On Joan Didion and self-respect and friends with benefits

I've been reading a lot of Joan Didion lately. Making my way slowly through her essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which are as sharp and relevant as ever. At the moment, I've got an essay on the Botox phenonmenon in the works, and am half assedly working on another one about dating, and feel like such a silly person when I read old Joan. The woman really slices to the heart of things.  

Here's a passage from her essay "On Self-Respect" that blew me away:

"People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which all self-respect springs."

Damn. I think a lot about how important it is to live honestly, and to be honest about your shortcomings. For one, it's less exhausting than pretending to be someone you're not, but then also it sets a good example for other people. It's refreshing to hear about people you admire, or who seem to really have it together, being utter fuck ups in their private lives. It reminds you you're not alone, and to not judge others too harshly. I need these kind of reminders. I'm too hard on myself, too often comparing myself with others and finding I don't measure up. Which is obviously a short route to misery. (Ahem, comparing oneself to Joan effing Didion being a case in point.)

But I've never really thought about honesty being a key factor in self-respect in such concrete terms. It's true, of course. Taking responsibility for your life is imperative. But one often thinks of it in the more constructive ways - choosing to commit to a job or a marriage or a family or whatever. It's interesting to think of it in terms of the destructive ways too. So you drink too much? Own it. So you still smoke? Own that too. You're overweight because you just can't get it together to be vigilant about your diet? Just own it. Everyone makes tradeoffs. 

This is relevant to the dating essay I'm working on, but which I haven't yet gotten to the heart of. My single friends and I often talk about settling. We're in our mid-thirties and are at the point where we don't want to settle - there's no point, we've seen it play out too miserably in other friends' relationships, marriages and divorces - but we also don't want to live like nuns. I'm talking about sex, obviously. And whether to have it with someone you're dating casually, or maybe not dating at all. You can argue that if you find someone to have sex with casually but who you know isn't a candidate for a longterm relationship you're distracting yourself from finding someone who is, but that's risky too. That can lead to long periods of not having sex, which is neither natural nor healthy. So I guess where I'm landing on this is go for it. Have a friend with benefits (that has become such a dreadful, dreadful phrase), be careful, protect yourself and just own it. If executed properly, it builds your character. And your self-respect. 

 

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What to Expect When You're Expecting (a Personal Essay to Hit)

So, last Saturday afternoon while I was hiking somewhere around 12,000 feet above sea level in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, my first ever published piece went live on Salon.com. 

My poor sister Caity sprained her ankle on our way down the trail, so I ran down ahead of her to get the car and drive it to the upper trailhead to pick her up, and when I got back into service range, I checked my email and discovered I had dozens of new followers on Twitter. And that was how I found out it was up.

I'd had no idea it would go live that day, so it was a total surprise. After going six or seven miles in insanely high altitude I was running on fumes, so I was running on adrenaline and panic, but then a few minutes after I picked her up I realized I was a published author, and the rest of the day passed in kind of a blur. Yes, we went to the ER, and yes, Caity will be limping for a couple of weeks, but it was one of the best days I've ever had. And I'm so glad my sister was there to share it with me. 

I'd been so worried. Not so much about exposing myself, but about exposing my family. My mom, my dad, my aunts and uncles. So when the comments started rolling in, I didn't even care that some of them were pretty harsh. They were the least of my worries. But they were all over the map - from brutal and derisive to supportive and tremendously insightful. It was overwhelming but in a good way. (And highly entertaining.) I was genuinely touched by some of the comments and emails that came in. It felt good to know I'm not alone, and that some of us tolerate the demands of the corporate world better than others. Some people don't have a choice but to gut it out due to their financial and familial obligations, which fortunately is not a factor for me, but many sent me their best wishes for me to be able continue to make it work. And that's generous and cool, and it warmed my heart. 

But the real moments of truth were in the reactions from my family. I'd shown the piece to a few of my siblings, and each one had warned me that my parents might be upset that I had put so much out there about the family. But they were amazing. They loved it. It did, as my mom put it, "sting" at first, but mostly they were excited and proud.

But I knew blowback would come from somewhere, and it did. From my mom's sister, who was (is?) apparently deeply hurt by the way I characterized their family. I think mainly what she took exception to was being described as "round." To which my mother said:

"It takes all kinds of us to make the world go round, round ones are the group I fit into and she does too. Nothing wrong at owning that. We round ones seem to balance out the edgy ones like [my dad]." Damn straight!

My dad also threw in:

"Truth in literary circles is the capturing of what is often thought, but never so well expressed, however piercing it is to those involved. Those on that periphery read at their own peril."

So, crisis averted. I think my aunt will come around eventually, or at least I hope she will. I'm lucky, is all I can say. My family is cool. 

 

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Success! Oh my god.

