of days later, so you can't go looking for it now. But I wondered: Does anyone notice these things? Or do you assume that I know what I'm doing and that it was just a word that I knew and you didn't?

2. The Second Impulse For Fiction.

I talked in Exit, Pursued By a Bear, about the impulse to fictionalize in order to entertain the reader. Now I'm feeling an impulse to turn to fiction to satisfy the writer. To put it crudely, now that I've used my mother's death, on the 18th day of my blogging month, I might have just run out of material.

What I'm preparing to do is not fiction, but it isn't documentary either. I'm accepting that I need to be at home with the kids, so if I'm going to practice the craft of storytelling, the available subject is me. And I'm organizing me into something that is interesting enough to write about. On the page, this looks perverse. Why do I have to do experiments with my life? Why don't I just write fiction?

"How Addicted Am I?"

2009-11-17T16:45:00.015-05:00

I've just come in the door from doing my grocery shopping. I've gone to three different stores, and Stella is starting to get fussy in her carrier. Milo has dirt on his shoes and would like to "help" me put the groceries away. There is milk getting warm on the counter, and chicken in the grocery bag. What do I do?

I turn on the computer.

In one 24 hour stretch not too long ago I received two personal confessions, almost identical in content. "Sometimes," these two perfectly functional, unquestionably sane people told me, "I find myself sitting in front of my computer, just refreshing my email page. Just hitting the refresh button, over and over again."

A few days before that, when I was just starting this project, my friend Liza sent me a Facebook message. She has no internet at home, and controls her media intake via a Netflix account she manages from work. And she likes it that way. But then she goes on to say:

I lost my cell phone last weekend...I don't have a landline...and got extremely anxious because I was completely out of touch with the world...amazingly though, I got through a list of things I had put off because there was nothing to distract me.

There was something to distract me from the dozen tiny things that needed done when I got home from the grocery store. And there was something to distract my two desk-working friends who caught themselves behaving like bar-pushing test monkeys, looking for their serotonin reward. But there wasn't anything to distract Liza, just as long as she was completely isolated from the world.

But which is healthy? I'm finding it hard to address the question of "how addicted am I?" without noticing that the disordered behavior and the sane behavior look an awful lot alike.

Nick and I cancelled our cellphones on a Friday afternoon. On Saturday morning, Nick was home and parenting, so I opened up the blinds and got a cup of coffee and sat down to read my blogs. One of the first ones I go to is Daiquiri, who commented here the other day. She's my sister-in-law. Towards the bottom of a post full of beautiful pictures of her beautiful children, I read this:

(Besides, Thomas has developed quite the cough and runny nose...please pray for him. AND Luke's grandma is in the hospital tonight with heart problems. Please REALLY pray for her!)

And I put down my coffee. Luke is Nick's brother. "Honey," I said, "have we told your family that we cancelled our cellphones?"

We had not.

She's okay, their grandma. I'm watching my mailbox for a letter from her as we speak. But the feeling that I had that morning -- before I learned that Luke had also sent us both an email, which I had not immediately received because he sent it to my old email address, and my forwarding has a delay -- was nothing less than Panic.

"What if something had happened? And I didn't know? What if nobody told me?"

My first point is that it isn't fair to treat the internet like it's only made of pixels. It's where our people are. And any discussion of disordered internet use -- which undoubtedly does exist -- needs also to be a discussion of how we hold the people we love.

But my second point is that this Panic, which I depend on the internet to alleviate, is also maintained by the internet. Learning something about the health condition of someone you care about in parentheses near the bottom of a blog post does not inspire confidence. In turns I am grateful that I happened to read that post, because otherwise I wouldn't have known, and very sorry that I happened to read that post, because otherwise I wouldn't have known.

Nick wasn't fazed. While I was experiencing Panic, he was doing his thing with his family in his own way. Although he didn't say this to me at the time, I think he probably noticed that there is a time difference between Idaho and Massachusetts, and making a panic-stricken, predawn phone call isn't really how Nick does things.

"Okay, Mr. Sane, whatever. You obviously don't spend enough time on the internet, thinking you can wait for a piece of information."

But Nick was sure. Whether Daiquiri mentioned it in her blog or didn't affected nobody in this house but me. I went to my Saturday ceramics class -- which comes just in time, every week -- and Nick talked to his brother later that day, and everybody is fine.

But I still find myself feeling nervous. And, sometimes, I find myself feeling scared.

"What if something happens? And nobody tells me? What if nobody cares enough to tell me?"

I didn't have my phone on, when my mother died. There was an illness, but she was previously completely healthy, and the transition from ill to dying wasn't something I was able to see on the approach. It was 7:30-something in the evening, and I was at work, getting ready to run the deck for Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life. The half hour call had just come over the paging system, and I was about to collect valuables, which is an age-old ritual, undoubtedly of great psychological significance, in which an assistant stage manager collects personal belongings from the actors in order to keep them safe during the show. My family called Nick. Nick called Christian, a union stage hand who could be trusted to be carrying a phone, and Christian called me over headset to meet him at the back door. I don't know if Nick had communicated the urgency of the situation or if Christian simply knew. During the half hour -- that designated time during which theatre folk put away the outside world to commit fully to the business of building our own reality -- no insignificant matter would have merited a call. I heard the words "flat-lined, twice." And I handed back the phone, and I went downstairs to the dressing rooms, and I collected valuables.

And I'm telling you that story here because this is the only way that I know how to forgive the Panic. This is how it happens that we worry. Because people are so precious. They're so greatly and undeniably worth worrying about. And love is not the part that is either reduced or expanded by the internet. That isn't the part that any of us stands to lose.

I haven't counted the number of times that I check my email in a day, mostly because I don't really want to know. Especially now that I'm maintaining this blog, I think it's a lot of times. But I recognize that to be a function of being human. We want contact. We check for new contact. When we get the new contact it feels good. So we do it over and over again.

We want contact particularly in moments of weakness. When I'm coming in from the grocery store, and I'm a little overwhelmed by the responsibility of fulfilling half a dozen tiny needs, and I'm facing the likelihood that none of those tasks will provide me with a feeling of accomplishment, that's the time that I most want to know that I'm not alone.

That's why, apparently against my will, I keep finding myself looking at the computer just at the times when I know I really shouldn't. When I'm feeling insecure, I find myself on the websites of people who are more talented than I am. When I'm feeling lonely, I find myself on the websites of people who seem to have an awful lot of friends.

It's possible that I am particularly at risk of this unwanted internet use -- what you might call addiction -- because of the features of my personality. I am a writer and a communicator, and I am passionately involved and aware. I've tried to quit discussing politics on comment threads more times than I ever had to try to quit smoking.

And I am a bit of a hermit. Shy doesn't seem like quite the word for someone as intense as I am, but the end result is similar. I let myself get lonely. The computer screen offers me a safer, gentler way to be friends.

In the past I have kept on top of my internet use by making containers for it. I never get on the computer before breakfast, or in in that rare, precious time that both children are sleeping. And my computer automatically sleeps at 11pm. For one important stretch of time my computer went in the desk drawer whenever Nick was home. And there have been several times -- especially while working, and most especially while writing -- that I have restricted email contact to only once or twice a day.

All these things have worked for me. They've kept my addiction from becoming a problem. They've kept me from getting to a place where I stop brushing my hair, or stop relating to real people, or go an entire month without vacuuming, or -- scariest of all -- stop feeding myself, or my kids. I believe that this sort of reasonable restriction would continue to work for me, as moderation works for people who work in moderation. In the constellation of people, I am not the one who is moderate. That is not my function.

Which statement brings us back to a place we've been before. In my life, at this time, the internet is not where I want to go in search of solace. It is not where I want to go when I feel weak, or when I feel lonely, or when I feel afraid. I don't expect those feelings to go away. And I don't expect my need for other people to diminish. I hope it never does diminish. But I don't choose to believe that the internet is the only way -- or even the best way -- to reach them.

How to Save Money, Really (The Money, Part 2)

2009-11-16T11:02:00.012-05:00

Swallowing the frustration and sense of powerlessness associated with this entire conversation, I'm digging one more layer into the mystery of personal finance, in search of the place where decisions are made.

I, like most of my generation, am poorly educated in financial matters. I remember my older sister, Becca, teaching me how to balance a checkbook, but when the time came, I rarely actually did it. It takes too much attention. It's too hard. Now, as I rescue stationery and birdhouses, and use Freecycle in both directions, and otherwise conserve resources in a hundred different ways, I often feel like I'm doing penance. I think of my six weeks on a pink contract for Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, earning fifteen hundred dollars a week. Was I living rich for those six weeks? Was I living happy? And what did I do with all that money?

When you're working those hours and under that much pressure, you don't think about it. You don't have time. And if you haven't trained yourself to think about it, you don't think about it. You don't have the skills. It takes such an act of will these days, to stop the train -- to get control of your money. There are so many other forces, people, faceless people, who are offering to do it for you.

The banner on the front page of my banking website says, "Spend less time banking and more time living." Thank you very much, Mr. and Mrs. Financial Institution, but I want my banking back. I don't want it to be psychologically divided from the essence of living. I don't want to imagine that control over my finances, my livelihood -- the relationship between working and surviving -- is some kind of an inconvenience that I should get through as quickly as possible so that I can hurry back to more important matters. So I can hurry back to... to what? To spending more money? To giving more of my money to someone else? Like...you?

I think of myself at a very young age, deciding how to spend my fifteen cents, or whatever small amount I first got into my grubby little hands. Should I get two lollipops? Or one lollipop and two tootsie rolls? They were excruciating, those decisions: delightful, all consuming. At what age did the power of deciding how to spend and save my money get to be such a drag?

Well, when I lost control over it, that's when. My 18-year-old niece asked me a question about money the other day, and I found myself tumbling over my tongue to answer. Please, don't make the mistakes that I made. Don't go at it blind, the way I did, the way so many people do, the way the world expects you to. And, most of all -- I told her to call my brother -- please get your advice from someone other than me. I am utterly unqualified.

