Hilda the Hippopotamus

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

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?!

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!

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

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

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

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.