Big times here. Found out Salon.com will be publishing a personal essay I wrote this week. !!!

I knew the day would come when I would get something published, but I'm pretty stunned it happened so quickly after I started submitting things, and in such a big outlet. It really is a dream of mine come true! I'm somewhere between shocked, ecstatic and terrified. Shocked that this is really happening. Ecstatic for obvious reasons. And terrified because my essay is, well, personal.

I'm fine with the stuff it says about me. It's fairly revealing, but I'm not ashamed of any of it. What makes me nervous is what it says about my parents -- none of it is untrue and it's not at all mean-spirited, but some of it is not especially flattering.

I had this conversation with my brother (another writer) before I submitted the piece, and the consensus was that I had to go ahead and do it, and apologize for it later if necessary. And that's exactly what's going to happen. I just didn't anticipate the guilty conscience I'm experiencing right now. I don't want to hurt my parents. But if I'm going to write about my life - and there's no question that my family will be a big part of it - feelings are going to get hurt sometimes. I've read a lot about how other writers deal with this, and there's no easy answer. As Joan Didion said, "writers are always selling someone out," and that is true as much in fiction as it is in non-fiction, but in non-fiction it's a lot easier for an outsider to tell who's who. 

Hopefully in the long run they'll be able to see that I love them dearly but that I need to tell the truth. That's part of the reason I write -- to make sense of things I'm struggling with and sometimes ashamed of. Reading true accounts of other peoples' lives has helped me feel not so alone in this world. Maybe I can help someone feel that way too. 

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Workout with a Ghoul

The other day I worked out at the gym in the 60s era condo building where I’ve been housesitting. It’s about what you’d expect from a gym in a building built in 1960s – small, with low ceilings, mirrored walls and outdated equipment.


Seeing as it was a dead time on a Friday afternoon and everyone living in the building is approximately 80 years old, I figured I’d have the place to myself. I planned to do some cardio and a quick shoulders workout via an app on my iPhone. Being alone for this was important, because the workout is kind of embarrassing. (It was only shoulders, so there would be no jump squats or anything really mortifying, but I find all calisthenics workouts kind of tough to do in public.)


So I jumped on the bike, which had a super uncomfortable seat, but was nonetheless a more appealing option than the treadmill from 1984. I had my Kindle and was planning to read and knock out 20 minutes of pedaling as fast and hard as I could. Within five minutes, a man in his late 60s/early 70s came in, smiled and nodded at me, and got on the treadmill. He was wearing jeans and had an old school Sony cassette Walkman. OK fine, I thought. I don’t mind him being in here while I do the app workout. His concentration would be on staying on the treadmill, so that was fine. 


And then. 


And then a woman walked in. She was terribly thin and dressed all in black, with thick-soled black shoes that added at least three inches to her height. I couldn’t tell how old she was – somewhere between 55 and 80, maybe. Her hair was slicked back in a bun and dyed pitch black, and her face was covered in foundation that was far too light for her actual skin tone. She’d capped off the look with harsh black eyeliner and a garish shade of red lipstick. She looked like an elderly, emaciated geisha. 


This being LA, she had a trainer with her. The trainer and I briefly made eye contact, and I tried not to stare as they got started. The guy on the treadmill greeted the woman. 


“Hi sweetheart,” he said. “You’re looking great, as always.”


I couldn’t hear what she murmured in reply. But of all the things I could think of to say to that woman, telling her she looked great would not be one of them. To me she looked like a walking fright mask, a perfect extension of what a girl could potentially end up looking like if she bought into all the ‘be-thin and take an inordinate amount of interest in your looks’ bullshit that fashion and beauty culture perpetuates.  Of course, this woman had lost perspective on what’s considered attractive to most people, but her appearance clearly reflected that she cared so, so much about what people think about her looks. And that sweet man obviously recognized that and did her a small kindness when he acknowledged them. 


Living in LA you do see this kind of thing fairly often – this was an extreme case, but you can set foot in any grocery store in Beverly Hills during daylight hours and find any number of stick skinny women with abnormally smooth foreheads and an unnatural tightness around the eyes. And the lips, yikes. Always with the overly plump lips. 


Anyway, I soldiered through my workout, foolish looking though it was, wondering what the woman made of me. I’m not super young and I’m not super thin – both of which I assume are her beauty ideals - but I’m young enough and fit enough. I didn’t see her looking at me, which almost made me wonder if she just didn’t register me at all. 


There’s a big chasm between that woman and me both age-wise and philosophy-wise, but the reason her appearance disturbed me is because I’m not exactly free of the beauty culture bullshit myself. The question I always wrestle with is how much maintenance is enough? I watch what I eat, I work out, I wear makeup, I spend money on stylish haircuts and clothes and shoes. But it can be a slippery slope from there. Should I bother covering the gray hair that’s coming in? How about laser facials and microdermabrasion to smooth the lines coming in on my mid-thirties face? After that, what about a shot of Botox? Where’s the line? I’m on it, I know that. Coming right up to the edge.