It isn't my value system that I blame. I don't regret my trips to Europe. I'm not sorry I've seen Paris. I'm not sorry about the many, many dollars in resources and time that I have donated to small theatre companies making thrilling pieces of art. Sometimes it hurts that Nick and I didn't buy property while we could, and are now looking at continuing to rent, maybe for a long time. But we did have other things to do with that money, things that were in line with our value system at the time. Why spend money on a space that you don't really live in? Because for a long time, loving what we loved, and wanting what we wanted, our house was nothing more than a place to drop our stuff.

And, seriously, we dodged a bullet. We are just the sort of people -- untrained in money matters, unsure of our long term goals, and categorically uninterested in fine print -- who would have foreclosed.

I would like to pay more attention.

I realized, recently, in the same session of banking in which I bought the checks with stubs, that my bank has provided me with an overdraft line of credit. I don't want it. I don't want my debit card to be converted into a credit card. I have credit cards. And that is, actually, the one small stroke of luck in my financial history. Even though I have been blithely clueless, I have never fallen to the credit card hatchet. I am cheap, and I am stubborn, and a hard sell is to me like a bad rhyme. It causes temporary deafness.

Is it possible to get a line of credit without being asked? No, of course I was asked. There's my signature, right there on the form in my welcome packet. I couldn't possibly have signed for something I didn't want. Milo and Stella were with me when I signed those papers, so maybe I was distracted. But Nick was there, too. In fact, it's really his bank account. One of the other dramatic changes associated with my hard swerve from career-lady to house-mom has been letting go of my individual account, which is a capitulation that tempts me right off this unyielding topic of financial responsibility, and into another post's worth of musings on gender and family and power. But yes, of course, that was exactly the distraction! Now I do remember that we discussed the overdraft line of credit. And by force of will, I bring this back to the point at hand.

Am I really this practiced in ignoring things? That I can forget a financial decision even when it was discussed in person in bright sunlight with the most relevant party and the bank officer?

I am that good at ignoring things. I have to be, in order to survive my life in the information age. I ignore hundreds of items of information every day. The billboards. The banner advertisements. The user agreement and the privacy policy. I am very, very good at ignoring things. I would like to be a little less good at ignoring my money, particularly the movement thereof from my bank account into someone else's.

As per the MasterCard slogan that is burned into all of our brains: Fulfilling basic survival needs without the internet...20 some dollars per month. Actively making decisions about how to spend and save...priceless.

How Much Does It Cost (The Money, Part 1)

2009-11-16T10:55:00.015-05:00

My Year Without Internet is not free. I post this early cost analysis with some trepidation, because personal finance is personal, and these details reveal more about me than a hundred essays about my spiritual yearnings. But in the interest of "follow[ing] the money," here's an expanded view of the inside of Esther's cupboards. Don't get bored.

Nick and I unwittingly began this adventure by dropping our cellphones. This is the simplest math in the whole post. Within a single field of technology, if you want more, you pay for more. Our three phone lines, with internet, cost between $160 and $170 a month. One phone line, with internet, costs us $62.69 a month.

The resulting savings, of $100 per month, would not have been available to us if I hadn't stopped working. As a freelance artist, lost calls are lost money. In order to compete with other freelance artists, you need to be at least as easily reachable as they are: therefore, carrying a cell phone was my job. The same has been true for my husband, who has had a salaried job but only recently stopping taking freelance gigs as well. This is an equation pair that appears frequently to the parents of small children: Not Working = 0; Working = x - Py, where "x" is the additional income, "y" is the additional expense, and "P" is the variable factor of Poor Decision Making, because you are crazed by your busy, busy life and don't have time to think about it.

At least for the moment, I am Not Working. And that's the end of the easy part.

I had very much hoped that I could tell you that dropping our internet service, opposed by a few incidental costs of life without internet, would result in a net balance. Wouldn't that be pretty?

Going without internet in our house saves us $15 per month. I could get the monthly cost down further by changing service providers, but would then have to pay fees associated with the change. I could cut out or restrict long distance service -- Nick and I have not been, historically, in the habit of calling people anyway -- but then I truly do risk isolation, and that isn't the point.

$15 it is. That buys 34 stamps. A whole lot of you would have to write to me to cause me to need more than 34 stamps in a month.

It seems tidy, and somehow scientific, to draw the relationship above, in which I equate the information transfer cost of Internet with the information transfer cost of direct mail. $15 each way. Done deal. But it's completely fictional. The internet brings a million more things into my home than direct mail ever did. Cutting out the internet creates the impulse to replace all those things. That cost is potentially infinite.

The bad news, I'm discovering, is that there is a cost to rejecting the dominant technology. Or you could say, I am punished for rejecting the dominant technology. The good news is that my husband and I have total individual control over that cost. And we have to think about it, which is healthful, like drinking castor oil is healthful.

Here are some of the things we've had to think about:

News:

I know I said that thing, about the dark wood and no path, but in the light of day I have no intention of completely depriving myself of news articles. A subscription to the New York Times, 7 days, is almost $15 per week, although they entice you by offering you half price for the first three months. At the other end of the spectrum, there are local free papers. There's a commuter paper that Nick reads on the way home from work. I bet Jacob could supply me with yummy day-old papers from the Harvard campus -- and by yummy I do mean doughnut stained. Or, in the spirit of humility, I could ask Marcella and Melissa and Terri and Kirsten -- the Facebook friends whose article links I read every day -- to occasionally hit "print" instead of "link." Small print, double sided to save on postage cost? I could send SASE's.

With the assumption that I will find other ways to supplement my diet of topical nonfiction, Nick and I are going Boston Globe, Sundays only, for $3.50 a week, half price for the first 12 weeks. This gives us a fat pile of news articles, the Sunday Opinion section, the coupons, and the classifieds, for $13.42 per month over a year.

Personal Finance:

Checks. I had to buy checks. I have used online banking for years, so this is a change. I got the kind with stubs, so basically I write the check twice: once to inform the entity receiving my money, and once to inform myself. This is all related to a concerted effort on my part to be more mindful of my spending, which impulse came originally out of necessity -- from two incomes to one income is a harsh drop -- but is now becoming a preciously guarded choice. We are realizing that we can live on less. Less money. Less stuff. Less trash. Less anxiety.

I spent $34.31 on 150 checks with stubs. It's reasonably a year's worth of checks, since I only have to use them to send money to places I can't go in person. And there are fewer of those transactions than you might think. Fudging a little because I can't currently find my crystal ball, the cost of personal finance by mail can be estimated at $2.94 in checks plus $2.64 in stamps, or $5.58 per month.

Entertainment:

If I were a single woman, this category would be a very round and attractive little zero. My entertainment is covered by reading, writing, baking, long walks on the beach...etc, etc. (And bird watching.) My husband, however, likes a little small screen entertainment, and going without that is a lifestyle change he doesn't want to make. We discussed the possibility of reinstating our Netflix, which we cancelled because I always felt bad about so rarely wanting to watch anything, and Nick was satisfied with Hulu. Reverting to Netflix, one movie at a time, would be only $8.99, and Nick could update his cue using the internet at work.

But so far we don't seem to be choosing to go that way. Instead, we've decided to use the libraries. Boston is a reader's paradise, and all the libraries are huge. I go to the library at least once a week because I love my son and he loves books. (Do you know that he actually sleeps with his books? Like the upstairs neighbor's kid sleeps with stuffed animals?) Nick has access to the Harvard libraries as well, so if we feel like it, we can get really obscure movies. We can even get obscure, educational movies, which Esther might actually watch.

In the end we did get our attractive little zero: replacement entertainment cost, $0.00 per month.

Correspondence:

With stamps at $0.44 per letter, and rescued stationery at $0.10 per letter (as long as the 10 for a dollar bin at Boomerangs can keep up with my habit), fudging again because of that constantly misplaced crystal ball, I might expect to write thirty letters a month, approximately one a day. That's $16.20 per month. My plan is not free.

Summary:

This little scheme will cost us, at this very conservative estimate, $20.20 per month. Depending on whether you are of the mountain school or the molehill school, this could be negative, or it could be negligible.

Or it could be that I need an entire additional post to address it. See Part 2.

Refund??!!!

2009-11-15T08:25:00.012-05:00

You can now get $15.99 back from Disney, in return for each of up to four Baby Einstein DVD's, less postage.

I'd love for everyone I know to do this, if you happen to have any unused Baby Einstein DVD's in your life. I'm tempted to go hunting for some in the thrift store/Freecycle world just so I can have the pleasure. We all need the money more than Disney does.

Here's the research that led to the Federal Trade Commission complaint that led to the offer.

The New York Times covered the refund in late October, but I missed it. I guess I have been under a rock.

I heard about it this morning on On The Media, which follows only Radio Lab in my long list of weekend radio pleasures.

Do you think I could fit any more links into this short post? Enjoy.

Where There is No Path

2009-11-14T06:32:00.017-05:00

I had planned this morning to write you a post about information. I thought I might title it, "A Shout Out to People Who Know Things," and I would, in my usual meandering way, discuss the intellectual honesty that is coming to my house as a not-so-welcome guest of my experiment. I am preparing to lose the ability to look up any piece of information anytime. This is to say that I am preparing to lose the ability to pretend I know things. Without Google, I can't casually list the number of legislators in the combined houses of Congress, 535, as I did in an essay-post last week. Without Google, I can't resolve a dinner table disagreement over whether it was rampion or arugula that Rapunzel's mother so fatefully craved from the witch's garden across the wall. I can't finish the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle. And I can't instantly learn how to get a white heat ring off of my dining room table. (Iron, wool setting, through two layers of white t-shirt, presto, thank you internet!)

What will I do without my ability to look up wonderfully useful items of information like that? Have to watch where I'm putting my coffee in the first place?

It's Saturday today. And, like last Saturday, I'm feeling overly earnest, and exhausted. I keep drifting away from my discussion of Wikipedia, in which I'm trying to endow the phenomenon of user-generated encyclopedia with a degree of influence that it may not particularly deserve. "What does it all mean?" I hear myself asking. "How can I make this mean something?"

And I'm trying to find a way to fit in a picture of a handmade birdhouse, which Milo and I rescued from the thrift store along with our mismatched stationery and forgotten postcards. The picture doesn't do it justice. Someone made it. And painted it. And I found it at the thrift store for 3.99 and fell in love with it, and am now learning (from the internet) how to use it to attract a mating bird couple to our front yard.

