Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Hope and Food Production
First, I’ve been asked a few times if I’m working. I’m not. Secondly, I’ve been asked how the kids are doing. They’re fine. They’re better than fine. They’re amazing. I haven’t taken pictures in months. Here I will be a good playwright, and put the plot exposition into the opening scene: pictures stored on computers, computers stolen, pictures lost, ensuing sadness/freedom, awareness that I can admire that gorgeous life spark emanating from my kids at any time, even without the aid of technology…total lack of inspiration to take more pictures. But because I was thinking of you, dear Internet, I dusted off the camera. Results attached: uneven but heartfelt.
And how is Nick? Ask him yourself! You can friend him on Facebook. After close to two years of stalwart resistance, he finally became a Facebook convert about eight months into my experiment, when the upstairs neighbor got unsecured wireless and I took a trip to Nicaragua. I didn’t mind, really. I gave him my password and asked him to count my friend requests.
And me? What have I been doing with myself? Not much. In fact, I have been doing as little as possible. I did too much in my twenties. I’m thinking I might take this decade off.
In truth I have made a practice of stillness. It feels good. And, even if it didn’t feel good, I'm due for it. I have a lion's share of listening and learning left to do. So far my studies are inexhaustible and inexhaustibly rewarding. I tell my pen pals that I am going to Do It Yourself grad school. I’m a candidate for a DIY degree.
Don’t ask me, though, what field I’m in. Some days I'd like to reclaim the M.R.S. degree, transforming that mean joke into an open door to all the sons and daughters of our mothers. To so many of our mothers the kitchen was a fox trap, because their dreams were hung outside the home. But a generation later, as we seek ways to reclaim humanity and human connection, and resist the ubiquity of commercial enterprise, an advanced degree in home and family sounds like a lifeline.
Of course I can't take the gender out of the MRS. Gender is a real thing, and it does exist, and it is used as a tool in hands we know and hands we don't know. If I could tidy up that knot in a single line of exposition, you must believe that I would. But I can't. Instead I set it aside, still breathing, still tangled, and trace one single thread: how I as a feminist chose to reclaim my own kitchen.
In the very first days of my experiment, I was hyperaware of one activity: eating. As I broke the addiction – and yes, I do think it was an addiction – I found myself turning constantly to food – for entertainment, consolation, and as the centerpiece of social behavior. I had nothing else to do. I began to cook. Having ordered out or eaten from the grocery store deli for most of my adult life, I was just learning how. First I learned to make dinner from scratch. Then I learned to make a vegan dinner from scratch. Then I learned how to make a vegan dinner from local ingredients. In August, sitting down at a coyantura in Nicaragua, hearing an historian ask the assembled travelers on which topics we most wished for her to speak, I was surprised to hear myself saying, “agriculture and economics.” Not art, not feminism, not that sexy poet assassin who killed the first of the Somoza dictators. (And doesn’t that sound like a great story?) No, I wanted to hear about food: who grows it, who eats it, and who gets paid.
Now some of you will remember my mother. She wrote a book about this sort of thing. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. I am paying attention now.
To some degree, following in my mother’s footsteps in this way is only an aspect of the largest accomplishment of my year without Internet. This is a slight but measurable increase in personal integrity. I left the Internet in search of authenticity. And I most certainly found it. What I found is that genuine lifestyle change is grueling and incremental. I did make changes. But other things have not changed. I did read some of the books that I have always thought I ought to read. But others I found boring and put back on the shelf. I have awakened and healed some of my broken or abandoned relationships. But others are still lost.
But the year has given me a tremendous burst in hope. Back on the Internet for one week, I see that the anger has not subsided. There is the fear. The desire to convert. The voices that are speaking but not being heard. It wears on me. I realize that beginning to take a square look at global food production – which is not a pretty picture – depends on my ability to retreat from the more fruitless aspects of ideological conflict. I have to be able to rest. I have to be able to find silence. Otherwise I will not be able to hear. I cannot constantly be on the attack. Nor can I lie back against the rope and allow myself to be pummeled. At least occasionally, I have to step out of the ring.
And in the resting, with silence, that heals and also transforms, there is this unexpected burst of hope. Change is possible. Positive change is possible. Start now. Start anywhere.
From Hafiz, "The Friend comes into my body looking for the center, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere."
An Invitation to You
Come see me!
Love,
Esther
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Love, by Snailback
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
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Return of the Jedi
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.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
A Word From Esther! Month 5
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
Thursday, March 4, 2010
A Word From Esther! Month Two
Quincy, February 7, 2010
Dear Internet,
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.
Yours Truly, From My Kitchen,
Esther Emery
Saturday, January 9, 2010
A Word From Esther!
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.