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Are our favorite writers acknowledging truths we can't bear to acknowledge ourselves?

Haven't been up for blogging lately because I've been hard at work on writing essay and memoir pieces. And really all blogging is, at least the way I do it, is cataloguing kernels of thought that could be turned into essays. So now that I'm actually learning how to write proper essays, I haven't quite wanted to post them. They're too weak and fragile, like little seedlings that may not make it to full flower, and anyway, the eventual goal is to get them published somewhere else. But I don't know, maybe I'll start putting the ones I'm abandoning up here. We'll see.

In the meantime, I came across this excellent essay by Alexander Chee on writing about sex, which turns into a great essay about writing in general, and why we love the writers we love.

I loved this.

"It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need."

I've never thought of it that way before, but it's so true. I love that image of the great writers having the balls to go places the rest of us don't. It's surely something to aspire to.

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I am Jane Donuts. I am also (really) someone else.

When I joined Twitter, I made a conscious decision to not use or be associated with my real name. I wanted to say whatever I wanted without fear that it would in some way jeopardize my job, which was doing public relations for technology and entertainment companies, some of which entailed social media strategy. 

So I used a handle that I've had online for years. But if you googled it, you could find out all kinds of things about me that were associated with my real name. Blogs I've had, comments I've made on other blogs, old message board postings, etc. Stuff going back to my early twenties, which is now kind of a long time ago, and a lot of which was just dumb and naive.

So then I changed my handle to Jane Donuts. Jane Donuts was a relatively fresh alter ego I'd developed for a creative writing/blogging project that eventually became my current blog, and I liked the name - it made me laugh - so it stuck. And now four years later, I follow and have about four hundred followers. It's not a huge number, but it's not insignificant either when you consider these are mostly people and companies that share my interests - namely music, books, writing, technology and media. 

 

And now I find myself with a little dilemma. I'm in the midst of a career change and am applying to jobs that are heavier on the writing and social media, many of which require the applicant to show they have some skills in those worlds.

So what do I do? Do I just throw Jane Donuts the twitter feed and Jane Donuts the blog out there? If I do that, I should probably go back and look at anything I've said that could be considered offensive, and delete it. But then that would be compromising what I set out to do when I started these things, which was just to use them as an outlet for things I was thinking about or feeling.  

I'm leaning toward just saying screw it, and citing them in my job search. I'm not exactly running for president. But if you have any thoughts on this matter, let me know.

 

 

 

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Twitter Do's and Twitter Don'ts

I've been on Twitter for about four years, and although I'm no kingpin (queenpin?), I'm well familiar with these parts. This list is totally subjective, but then, this is my blog and I'll write what I want to.

DO: 

• Be funny - the world needs more funny. Jokes, inappropriate remarks, pithy observations. People will agree or they won't. 
• Tweet interesting links - more than anything, we're on here to be amused. So be amusing, or provocative, or something. I want to discover new things.
• Recommend other people on Twitter one by one. Give me a reason to follow someone I might like. Or...
• Just retweet the good stuff. If someone retweets something that makes me laugh out loud, I'll usually follow the original tweeter.
• Follow people. I am instantly turned off when I see someone with a lot of followers who only follow 100 people or less. It basically tells me they're missing the point of the whole service, which is basically to be entertained, informed and introduced to people with common interests. It's fun. 

DON'T:

• Say something just to say something. Say something good.
• If you have an annoying song stuck in your head, please don't tweet about it. Just don't. No one needs to go through the rest of their day with an irritating earworm. This shit will lose you followers. 
• Tweet lists for Follow Friday. It's a nice gesture, but it's kind of annoying. And it's not effective! I was once given a follow Friday recommendation by someone with more than 100,000 followers, and I don't think I got one new follower from it. People just skip right over those posts. Or at least, I do.
• Tweet too much. I can't tell you how much this is because it's totally subjective, but I can tell you that nothing will make me unfollow someone faster than if they're cluttering up my stream. I guess if they're tweeting interesting stuff it's OK, but even then it's hard to stomach. This guy is one of the worst offenders I've come across. And he's written a couple of books I've found useful, too. 
• Self-aggrandize. There's a fine line between talking about your projects/blog/passions/etc and being too self-promoting. Figure out where that line is and please don't cross it. (This is also known as tweeting too hard. Don't do it.) 
• Include too many hashtags and @replies in one tweet. My eyes glaze over when I see so much highlighted text. It also seems insincere, and makes me think you learned it in some kind of social media bootcamp. Which makes me want to puke. 

Ok, that's all I can think of right now. Tell me what else I'm missing in the comments. 

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