And I'm tamping down a very small but creeping sense of dread.

This may not work.

This is not, please -- not at all -- a fear that I can't do my Year Without Internet. For God's sake, I can do it. But I am a little bit afraid that it won't help.

As I mentioned, it's Saturday, and that means my husband has been gone all week (and is asleep right now.) And I'm feeling like little Milo, who woke up too late to see Daddy before work a few mornings ago -- which means that he wouldn't see him at all that day -- and ran like a dramatic heroine to the front window, crying, "No working, Daddy! No working!" It was exactly the same tone of voice that he uses when I refuse to let him have a second cookie. But I don't care too much about cookies, and in that case when he cries, "I want it, I want it!" he isn't speaking also for my heart.

We can't explain this yearning away by saying that I don't have community, because I do. My brother and my niece each come over at least once a week, and they also babysit. I am not housebound. I have hobbies, I have a couple of interest groups, and I have a church. Yesterday I dropped the kids off at Jacob's house and went to Mt. Auburn to meet D.W. Jacobs and a couple of folks from Arena Stage at the grave of R. Buckminster Fuller. It isn't that I'm bored.

But I have space in my life. That's what small children require of you. They force you to make space for them, and then they don't fill it. And as much as I've adulated open space, it is also terrifying. It is often lonely. And it's silent. And sometimes, I think, it gives you knowledge of yourself you didn't really want to have.

I've been making a brave stand here against the big bad wolf, the internet. It's going to be SO hard. I'm going to be SUCH a hero. But my personal journey has very little to do with the internet, in itself. Can high speed information access really make a difference to whether you stand firm in your loneliness or run away from it? Can the absence of it really teach you to stand firm in any and all of your imperfections? Can turning off the computer possibly teach you to stop running away from your life?

In the hero's journey, growth always begins with a pilgrimage: like the Grail knights, into the darkest part of the wood, where there is no path. In the context of my real SAHM life, I think Jennifer described it well as, "My Year Under a Rock." In this modern era, that is where the darkness lies -- the quiet of the soul. It's under a rock, and I'm going to look for it.

The question is, in a year or so, when it isn't so eminently sensible (or even possible?) for me to stay at home with the kids, can I return to the world/internet/workforce with a greater sense of balance? Can I return with a greater appreciation for humanity and humility and spirituality and personal journey and all the little details of life that I forgot because I was glued to the computer, constantly scanning cyberspace for a quick ticket to resolving the inherent difficulties of this one great difficulty, life?

In this way I have an appreciation for accountability, in the sense that I won't always have access to a myriad of experts to help me fix my careless errors. And I have an appreciation for humility, in the sense that if I don't know something I will have to ask. I will have to raise my hand in class, as it were, and say to another person, "You know that. And I don't."

No epiphanies. No miracles. Just a lot of work to do to change my habits, with some short term consequences and, maybe, some long-term rewards.

Yes, I Will Write Back To You

2009-11-13T08:00:00.004-05:00

I haven't managed the PO Box yet, and am not feeling quite up to posting my actual physical address, but in the meantime, I would like to let you know that

Yes, I Will Write Back to You.

As soon as I have an address where you can always reach me, I will put it here. If you are concerned that you are going to miss me when I'm gone, I invite you to write to me, and I will write back. I'm not really going anywhere. I will continue to exist. And if you ever find that yourself craving some piece of tangible proof that the world perseveres without the internet, feel free to drop me a line, and I will send you that proof.

I have a friend from high school who is an amazingly prolific and talented visual artist, who has a few times referred to his impressive body of work as the "detritus from my overactive drawing hand." I have an overactive writing hand, and will be happy to put it to good use.

I'm starting to draw a character here called the Letter Writing Lady. I think she wears purple, and has a bird feeder outside her window. Maybe some extravagant hats. Any costume designers want a piece of this? How about this one?

No? You don't think? Yeah, maybe not my color. Or maybe it just doesn't work without the bird feeder.

Hilda the Hippopotamus

2009-11-12T07:19:00.028-05:00

Here's a thought experiment, of which neither part is precisely historical.

Let's say that I find myself in a period of creative drought. (Okay, that small part is precisely historical, although not current.) In my frustration and sadness over this, I go looking for a culprit. Who can I blame? The obvious answer is my children. The babies are the thing that is new, this must be their fault -- or, rather, my fault for having them. Motherhood is an intense distraction that has made my thinking less clear and therefore affected my ability to make good art. And motherhood is important to me, so I choose to prioritize that over the art, with which it appears to be in conflict. Either way, I'm going to have to starve a part of myself. I can't have both.

What if I believed that babies are a normal and unavoidable part of the work as a creative being with ovaries -- maybe even used that big word, "necessary" -- but that the internet was optional, and a distraction? What if I heard people saying, "Lots of people who do theatre do just fine without internet. There are things that you just have to give up in order to make it in this very competitive profession, and internet may be one of them. You need to concentrate, and you may have to clear your life of distractions like internet. It's your choice, of course, but if you're going to go and have internet, then you just have to accept that it might be damaging to your career."

I'm going to rename this blog The Question Binge, because, apparently, the only thing I like better than expressing myself in long form is asking open ended questions and then changing the subject.

My husband told his office yesterday about our plan. I didn't hear about this until after bedtime -- what you might call pillow talk -- and I was fighting sleep to hear him talk about it. Actually I found myself thinking, "is he still talking? does he really have more to say about his feelings right now? Because I'm going to have to get up with the kids in about five hours."

And I have to share it with you just like that (no offense, Nick) because these are the revelations that become available to us as women become equally prominent as dramatists, storytellers and social critics. We find that the experience of wanting to selfishly fulfill your own physical needs at the expense of your partner's emotional needs is not associated with masculinity. Women do it, too. (I know, right?) I can only hope that this sort of revelation can wear gradually at the Mars/Venus map of mysterious, planetary-sized gender differences, which I find leads us in all directions away from the hard slog mix of accountability and forgiveness that it takes to actually succeed in our relationships.

But that's a side note. The story is that my husband was proud of me. As I was fighting sleep, Nick was telling me that he was proud of me. He told me that his coworkers had been impressed. They had assumed that this bold feat of A Year Without Internet was something we were attempting, and that we would discover on the way whether or not we could actually pull it off. Nick had corrected them to the effect that when Esther decides to do something, it will get done.

Thanks, honey.

Now that it's morning -- and I am exclusively a morning person, yet another reason, I'm discovering, why theatre directing maybe isn't exactly the best career for me -- I'm realizing that the kind of conversation that my experiment sparked in Nick's fast-paced, high-stress work place is precisely my goal. I do have a real desire for personal growth. There's nothing like having a couple of kids to let you know how much growing up you have to do. But I also have a strong impulse to publicize this experiment, and in that, I'm asking one great open ended question. One person says to another person, "I know someone who is going a year without the internet." The other person asks, "Why?" Mission accomplished. One person says to another person, "I know someone who is going a year without the internet." The other person asks, "How?" Mission accomplished.

Those two little questions, given even a tiny bit of real attention, can have more impact than all the meandering explanation I can possibly do here on this blog. We are such powerful creatures, we humans. We transform our environment. We make moral decisions. It can never be a bad idea to remind ourselves of our strength.

During our usual Tuesday library date this week, Milo brought to me a book by Richard Scarry, in which an unusually large playground monitor named Hilda -- I think she's a hippopotamus -- learns how to manage her own very special gifts. However, she doesn't gain this wisdom until after she rips down a couple of doors and sends the playground merry-go-round spinning down into a hole in the earth.

And, you know, it is a riot here on this spinning merry-go-round. It's going very fast. But I am not the first one to suggest that it is helpful, every once in a while, to see out of the corner of one's eye that someone else is trying to get off.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

2009-11-11T09:49:00.018-05:00

It's official. My real life is no longer sufficiently interesting to justify this continued demand on your attention. I will now begin to fabricate.

Someone almost said, you can take the artist out of the theater, but you can't take the theater out of the artist. I find myself thinking along these lines, "On day fourteen, the protagonist begins to buckle under the strain of her daily blog-posting schedule. Her posts become confessional and disorganized. She abandons her lofty pursuits of global-scale insight, instead struggling to maintain basic soundness of mind. Can she possibly achieve her goals? Check back next week to find out."

And here I am this morning, sitting at my desk with my usual cup of coffee -- the one that lists in very small print a few score foods that are high in protein and therefore good to eat while pregnant -- bravely battling the impulse to write you a really sizzling opening act closer. Maybe a gambling debt. Or a rich uncle returning from Peru. Or a ferocious wild animal.

On one uneventful evening before I started this experiment, Nick and I found ourselves sitting back to back at our respective computers. I didn't have any new messages and so was bored.

"Hey, honey, what are you doing?"

"Nothing." He closed his computer kind of quickly. "Nothing at all. What do you want to do?"

I wanted to make some hot cocoa. As we stood in the kitchen a few minutes later, Nick told me that, in this case, "nothing at all" had meant watching a stroller with a child in it fall off a platform in front of a speeding subway train.

I won't link the video, because I don't really want to watch it. But it is viral, and if you would like for it to enter your consciousness it will be only too happy to oblige. I am now one of these people who does that regularly -- not the part where your kid almost dies, but the part where you take them with you on the subway. I wear Stella on my chest and I push Milo in a stroller, and even if the subway didn't make me nervous, the busy intersection between my house and the train station certainly would.

Here's a really good way to make me crazy: fill my already not-big-enough brain with a mesmerizing, repeating image of disaster.

I just googled "image bear attack" to get a picture to go with my catchy post title, and the first dozen images seem deeply inappropriate for mass consumption. Gaping flesh. Ripped up faces. A hole where a bone ought to be. I find myself feeling a little uncomfortable about it. This is real life tragedy arranged in thumbnail-sized rows. I'm here today to attract an audience for my little blog: which tragically damaged person shall I choose? I head back to iPhoto for pictures that I've taken of fall leaves.

