One More Sentence

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.