It occurs to me that Google Image Search is quite different from what Shakespeare's buddies might have done with his famous stage direction, with which he kills off Antigonus in Act III of The Winter's Tale. Maybe a person dressed in a bear suit. Some thrillingly muffled cries from off stage. Some people say they might have used a real bear from the London bear-pits, but it is highly unlikely that it was actually tearing any human flesh. Then again, the Romans did exactly that, didn't they? For centuries, the gladiators engaged in -- or were forced to engage in -- death rituals, something like human sacrifice, but with a more sportsmanlike air. And they called that entertainment.

What just happened? This post started so sweetly. It was going to be funny, and entertaining, and you were all going to like me! What have I done to get myself here? A Facebook friend that I don't know very well just posted this update, which seems relevant:

WHY ARE PEOPLE SOOOOOO DRAMATIC?? WHHYYYY SO CRAAAZY via Mobile Web

I don't think we can really blame the internet for that.

But it does happen, on occasion, that you wonder whether or not your web content is interesting. A couple of hours ago I went through and changed some post titles with just that question in mind. I had some boring post titles, and I don't like boring things. I imagine you don't like boring things, either. What I'm going for here is not fiction, though. This is exactly what really happened, except...more so. I'm thinking now of the Real World, in which the high-drama clashes between roommates are completely real. They're real people having real problems. All we did was point them towards each other, in a television arena. And we promised them fame and glory in return. Kind of like gladiators.

This is the hue and cry that was once raised over reality TV, which is arguably fairly seamless with reality Internet, which is viral videos of someone's child almost dying in front of a subway train. Some people are concerned about the well being of the individuals who trade away their realities for their 30 minutes of fame. Later deprived of the lime light, they might do something completely crazy, like invent a giant balloon and pretend their child has flown away in it. Others are concerned about the spectators, or at least -- like Tertullian condemning the patrons of the Roman amphitheater -- about their souls.

Now I'm getting my history books down off the top shelf and preparing to have discussion with people who know more about this than I do. "Tertullian? You brought up Tertullian?!" But I feel confident that I can defend this one position: we have not suddenly become bloodthirsty. Nor were we bloodthirsty for only a short period of time during a unique and bygone era. The desire for horror in entertainment persists. Beowulf, for example, was a sordid little tale, full of bone crunching and otherwise similar t0 Grand Theft Auto.

The internet did not create our attraction to disaster. But by virtue of its ability to distribute information, it is keeping us in nearly unlimited supply. The internet specializes in information access. On the one hand, we have access to the information. On the other hand, the information has access to us. I used to have monsters under my bed. Now I have them in my computer.

About a year ago I moved my email from aol to gmail, and in the process I stopped seeing the "AOL News" on a more-than-daily basis. Now, when I go back every once in while to check for lost emails, I am shocked by the tabloid-style headlines. Today, of course, the DC sniper's execution; yesterday, an over-stressed mom who overdosed on alcohol, drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway (that's on the way to my brother's place in Westchester) and killed four children and four adults. The actual email page loads notoriously slowly. I'm not the one who can tell you whether that has to do with clunky programming, or a targeted bid for advertising revenue. But either way, that slow load gives you plenty of time in which to click on those sordid headlines, to pick up the tabloid from the check out aisle, to be voluntarily inundated with crystal clear, high-pixel images of the absolute worst things done by the absolute worst people anywhere in the world on this particular day.

Anxiety disorder, anyone? I'll take just a small one, thank you.

You Mean, I Have To Wait?!

2009-11-10T07:46:00.014-05:00

I just wrote a letter. I'm perfectly delighted by it. The act of writing letters is every bit as rewarding as I had hoped that it would be. It gives me an opportunity to express myself in long form, which is (apparently) my favorite thing to do, and I can make a precise connection with another individual in a way that nourishes us both.

Here's the problem. My letter will take DAYS to get there. This -- belying the idyllic past-century portrait that I'm trying to sell you above -- makes me feel nothing less than insane. The postmark on the letter that I'm answering is November 3. It arrived here on Friday, November 6. I didn't get around to my reply until Monday. That actually felt fairly efficient given all the other things that can get in the way...like, for example, this blog. I am sending my reply today, in Tuesday's mail, and it will arrive in Boise, ID, probably on the 13th. That's ten days from message to reply. TEN DAYS. I can't wait ten days. My life changes in ten days. In ten days I might be completely done with this letter-writing thing and on to making origami.

Then again, maybe origami is the solution. Every time I feel an impulse to check the mailbox -- so similar, I'm finding, to refreshing one's email page -- I could sit down and fold a paper crane.

(Paper cranes in the windows... Paper cranes on the bookshelves... Paper cranes in the bathroom...)

I hope everyone around here likes paper cranes.

Save More! Be Happy!

2009-11-09T09:38:00.044-05:00

My whole family went shopping together yesterday. This is not routine, but after devoting half of the weekend to pure enjoyment, we felt a certain amount of pressure to take care of the details of living. And, at the same time, looking down the barrel of another long work week, during which Nick leaves for work at 6am and gets back just before 8pm, we wanted to spend time together. This way, we could do it all at once.

I go to a giant grocery store. It's called the Super Stop & Shop, it's extremely conveniently located -- right next to the MBTA train station -- and as you make your way in the door, past the cart corral and around the corner to the produce section, you'll see a green and white sign that says, "Save More." If your life map is anything like mine, you'll take a closer look. And you'll see something like this.

(I didn't take this photo. Although I considered it, getting the kids to the grocery store just to take a picture is a little too crazy, even for me. I got the photo from this digital marketing blog.)

You can now scan your own groceries, as you go. By swiping your Stop & Shop card, you release a little hand scanner that looks to Milo (and maybe also to us grown ups) like a very, very good toy. You can bag your own groceries, as you go. You can watch your tally go up with each item you scan, and every once in a while, with a soft "ping," your hand-held scanner will inform you of special offers, just for you! Thirty cents off the frozen vegetables. Fifty cents off of a can of soup. (Do we need soup?)

We hadn't ever tried it until yesterday. I was fascinated -- whether by the concept or by the actual bright lights, I'm not sure -- and I stood motionless in front of the display long enough to attract my husband's attention. "Do you want to try it?"

"Yeah, I think I do." I probably wouldn't have done it by myself. It wasn't that long ago that I still took advantage of the bagging clerk's offer to help me to my car, when Stella was young enough to need always to be held and Milo was (and still is) young enough to try and get away from me in the parking lot. By myself, putting the right groceries in the cart and keeping them there is quite enough to accomplish, thank you. I'll let the professionals do the rest.

But as a family, we tried it. And it was nothing less than an adventure. Nick is all hands and never drops anything. He scanned this item while reaching for the other one, printed a label for the bananas using the designated customer-operated scale, all with a bag open, and don't forget the hot cocoa! Milo, not to be outdone, drove the little car cart while enthusiastically naming fruits and vegetables, and even little Stella gurgled loudly from her carrier, as if to get her own piece of all this action.

Nick was still in a good mood when we got in the car. He gave me a high five. "That was good, baby." I nodded. We are incredibly efficient. And I think I would have forgotten the mushroom soup no matter what. But I was also thoughtful. Is it really happening that people don't want customer service anymore? That we would rather do everything ourselves than have to make eye contact with the checker, to respond to the person behind us in line asking the names and ages of our babies, or -- worst of all -- have to wait even a few minutes for our turn to be served?

We wonder why we feel so deeply lonely.

And, of equal concern, is it really true that we want to be any more plugged in? That little hand scanner is interfacing with a record of every item we've ever bought at the Super Stop & Shop, on every occasion that we swiped our card in order to get our Valued Customer Rewards. I'm finding it hard to believe that Stop & Shop is offering us this feature out of a generous or altruistic impulse. It is a feature that is pretty clearly good for them: the repeating cost of baggers and checkers replaced with the one-time cost of technological infrastructure, and a vehicle for advertising that is disarmingly, alarmingly direct.

Nick recently noticed, with a grimace, that when we bought one bag of coffee they gave us a print coupon for two bags of coffee. And when we bought two bags of coffee they gave us a coupon for three. My friend Stop & Shop now knows, like the rest of my friends, just how much I love my warm caffeine. But if I were to suddenly want to give up my coffee habit? Something tells me my friend Stop & Shop wouldn't be as supportive as I might like. "Ping." Look how cheap it is. "Ping." Look, it's the brand I like. "Ping." I'll just get it this time...this one more time.

And this is the direction of progress. It isn't entirely the corporation creating the culture. And it isn't entirely the culture creating the corporation. But the narrative that emerges is one of mythological resonance, in which human contact gives way to conversation with our own robotic creations. We find ourselves trying to eliminate all the little weaknesses and annoyances that make us human, like the slow grocery store clerk, like that youngish checker who dropped my last Stop & Shop card into the narrow gap at the end of the conveyor belt. Wouldn't it be great if we just didn't have to deal with things like that?

It does sound restful. But as we acquire ingenious ways to make good on that age-old impulse, I'm feeling rather nostalgic for the practice of enduring other people's imperfections. If get home and drop the eggs that I just bought -- because, unlike my husband, I am klutzy -- I am less likely to say to myself, "I'm just like that grocery store checker." I'm less likely to say, "Oh yes, we all do things like that, because we're people and we're all deeply imperfect and some of us specialize in dropping things." Instead I feel alone in my non-digital-ness, which is to say, my humanness. I feel like an island of chaotic personhood in a world of uniformly friendly little "pings." Enter the perfectionism of modern life. Where on earth did I get the idea that I should be perfect? Well...everything else seems to be. What's wrong with me?

The Macro Lens

2009-11-08T14:01:00.029-05:00

I'm feeling resistance to my post-per-day commitment. It's Sunday. I have a lot of other things to do on Sunday. It seems like a bad idea to carve out as much time as it would take to grow any of these awkward, haphazardly organized ideas into deliverable posts.

There's one here about internet addiction. It starts well, noting that the image of a test monkey hitting a bar is precisely reminiscent of my email checking habits, but then becomes quite incomprehensible as I introduce the narrative of the first time I tried to quit smoking. At age 18, I stood up on a chair in a theatre management class and announced that I was quitting, following some purely intuitive theory that publicity would hold me accountable to my decision. I lasted about a month. How to fold that into my aggressively publicized plan to quit the internet?

And here's one titled -- somewhat pretentiously, I notice now -- "The Illusion of Ease." This one was born when I started listing things that would truly be harder to accomplish without the internet. Unfortunately, each of these "difficulties" have essentially dissolved under examination. I talked about how I've just now finally started to submit my poems to literary magazines, and how am I going to keep doing that without the internet? But then I mentioned that problem at the dinner table, and my rascally brother Jacob (again!) reminded me that the library organizes periodicals by subject. I can walk to one place and leave with submission information for every literary journal carried by the Boston Public Library. That isn't harder than surfing the internet. It's much, much easier.

Consequently I started looking for a whole post's worth of tasks that will be easier without the internet, feeding my imagination with the known truth that websites do their best to keep you as long as they possibly can, and maybe we're all doing things the absolute hardest way. But I was no more able to prove the second hypothesis than the first. Grrr. It's so difficult to write engaging posts when the world just refuses to line up to support my most clever ideas!

Finally, unrelated: an unfinished post on the joys and difficulties of life without a cellphone. And this is probably where I should have started, because some things about this are really, very fun.

Nick and I had arranged to meet at 11AM, at the corner of Water St and High School Ave. I, coming from the ceramics studio, was on time. Nick, coming from home with both kids in the car, was not on time. We had a very exciting place to go and I really didn't want for us to be late. But there was absolutely nothing I could do.

Miraculously, calling on every "deep resource" that I had, I sat down on a pile of pine needles on the street corner and did a sitting meditation. I'm lousy at meditation. I'm very good at daydreaming. As Nick describes it, "You don't clear your mind. You move your mind." But with no phone, no camera, and nothing to write with or on, I couldn't think of anything else to do. I figured that a busy street corner was as good a place as any to fail to meditate.

Although I hardly achieved any degree of mental silence, I did log some wonderful details, from the sound of leaves scraping the sidewalk, to the concentrated heat on one eyebrow from the late morning sun, to the open-mouthed smirk of the delivery driver who made a U-turn right in front of me, making no secret of his plan to tell a story of his own, about me.

When Nick pulled up close to the curb and I jumped up to greet my very hungry baby and my very unbalanced life, which so bravely refuses to fit neatly into blog posts, I did feel a little calmer. I felt a whole lot calmer than I might have otherwise, had I spent that time pacing circles, or helplessly watching the numbers change on my electronic time keeping device.

Some days I think this experiment will bring me to some insight regarding the deepest rhythms of the world, or the movement of power through previously invisible channels. I imagine myself making everything fall into a pattern, like a great Periodic Table for the Humanities. But today, marking one unusual victory, I'm actually feeling appreciative -- even protective -- of my tiny, awkward life. Today I am still wearing the macro lens that I found so reassuring in my meditative (ish) triumph on a street corner, and am thinking that if I could focus on growing myself to some small degree, instead of ordering the forces of the planet, then I might be better satisfied with my results.

Deep Cuts

2009-11-07T09:00:00.016-05:00

This is my brother Jacob, giving Milo some piece of crucial information about pears. Jacob was over for dinner on Thursday, as he often is. He hasn't read this blog, and he posed, almost word for word, this same concern. "I would think," he said, "having just moved to a new place, and otherwise lacking a support network, that this [Year Without Internet] would block avenues for communication that you might later find you want."

I told him to go and read my blog. "Put down the polenta. Get back on the train. Leave my kitchen in favor of your computer screen, please, and do some reading, because I have Already Talked About This."

People are so messy. So much messier than blogs. People want to talk about things you've already talked about, bring up issues that are Already Resolved.

Shortly after I put up this post this morning, I'm getting with my family into the car and driving south, a little more than an hour, to see some friends from college. These are friends whom I partially credit for getting my husband and I together thirteen years ago, when I basically stalked Nick -- who was equal parts reticent and oblivious -- to a party at Kim's house. As the party wound down, Rick suggested, with his characteristically irreverent grin, that the two of us might want to sober up a little bit instead of driving home. And perhaps a perfect place for us to do that was in the basement.

About a decade has passed now since we've seen them, and as Nick and I are packing for the drive, we're all feeling a little like we're about to open the presents on Christmas morning. What a gift it is to regain friends you've lost! Of course, we arranged the entire thing on Facebook.

When I opened my email yesterday -- rather, one of many times that I opened my email yesterday -- I received a cyber thank you note from a student director to mentors past and present on the occasion of opening her first full production. Her gratitude was sweet and exuberant -- oh, to be that age again! -- and if her opening had occurred one month later, after my Dec 1 blackout date, I wouldn't have received it. I wouldn't have known that a bright young female director credits me among the many influences that help her guide a play from table work to opening.

So this is the price I pay. Nothing in life is perfect. You give a little, get a little. I give up some friendly contact and I also lose my internet addiction. Or I keep the addiction, and I keep the friends.

A lot of feminists have had their "aha" moment associated with the discovery of these exchanges. You discover patriarchy not when it takes your rights away, but when it gives them back, under contingencies: Your body can be safe from violence, if... Your sexuality can be your own, if... You, too, can rise in the ranks of power, if...

And it is equally as dangerous to imagine that things in this life are free. Every action has consequences. There's no such thing, we all know, as a free lunch. A few people in the world would say that maintaining sexual purity is the only way to protect yourself from rape. And a few people would say that the internet is the only way to maintain access to the rest of the world.

I'm treading on dangerous ground here, I think. I don't really want to take the next step, in which, following the advice of Deep Throat and World Magazine, I will "follow the money," asking myself who benefits from the strange claim above, who engineered this slight twist on a truth, in which we leap from, "this is a tool that does things no other thing can do" to, "this is the only tool that can do something humans have been doing since the beginning."

But I'm genuinely melancholy this morning about my Year Without Internet. Partly because this blog has temporarily warmed my online life, proving the maxim that all things improve proportional to the amount of attention paid to them. And partly because I had a real experience of loneliness yesterday. I intentionally put the brakes on my intellectual pursuits, so that I could take better care of my kids. And it worked. I had a great SAHM day, with a clean house and happy kids. We got a new book in the mail from Dolly and worked on letters all afternoon. But I was lonely.

I found myself staring out the window, hoping to see Nick's figure coming around the corner more than an hour before he was actually due home, and refreshing my email page over and over again, and experiencing this sense of loss associated with having stopped my own train of thought. And why did I have to stop my own train of thought? Why did I find that I had to stop blogging for the day because I had disengaged from my real life to the extent that I couldn't hear my kids? I think...I think it has something to do with the Internet.

The secret to all of this, says the whispering voice of every wise person I've ever known, is Balance. The problem is, you do each thing too much. When you write, you write too much, and when you stop writing, you stop writing completely. And you care too much about your friends. And really, you're a Very Dramatic person.

And, yes. All that is true. If any of you has a tonic for Becoming Balanced, will you send it my way, please? Via snail mail?

Five Minutes

2009-11-06T11:24:00.011-05:00

I don't have any theatre people around my house right now, so the following has been very under appreciated. But it makes me smile.

One More Sentence

2009-11-06T09:00:00.012-05:00

I took a few minutes longer with yesterday's post than I had intended. And although Milo was playing quietly in the living room, I soon discovered that he was playing quietly with small chunks of styrofoam that he was ripping off of his sister's car seat. As I was putting a stop to that project I realized, with mounting alarm, that both kids were hungry, and both of them needed changed, and there were breakfast dishes still to be done, and actually it looked a little bit like a tornado had made its way through the house, and that I had been locked to the computer screen writing "one more sentence" for more than an hour.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Have a nice Friday!

Niche Market News, or, How The Sky Got a Crack In It

2009-11-05T11:30:00.034-05:00

It was about six months ago that it fully dawned on me that my sister and I are getting different news. Dolly was sitting with me at my kitchen table, with some of the coffee cake that I always make (that she later taught me would stay moist longer with 1/3 of a cup of applesauce in the batter), and she was talking about tea parties.

I don't know if she could tell this at the time, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Tea parties? British high tea? I was a little distracted by my heavy pregnancy -- the very day before Stella was born -- and I had a momentary image of a friend's three-year-old daughter serving me plastic doughnuts.

My sister continued, "It's hard to see that as anything but bias. When that many people come to a protest and the media doesn't cover it at all. That's a bias."

I didn't hear what she said next. Instead I transformed her accusation into its shadow: a claim that her preferred news sources are somehow not biased, while mine are. This shadow claim -- the thing that Dolly didn't say but, I imagined, she must have meant -- is so absurd and strange that I stopped listening.

Media bias? My sister, who is a card carrying member of the Christian right, is talking to me about media bias?

As we always do, my sister and I continued our conversation in perfect civility until one or the other of us changed the subject, and we still get along just fine, even though we remain politically minded and pretty much diametrically opposed. But I didn't learn anything about the tea parties.

It was more than a month later, near July 4, that the phenomenon of tea parties finally made its way into my news stream, and I came to realize that they were gatherings of political conservatives convened to protest various financial policies of the current administration.

Maybe I wouldn't have been interested anyway. I'm a garden variety bleeding heart, by which I mean that my alliances are forged along the lines of social issues, and financial policy concerns would have a hard time coming near enough to unseat my convictions. But my greatest conviction of all has to do with clear vision, in this case, the ability to hear, and on that front I had experienced a failure.

And the most maddening part of this particular failure? Is that I don't even watch television news, which I'm pretty sure is the sector of media my sister was critiquing. So what was I defending? I don't watch TV at all. And neither does my sister. We both read our news...on the internet.

In different places on the internet, clearly. The phrase "niche market" comes to mind, and I'm remembering how my brother Dan, who is a businessman, explained this to me. On the internet there is financial reward for gathering what would once have been considered a puny audience. If you can gather a thousand people, a couple of thousand people, you're doing all right. A generation ago, nobody would have kept creating content for that small of a market. It would have been too expensive. It wouldn't have made money. It wouldn't have worked.

But now it does work. And as a result, even in circles of people who wear the same political stripes, it can take a few minutes to get on the same page. I listen to NPR. She's watching CNN. He's reading Slate. And even though many of us still read the New York Times (in my liberal-ish circles, obviously), we are using our browsers to scan that huge paper for the particular articles we're looking for.

Welcome to the age of consumer-driven news. I can search the internet for the position statement that most closely matches my vision of the world, for the evidence that supports my already-formed conclusion. And with as little effort as type-type-type-click-click-scan-scan, I will almost certainly find it. It wants to be found.

Quite a few years ago now, I worked as a stage manager on a play written and directed by a San Diego radio personality. The play was a simplified and humor-ized rendition of that disc jockey's life and career, with great pop hits and a twenty-five foot turntable. It ended each night with a montage of television news footage of the most significant events in the prior thirty years of San Diego's history, ramping through the devastating crash of PSA Flight 182 on its way to the fall of the Twin Towers. That house held 414 people. It was packed every show. And every show there was a collective mourning, a together mourning, as they relived these horrific events writ large on the projection screen in front of them.

I couldn't have anything to do with it. Maybe I genuinely needed to maintain emotional distance in order to be effective in my job. Maybe I'm just weak. But every night I invited the stage crew to open their headset microphones, asking them to cease their wonderfully breezy and distracting conversation only moments before the closing sequence, in which, as the second of the two towers collapsed again into that living cloud of dust, I would call the projection screen to black, and the turntable back around to its final position.

I can't exactly remember the lines that were spoken then, by these DJ characters with their funny names, as the stage lights came up to a theater sized replica of a grieving nation. The truth of those words was too bald for me to really appreciate it at the time, and I would guess the insight was also lost to most of the audience. But what was said went something like this:

"When you turn on your radio in the morning, what you really want to know...is that you're not alone."

To the hundreds of fans of a single radio show, seated shoulder to shoulder in that darkened room, that was a rallying cry. It was a celebration of their togetherness in the face of unimaginable tragedy. But to me, it just made me feel more lonely. I wasn't a part of that group. I couldn't be a part of that group. I couldn't buy what that particular DJ had to sell.

Once again, I find myself thinking of the world less in terms of left and right and more in terms of in and out. "Do you believe what They are telling you?" so many of us ask, every day. The thing that differs -- widely! -- is who we think "They" is. "They" could be the Communists or it could be the President. It could be a pastor or it could be an environmental scientist. It could be the corporations, or the United Nations, or talk radio, or your sister, or the network news.

This is our culture now, this dogged pursuit of our deceivers -- even to the extent that an elected Representative calls out, "That's a lie!" to the President during a joint session of Congress. In this, he is accurately representing his constituency. We all believe that somebody is lying.

I felt this deeply as I recently drove across the center of the country, letting my radio dial meander across the band and hearing, in succession, fully opposite statements presented equally as truth. What is this doing to our minds? When you can sit there with another person, and you know they're not crazy, and you know you aren't crazy -- at least, you weren't yesterday -- but you're finding that their understanding of reality is different from yours? That they're literally living in a different world?

When we talk about the political polarization of recent years, I believe this is what we're talking about. I don't have reason to believe that our legislative representatives are drifting apart from one another. From my humble single-point perspective, all five hundred and thirty five of them continue to have more in common with each other than they do with me.

But we are becoming more polarized. Across these ideological chasms -- the culture wars, the mommy wars, the political wars -- we are less likely to have shared experiences: less likely to have heard the same program, read the same book, admired the same public figure, or dreamed the same dream. And as we surf the internet each day, we can feel our reality shifting, just a tiny bit, depending on in which universe we land.

I don't blame the internet for all this. It is a reflection of changing culture as much as it is a cause of it. But I do feel the need to aggressively reach out, at least to a few people. Maybe just to my one Republican sister. Or even to people whose political values are similar to mine, but have heard me focus on the minute differences in our thinking instead of digging hard into the human souls we have in common.

And I find that, on occasion, I close my computer and look up and out at the real sky, which doesn't have any cracks in it at all and wonder, what on earth am I talking about? These dire imaginings, all these concerns, however poetic they might appear on my computer screen, can hardly stand to the challenge of a real November wind.

Now

2009-11-04T09:00:00.014-05:00

I don't know what I'm going to write about today.

This is abnormal. I am the sort of writer who writes because I have so much to say, and my craft is forever trying to catch up with my enthusiasm. But I'm starting week two of posting every day, and suddenly I find that the drafts in my list of posts are all finished, the ideas for posts that I've had swimming in my head are all used up. My posting has caught up with my thinking.

I'm HERE.

In the "psychological experiment" category, it's a plus that I can't sustain essays like the one I wrote yesterday: several pages of carefully crafted prose that support my chosen course of action, decorated neatly and tied with a bow. We both know that it isn't really advertising revenue that drives the clanking, clinking Internet machine. It's us. I'm here, and you're here, and we came to see each other.

Hi.

Lisel said yesterday that the internet makes her feel like a hypocrite. Here we are, representing ourselves in real time, like conversation, except I don't always know who the "you" is in my conversation. I don't know if "you" is understanding me. Maybe I misspoke, or hit the wrong key, or didn't give context, or in any of a hundred other ways failed to communicate. Maybe "you" is just in her own place today, and she can't hear me anyway. But whether I reach "you" or I don't, my attempt is printed here in black and white, and it's easy to interpret it as fact.

I recently alarmed myself by dashing off an email -- on my way to take Milo to the library, with him climbing over my chair and chanting, "liberry, liberry"-- and realizing when I got back that the heartfelt statements that I made in that email could be perceived as quite extreme. Doesn't that happen to us all the time these days? We deliver unprepared address, in the moment, and then there it is on the screen, already sent, made permanent in cyberspace. I think it is accurate to say that the most harmful misunderstandings in my life to date have emerged from a careless email. I know that the cruelest thing I've ever said was via text.

I have an Emile Zola quote that I live by, that I have on my Facebook page (and isn't that proof that it's important?!) Slightly paraphrased, because I'm here, now, and doing it from memory, it says, "If you ask me what I came here to do, I, an artist, will tell you. I am here to live out loud." And I have made every effort to do that.

In the context of the theatrical movement of naturalism, which is how I studied Zola, that quote is about having the courage to reveal truths that others might leave hidden, like poverty and suffering, and -- even more alarming -- unkempt kitchens and boring lives. At least, as an artist, I've always thought of it as courage. I am courageous enough to reveal the truth of my condition, to share with you the reality of my imperfections in the interest of a deeper, more meaningful shared experience of life. But in the context of the internet, it doesn't seem to require any courage at all. Now everyone is doing it. Now it's the way we interact. There are no rehearsals. You don't carefully compose your naturalism so that it's properly lit and you can hear the actors. You just turn on the tap and let it flow.

I'm flirting with this now. By committing to write something every day for a month, I'm not always writing because I have something to say. I'm coming up with something to say so I can write it. Pro or con? I don't know. I haven't thought about it.

The Opt-Out Problem

2009-11-03T08:30:00.017-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen -- ladies, in particular -- I seem to have opted out.

As I sat down this afternoon to write a letter -- on a floral-patterned card with a creased envelope that I rescued from a nearby thrift store -- I had to acknowledge the drastic change that preceded this adventure. None of these lifestyle changes would be possible if I hadn't stopped working. I wouldn't be the one writing letters. I would be failing to answer them. I wouldn't be the one rescuing pretty cards from thrift stores. I would be stuffing them down the sides of a donation bag in an effort to suppress my own domestic clutter and unfinished thoughts. I certainly wouldn't be the one planning to go for a year without the internet. I would be too busy using the internet, to work and to network, to instruct and to debate, to publicize and to promote. Today I had no choice but to acknowledge this: to the two loved but several-years-neglected friends in the address line, an Esther that doesn't work was going to be hard to explain.

In my first year out of college I put in my 40 hours in corporate America, while also running eight shows a week. Even as I gained traction in the theatre world I never, ever slowed down. Until I stopped. That my choice to abandon my high stress/high reward career path coincides neatly with the birth of my second child is not a statement that I like to make in public. I'm not a believer in the "opt-out revolution," as it has been referred to in media circles since Lisa Belkin's now-aging 2003 New York Times Magazine piece. We all know now that the idea that middle class women are dropping out of the work force in droves is not supported by census data. Rather, the numbers and percentages of women who work for wages continue to increase. But Belkin's opt-out story line continues to surface, as one of many faces to a much older and more insidious myth, one deeply entrenched in the American psyche and one I've spoken about quite harshly in the past: the fallacy that if women are not running the world these days, it is simply because we don't feel like it.

Of course, all that was before I started to not feel like it.

My sense of the importance of female leadership in the theatre has not diminished in the slightest. I'm very concerned about gender imbalance in arts and entertainment. Movies are overwhelmingly written and directed by men. Plays are overwhelmingly written and directed by men (although somewhat less so than movies). What we consider to be fine art is overwhelmingly created by men. Even as men and women become more and more likely to claim that gender imbalance is a thing of the past, the stories of our lives continue to be told from a singularly male perspective.

As a female director I have always been in the minority. As the working mother of an infant I was even more unusual, but not -- at least in my circles -- unique. Kirsten is reading this, and she and her husband wore their baby in a bjorn from prelim design meetings right through tech. Delicia will read it eventually, when she has time, and she has corralled her two children in green rooms all over San Diego. I pledged more than once to stick it out. "I can do this," I said. "I can help prove that it can be done."

And I could have. There is no doubt in my mind that I could have stuck it out. I could, if I wanted to, walk out my door right now -- even in this economy -- and find somewhere to ply my craft. And I could put on a good show. I could draw an appreciative review, or maybe two. I could take gorgeous pictures of the show and file them away with my newspaper clippings, which live in a wooden hope chest painstakingly crafted by my husband's brother in the days before he also had kids.

Or I could fill that hope chest with pictures of children playing in fall leaves, with recipes for banana bread where you freeze the bananas and then thaw them so it turns out really moist, with correspondence with the half dozen truly special -- no, extraordinary! -- friends with whom I have failed to communicate over the years.

Is this how it happens? Does this explain the wealth gap? That according to the Survey of Consumer Finances never married women have slightly less than half as much wealth as never married men? Is it because women are slightly more than twice as likely to notice that we all have better things to do?

As days and months at home bring detachment from various personal ambitions, I am also becoming detached from a certain well-learned image of myself as a success: the image of a successful woman. As she drifts out of the foreground of my own picture, I begin to wonder if gender differentiation is likewise serving -- quite effectively -- to obfuscate a broader question. How can we -- the whole of humanity -- both work and live? The two efforts appear to be at odds with one another. I say work-life balance and it appears in my mind as a set of scales. Work in one side. Life in the other. But who separated them out? How can there possibly be a division? Since when was our labor conceived as something other than the sustenance, even the mainstay, of life?

Each day that I spend in my home -- or out of it, chasing seagulls on the beach (I know, seriously!) or shaking maracas with a room full of toddlers at Tuesday story hour -- the dichotomy shifts. Where I used to see a conflict between career and family, between authority outside of the home and authority inside of the home, I'm beginning to see a conflict between commerce and life. And on the ground, in a world in which commerce and the pursuit of commerce tends to define or affect just about everything, I see a conflict between participation and separatism. By dropping off the internet for one year, I am refusing to participate.

As we all know, but don't always consider, the internet is powered by advertising revenue. The financial reward for gathering an audience gives content creators real reason to play down to our emotions, and the so called "battle of the sexes" is one story that just keeps on getting hits.

I just told Doug (in comments on the Connection post) that I'm not ready to extrapolate beyond my imperfect single point perspective into criticism of the social machine. And I am, as I accused my mother, short of citations here, in the interest of making my committed post-per-day schedule. But I can say that as I live my life outside of the workplace, my gender is less an issue for me than it has ever has been before. In this one magical year before Milo starts preschool, nobody is asking whether Mommy and Daddy fulfill our gender roles or we don't. The seagulls are not taking notes.

I am not interested in giving up my stripes as a radical feminist. I believe that sex-class oppression is widespread, historical and current. I am philosophically opposed to the commodification of the female body, even as it is expressed in a gesture so apparently mild as wearing lipstick in exchange for power. I will continue to be watchful -- especially around young people -- for the pervasive woman-as-commodity language that I believe entrenches rape culture and feeds the ranks of rape apologists.

But I am also a person, and as such I am looking forward to spending a year on the sidelines, where anxiety regarding the "opposite-ness" of the two genders is not fed to me as a part of my balanced media diet. I can even hope (in my never ending idealism!) that when I do return to the work force I can do so with some additional perspective, one more layer of skin with which to resist participation in the more fruitless fronts of the "battle" and possibly even to see more clearly the path into the future.

Things to Do

2009-11-02T08:30:00.007-05:00

1. Switch to paper statements.

2. Cancel direct draft.

3. Order checks.

4. Locate my Yellow Pages, which have been used exclusively as a booster for Milo, and only that after we realized that a daily sprinkling with oatmeal was damaging Volume II of The Annotated Shakespeare.

5. Resign myself to the fact that digital phone will cost more when it is no longer bundled with digital internet and prepare to be frustrated by that phone call.

6. Collect phone numbers.

7. Collect mailing addresses.

8. Contact those relatives and friends who are internet people by halves: those who would use email to contact me but wouldn't see my Facebook or my blog.

9. Buy a map.

10. Pick up a bus schedule.

My Rock Star Brother

2009-11-02T01:19:00.001-05:00

Off topic, in which The Sucking Stones rock the pants off of their first show and have their picture taken by an adoring little sister...

I have three brothers that are rock stars. Above is Jacob, and yes, he is single.

This is my son. He is also single, with only five fewer strings.

The Quality of Connection

2009-11-01T09:00:00.013-05:00

"Esther, having just moved to a new place, without good friends on the East Coast, this is not a healthy thing to do. Your San Diego friends won't write you letters. They won't pick up the phone as easily as they might contact you on email or Facebook, and you can't expect them to. You might become very isolated. And that could lead to becoming depressed."

I'm not going to talk today about the isolation that can be a part of life at home with small children. But that kind of loneliness was the context of my friend's concern, and both she and I have a pretty good idea of what that feels like.

A few days ago I wrote about how good it feels to share something wonderful that just happened even when there isn't a live grown up anywhere in sight. If my son has done something thrilling, Daddy is out of contact on his way to work and my West coast friends won't be up for hours, where do I turn? To the internet, of course! No matter what the day or hour, there is somebody on the internet who is listening. The internet itself is listening.

In this case, when I found myself full-to-bursting with the news that my 2-year old is beginning to learn to read, I had less than an hour to wait before I could have picked up the phone and called my husband. Then again, my husband might not have been the best audience for my delight, having recently expressed mild concern after cleaning out my car and finding 1st and 2nd Grade McGraw-Hill reading textbooks tucked underneath the driver's seat. These were the result of a Freecycle mixup, I quickly assured him. I was supposed to get the bag with the cloth barn and farm animals. But he had raised an eyebrow, and I had taken the note.

I could have waited a few more hours and called my homeschooling sister, who would not only have been appreciative of Milo's progress, but could also have helped me understand what to teach next and how best to teach it. Or I could have waited a few more hours after that and called Milo's grandma, who would have been unconditionally tickled. But I didn't call her. I didn't call any of them.

On the same cross country drive that I mentioned in the Open Space post -- the post on which Chelsea commented that media chatter helps protect us from our loneliness -- my family and I stopped to visit my grandmother in her nursing home in northern Utah. For a few hours on a Sunday morning, Milo alternately hid behind Daddy, crawled in and out of his sister's car seat and suspiciously eyed the metal walker, while Stella and I sat -- mostly in silence -- and held my grandma's hand. The centerpiece of her room and of our brief conversation was her bulletin board, which overflows, sometimes two deep, with pictures and letters and postcards from her eight grandchildren and now eleven great-grandchildren. Except, really, only nine great-grandchildren. There were no pictures of my kids. Not one.

Do I have any excuses? Well...I haven't had a way to print pictures. I have a printer, but the color settings are wrong and I don't know how to fix them. And I haven't had a way to take pictures that seemed worth printing, since I have an overdeveloped aesthetic sense and have only recently started learning to control my camera. And I've never had pictures professionally done, because I just have never had the time or the money for things like that. And I've been, you know, so busy, and we do visit her, at least occasionally, and one thing and another, sending pictures to Grandma is something that just never, ever happened.

I finally took the photos. I printed them at Target. I put a stamp on an envelope. I wrote out the address. I wrote my kids' names and ages in black marker on the back of each picture, trusting that somebody other than me will help my grandmother pin them up onto her bulletin board. It wasn't really very much effort, but it was a little bit of effort. It was a little bit of effort targeted directly to a person whom I love.

At least a few days a week I capture something funny or clever or important about my day, and I post it as a status update on Facebook. This also takes a little bit of effort. But instead of sending it to one person, I put it up for anyone to see. Does this interest you? If so, come in and have a conversation. If this interests you, be a part of my relationship circle. Be my friend. Be my family.

We all have seasons in our lives, and for me, this period of having no job and two kids under the age of three is an intense season of family. That's why this blog is so heavily populated with the colorful personalities that I'm bound to by blood or marriage, including the pretty girl in these pictures, who is the daughter of my brother. The transition from work life to family life is a real thing that's happening to me right now, but it isn't at all the point I'm trying to make. Blood family or soul family, either way, what I'm trying to talk about is the locus of intention.

I created a message, yes, but I did I finish the job? Did I decide where to send it?

On that morning a few days ago, when I couldn't wait a single second to express my sense of celebration, I sat down and wrote a letter. (Really? A letter? Who writes letters anymore?) Yes, I think so. I put the words on the page. I put effort into telling the story. The only thing I skipped is the address line. I didn't choose the target. Instead I put the information in the blogosphere, and I waited for the target to choose me.

This consumer-driven exchange may be ideal for information. I can find my way to the "how to" that I'm looking for. I can read the article that interests me. It's lovely for finding other people's insights, and I suppose also for various kinds of solace and inspiration. But for me right now, at this moment in my life, I'm not sure that consumer-driven contact can be a good model for friendship.

Friendship takes work. I'm not great at it. I never have been. And I'd rather face that than to keep my life full of shadows of friendships, electronic maps of who happened to notice what, when, and did I get your attention today, or do you happen to share this particular opinion that defines the two of us as members of one group. I'd rather go to the effort to learn how to take better care of the many wonderful people that I already have. I think in the long run that is what will take better care of me.

And of course, here I am telling you all this in a computerized version of my life, complete with computerized tea dates and computerized discussion, and I've made an effort to attract my San Diego friends, whom I miss, to this blog for just that purpose. Feel free to poke fun at that as you like.

Good, True Stock of Separatists

2009-10-31T09:33:00.005-04:00

This is my mother, Carla Emery.

The picture captures her very well, from the broad and very practiced smile to the misspelled tag that accompanied the download, "calra-home."

I'm on a winding path right now, but it seems that no matter where I think I'm headed, I keep on running into my mother. Amy Chini was in my house one evening, shortly before Stella was born, just as I was beginning to realize that my confusing, painful separation from the theatre world -- which appeared to be a side effect of having babies -- was also creating space for me to write. I wasn't any clearer then than I am now how best to apply that knowledge: whether I can break into academia like the rest of my new hometown of Boston, or put out a chapbook and live proudly as an unknown poet, or continue to write selfishly for my own clarity of thinking and peace of mind. Destination Unknown. But when Amy Chini was in my house that night, we started talking about writers and writing, and suddenly realized that we had spent an entire cup of tea on the subject of my mother.

I'm the youngest daughter of Carla Emery, who wrote The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book -- a book that is big enough to wear that long of a title -- and who trumpeted frugal living and the homestead lifestyle with singular commitment for more than thirty years. She died on the road, touring the country with her husband and a van full of books and pamphlets, sleeping where her people would keep her, and preaching the gospel of sustainable living: Get out of debt. Live free. Teach your children. Work for yourself. Think for yourself. And don't be the one left unprepared when the natural resources run out.

Like any self-respecting young adult, I didn't take my mom too seriously. The message was too strident, too scary, too much in opposition to the world we live in. And she hardly ever cited anything. Her truly formidable knowledge was specked with figments, scientifically unfounded visions of conspiracy and of impending doom.

But lately I've found myself drawn to her memory, not least because October marked the fourth anniversary of her death. I occasionally read her website, which is still up in its entirety, remembering with a shudder the intensity in her eyes and hands as she warned her audiences of dire consequences, disasters to come, and sighing as I look at that familiar tag line which I once found so embarrassing: "Ask Carla. Carla knows."

I hail from good, true stock of separatists. In my own wobbly orbit of Planet Carla, I have visited the barter fairs and the militias. I've met the Biblical contingent and the free love contingent, eaten with the skinny dippers and the puritans, participated in the late night drum circles and the early morning prayer circles. And, full disclosure, they sort of run together.

Today -- writing to you from a warm house in the city complete with slippers and cat and cup of coffee -- I am not the one who will go off the power grid. I am not the one who will grow my own food. But I am able to go off the communication grid. And the passion that I have to do this, and to talk about it, is something that I owe, at least in part, to my mother.

I have one copy of "the Book." It's the very shiny, modern 9th edition that feels like it doesn't have enough illustrations. I gave the other ones away, not realizing that I probably could have sold them. I watched my husband make bread last weekend, for the first time ever, and although I didn't actually open my mother's book, my thoughts darted affectionately to a line drawing illustration of her that appears in the chapter once titled "Grains." She is elbow deep in bread dough, with one child helping, another child enthusiastically offering up his teddy bear, and the baby (would that be Sara?) playing with a chunk of bread dough at her feet.

Here's bread and gratitude to my mom, on Halloween instead of Mother's Day, but deeply felt.

Open Space

2009-10-30T09:00:00.005-04:00

The second person I talked to about my Year Without Internet was my big sister, Dolly. As big sisters sometimes do, she started organizing me. "You'll need some criteria for deciding what you can and can't do," she said. "What are your criteria?"

Internet, no. Cellphone, no. Land line, yes. Ability to dial 9-1-1 if one of my kids chokes on a penny, yes. Computer, yes. The ban is on digital communication. Only, wait, that isn't accurate because land line phones are digital now. No, the ban is on portable, instantaneous communication. Walkie talkies are right out.

"You'll have to decide what you're going to do for entertainment," Dolly said, "besides the kids. Otherwise you'll go crazy."

I disagreed. I disagreed so much that I interrupted. "I don't think so." I think the entertainment IS what makes me crazy. Addicted and crazy. Addicted to being crazy.

I remembered my Aunt Mary's complaint regarding the half day drive with my dad from Boise, Idaho to their mother's nursing home in northern Utah (pictured here). "He doesn't like to talk," she said. "And he doesn't like to listen to the radio. So I'm sort of..." She grimaced and made a twiddling gesture with her hands.

I'm with my dad on that one. I like the drive across Kansas, and would prefer not to have it interrupted. Are we built differently from other people? Born under a different star? Made fit to tolerate silence? Or has there been some grain of separatism in the mechanism of our lives, behavior patterns that we acquired somewhere off the beaten path, that have taught us this aptitude for stillness? I don't mean to stray into nature vs. nurture here, but I wonder: Is this a trait? Or a practice?

People occasionally try to save me from my puritan tendencies. One beloved friend (and you know who you are, lady) tends to encourage me to let my toddler watch videos. I do sometimes let him watch videos. An example is our adventurous drive from San Diego to Boston, during which I gave exactly as much brain space to charging the DVD player as I did to keeping my gas tank full.

"There's nothing wrong with it," my friend says, meaning television, "and it can give you a bit of a break." She may be thinking to herself that I'm a perfectionist (which I am) and a control freak (which I am) and I just need to be reminded to relax.

But for me TV is not relaxing. Even the sound of it in another room tends to affect me for the worse. It's just too emotionally loud, too effectively geared to manipulate, for me to let it fade into the background. I know this because my resting state is without TV. And I'm here to test a muddy hypothesis that internet is doing the same thing.

It might go without saying here that my sensitivity to informational noise is informed by the struggle to generate art. I won't go into the chicken and egg question of whether my sensitivity came from trying to make art or trying to make art came from the sensitivity, but clearly I have both.

Theatre folk know well the first couple of sentences of Peter Brooks' book The Empty Space:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.

I think (hope?) I'm creating an empty space.

Do other makers of pictures and manipulators of ideas out there find that your creative state is adversely affected by informational noise? Magazines, advertisements, talk radio, worries...phone calls from your mom? Or maybe you find the opposite: it's difficult to get moving on a project without some good internet-style instant feedback. Like, say, you might want to blog for a while -- a month or so, maybe -- to kick up some ideas for a book?

Card Catalogs

2009-10-29T11:00:00.001-04:00

The first person I floated this idea to (not counting Sam) was my husband. It affects him rather closely. "I think I want to do a year off line, partly because I really want that kind of life and I may never have this kind of a chance again, and partly as a stunt that can organize some writing."

In typical Nick fashion, he considered it for a while before responding. "Here's my question," he said. "How much research will you need to do for this book? And how will you do the research if you can't use the internet?"

Question: Do card catalogs still exist?

Answer: Yes. You can use them for storing spices.

Cut to a vision of myself walking the stacks of the Harvard libraries, reaching out my hand towards a mass of musty hardcovers and praying for guidance. "Please, let my hand fall on a book that is lively, informative and concise, and also relevant."

Is that what we used to call "browsing?"

This is What Mommy Blogs are Good For

2009-10-28T06:39:00.000-04:00

When you have something wonderful to celebrate and you're the only adult in the house and it's still too early for it to be light outside, let alone to call a friend:

Milo just said, "B is for Book." I've been working on B is for Bunny, and B is for Baby, but we haven't done B is for Book. Unless he learned that phrase from my niece -- who is apparently related to me because she teaches language skills as continuously and with as much enthusiasm as I do -- he has made the letter-sound connection!! Pointing to the letters on the keyboard, he says, "B, buh buh buh, B says buh, B is for Book." You know it!!

Now he's saying, "don't touch my letters," which I think means that I should stop typing for a while and celebrate. How should we celebrate? Clearly, we should read some Books.

I'm glad I had a mommy blog today so I could share that with you. To be filed under "things I will miss."

How ARE you going to do it?

2009-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

This whole thing started a little more than a week ago, when my husband and I cancelled our cellphone service. We did this for financial reasons, although I will admit to letting certain people imagine it was in the spirit of simple living.

The customer service agent's name was Sam, and she sounded concerned. "Can I ask why you're considering cancelling your cellphone service today? You know, there are a lot of things we could do to lower the cost on this. We could drop it to a single line today and that would substantially lower your monthly payment."

I decided to try to be funny. My husband was home. My husband is funny, and when he's around I often try to be funny, too. "Sam," I said, "I'm writing a book about how to survive without a cellphone for an entire year. This is my research."

I grinned at my husband and pointed at the phone. See how I'm getting out of this sales pitch?

Sam's tone changed completely. "That is so cool," she said. "I would totally read that book." Then she hesitated, and her tone changed again. "How are you going to do it?"

I wish her enthusiasm had made it any easier to drop the cellphone service. We had two more phone calls ahead of us, and although I think their customer service is a little more endurable when you try to cancel your plan than when you sign up for it in the first place -- the least motivated agents seem to go to customers who have already decided to buy -- it was still a royal pain to get ourselves disentangled.

That evening, as I practiced juggling in the kitchen and listened to my two-year-old son's bedtime ritual with Daddy, I remembered Sam's incredulity. I've heard that tone before: As a home-schooled teenager starting college at age 15, "Wow, you must be really smart." As a young adult, "You don't have a TV? Don't you get bored?" As a pregnant woman choosing home birth with a qualified midwife, "Isn't that dangerous?" And recently, from the ComCast employee who installed our internet service, bundled with digital phone, "How are you going to do it with two kids and no cable?" When I told him that I didn't actually like TV, I mean really like TV, at all, he had shrugged and waved at my two year old. "I bet he does, though."

It's true. My kid does like to watch television. He also would like to eat macaroni and cheese for every meal, go all day without having his diaper changed and follow a seagull into the Atlantic Ocean. There are certain things that we don't let him decide.

Of course I'm not suggesting that purchasing cable TV service is like letting your child drown. There are no similarities as far as I can tell. What I am approaching is this question: Who made that decision? And if you think you made that decision, are you sure?

Since my encounter with Sam I have been obsessively observing which lifestyle choices I think of as choices, and which ones I don't think about at all. Is it really more difficult to live life without a cellphone? Does it adversely affect the life I'm actually living, or is it left over from another time and place? And while I'm thinking about it, What Is My Deal With The Internet?

This is the question I'm setting out to answer, for one year, with a pledge to journal the whole experience -- but without a way to post that journal for instantaneous feedback. It's partly a year of growth and introspection, like self-guided grad school. It's partly an effort to spend this finite time completely focused on my kids, who seem to get older very suddenly whenever I look away. And it's partly self-source psychological research. (ha ha!) Will I be different once I've had some time free from the internet? Will I think differently? Would you?

And maybe I will someday roll this experience (with your thoughts!) into a book, in which case I'll call Sam back and tell her where to buy it.

A Year Without Internet

2009-10-26T14:40:00.001-04:00

I'm going off the internet.

(insert sun burst here)

Having recently learned how to live without my career, how to live without a workplace to organize my sense of accomplishment, how to live without daily performance assessment in person and in print, and -- most relevant -- how to live without my own source of income, I realize that I may never again have this opportunity.

So in December of 2009, just in time to devote the extra free time to celebrating Christmas -- yes, that holiday again -- I'm going off the internet.

And because I am a creature of rituals and containers, on the way to spending a year without the internet I am going to spend a month WITH the internet. A month? I know, I know, but I want to take a nice long goodbye, like the last twenty minutes of The Return of the King. Does that not sound healthy? Well, I'm not sure it is. That's why I'm calling it The Internet Binge.

Encouragement, discouragement, sage wisdom and rants are welcome, here: