caught in amber

I’m not very good at writing about music. I have tried. I don’t usually know how to describe what I’m hearing, I don’t have great recall of musical history (pop or otherwise), and I can barely follow a meter. The thing I DO know is lyrics and stories. Lucky for me, xx are as good at building their music lyrically as they are melodically. This means I can tell you why their new album  (also titled xx) is dismantling my theory that Silversun Pickups’ Swoon is the best thing I heard all 2009.

Swoon is about responsibility and who is to blame for the dissolution of a relationship (“Don’t say I didn’t tell you so/ Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it”), as much as anyone can be when aging is the real crime, but The xx might find that question asinine: the slow devolve taking place here has no agent. But their debut album is blindingly honest in the same way. In “Shelter,” Romy Croft asks, “Maybe I have said, something that was wrong/ Can I make it better, with the lights turned on?” The answer xx provides is probably not, since lies are not the problem.

“Crystalised,” which I’ve included above, is the album’s anthem of trepidation. This song, with one player as the sun and another as the glacier, reverses roles frequently, as Croft and Sim remind each other to “go slow” and the music oozes down to a finish. Like the rest of the album, these songs are quiet, like a set of conversations we’re overhearing from another room, and any disturbances are spoken as quietly as confessions. But “Fantasy” is the real turning point of the album. It’s the shortest track aside from the intro, and the least coherent, but perhaps the most important in terms of the record’s narrative. Placed right in the middle of the album, it lacks much in the way of melody, the few lyrics reverbing and almost lost, like the rhythm. This is where time has stopped, or perhaps reversed: “I’ll see you August, see you June.” And in this careful dismantling, each chord, each word bears more weight, and the whole thing shuffles, one uneven synth glide at a time, towards a climax: “I’m burning to impress / It’s deep in the middle of me/ I can be fantasy.”

This confusing of time, of the real sequence of events, is one of the recurring themes of the album, and might also be my favorite thing about it. “Stars,” the last track, is really its own beginning, a first date, or maybe a second or a third or fourth first date– it doesn’t really matter. The more time is rearranged, the better: this story doesn’t have to follow a line, as long as it’s played out with the beloved. “But if stars, shouldn’t shine / By the very first time / Then dear it’s fine, so fine by me / ‘Cos we can give it time / So much time / With me.” “Infinity” continues to develop this theme, but after all the dates have failed. It’s endless and slow, with Oliver Sim’s voice more mumbly than we thought possible so far, and a drumbeat that sounds at first like a death march. We’ve reached stasis, and time has stopped for real, in the absence of the ability to move on: “I can’t give it up / To someone else’s touch / Because I care too much.” After the superstar hope of “Vcr”(which sounds a little like something The Cure would have dreamed up) and relief implicit in “Islands,” it’s easy to believe that neither of these singers will be able to move on.

So, it’s not a very optimistic album. The minimalism is taken almost to an extreme in both note and narrative, and the space that it occupies, cycling between dawn and dusk, is in the end negative. Each choice on the part of the to withhold is an act of self-preservation, crystallized like a statue’s hand raised in warning or refusal.

But that’s really the point. Basic Space, one of the jauntier tracks, with the kind of hook that indie popsters dream of, talks about being dipped into wax, stopped in a moment of bliss (“I’m setting us in stone / Piece by piece, before I’m alone / Air tight, before we break / Keep it in, keep us safe”), although the album’s other time-traveling tracks jumps show this to be explicitly impossible, both on the album and in the real world. Even the title may now be suspect: xx was chosen because all the band members would be turning twenty by the time of its release, which of course they all are now, since time won’t stop even for a record this good.

Of chalk and sailboats

I finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Given the emoting you’re used to from me, you might be predisposed to think that it dissolved me into a puddle of tears, but guys, I made it almost all the way through! Which is sort of unexpected, not only because it’s me but because everyone in the film spends so much time being sad.

Here’s what I liked about it, and let me be clear that this is what most people DON’T like about it: Max reacts to his situation not by running away so much as by reliving it with giant clawed monsters. The island of the wild things is a deep, deep dive into Max’s problems, but with way cooler houses, and while this seems to be one of the most recurrent criticisms of the film (not fun enough for actual children! too much psychological projection!), I actually thought it was the only way this movie could make sense.

Because an unfortunate truth of my own life is that even as a kid I was limited by my own imagination. The stories I made up, and the ones I wrote down, were the products of what I’d lived and done and read. Even my dreams were made up mostly of things I remembered from my waking life, if much weirder, what with that sailboat coming out of the bathtub drain and all, and that’s true for all of us, I think. I mean, I could imitate, I could rearrange, I could come up with things that felt new, but all stories are essentially inseparable from their sources.

Jonze makes this angle clear: Max’s creations haven’t emerged from the ether. Monster Carol behaves like Max, and KW often seems like a mash-up of his sister and his mom. Everyone speaks in the kind of simple sentences a kid would use, or that adults use when talking to kids. Since this world is of his making, it’s only logical. And despite the truly excellent rumpus at the beginning, things devolve into tantrums pretty quickly, just as they did before he ran away.

Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s dark fairy-tale set in fascist Spain, was no idyll, either. Both movies start with a story: Max runs full-tilt down the stairs after the dog, fork in hand, hunting his dinner, and Ofelia’s books tell of a lost underworld princess. We quickly learn the miserable circumstances of each, and of their growing separation from their parents. Most importantly, both kids are extended an invitation to an otherworld in which they must prove themselves as royalty. (Ofelia has a harder time of this last task.)

Neither kid finds much in the way of solace in these new homes, because they are exactly as dark and difficult as the ones they’ve tried to avoid. Max’s situation is obviously not as dangerous as Ofelia’s, and his monsters are correspondingly much cuter, if a little mopey. But that dirt clod fight is basically the episode with the snowballs writ large, just as the Pale Man’s test of Ofelia’s character is a banquet only because Ofelia was sent to bed without supper that night. In each, the fantasy world’s rules always follow from what’s happening in the concrete.

The distance between what’s real and what’s imagined is so much bigger in movies ABOUT children than in movies FOR children. This is why 25-year-olds don’t watch those old Winnie the Pooh movies or go to, like, G-Force when they’re feeling nostalgic, and why WTWTA has been such an advertising juggernaut. If you’re six and you’re watching Winnie the Pooh, you’re in the woods with him. But the problem of being an adult is that you can’t really enter that world without a proxy, which is why Max and Ofelia exist.

That’s also why kids don’t get this movie. They shouldn’t. They don’t need proxies. WTWTA is not made for them, even if it was erroneously marketed to them. This movie is partly for people who know who Spike Jonze is, but more so for people sufficiently removed from being an actual kid that they can look back and now realize–much much later–that the igloo wasn’t any more awesome than the world outside it, and in fact the angle from which you see the world must necessarily triangulate your dreams.

So, I did tear up a little, which is what I started this post with and I’ll come back to it now. But not when Max and Carol are gazing soulfully at each other over the waves. I didn’t lose it until he finally makes it home, when mom collapses to the ground, pulling him in,  so full of words that in the end she can’t use any of them and just drinks him in with her eyes: her child returned. Her own fantasy– one I never thought I would be boring enough to share, let me add– is the one where everyone makes it home safe, everyone gets out alive. It’s a mundane daydream, maybe, but has its own wildness to it: remember how she yowled and chased after him when he ran out the door?

Shut out of Neverland, now I’m the Max who sits next to Alexander and makes a clumsy effort to apologize. And it’s not as much fun as throwing dirt, not even close. But I crossed that boundary a long time ago: if I were to make a blanket fort now, it’s not because I believe I can hide there.

Shining, perishable dream

“That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” — Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That

I’m sitting on the New Jersey turnpike right now, on my way back from my super-awesome best weekend ever in New York City. Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman is talking on her phone about what must have been her first trip. Here’s her catalog: She went to Chinatown. She saw Chicago for half-price. She ate the best soup of her life at that deli from When Harry Met Sally. She bought a hot dog! Off the street! And she is just so, so happy about all of it. She’s gotten a few eye-rolls from the cool kids on the bus, but her husband, sitting next to her with his eyes closed, smiles every now and then as she gushes. I can’t tell if he’s remembering the deli, or just loving the sound of her voice.

I was 14 the first time I came to New York City, somewhat misplaced in my high school’s business club. There was some kind of “youth business leaders’ conference,” and everyone else on the trip was an upperclassman that actually had an interest in some of those words.  I was taking a Keyboarding class at the time (how quaint does that sound?), which meant I could go, and my mom had prepared by buying me a blazer that was fully three sizes too big. I carried that blazer exactly the way one carries a train ticket, checking every now and then with a brush of the fingers to make sure it’s still there, still offering passage.

The day we got to explore Midtown–  which to us WAS the city, the only part of New York that mattered–  everyone paired up to leave me the odd number out. I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I didn’t want to stay with the chaperone, so I turned and struck off alone. It was the most vivid moment of my life thus far, and my list of accomplishments looked a lot like this woman’s, who is still on the phone in the aisle across from me. I bought a pretzel, I wandered in and out of t-shirt stores, I got turned around in the bustle, I found Chinatown. I knew New York was “dangerous,” so I did what you’re supposed to: walk fast, don’t gawk up at the buildings, look people in the eye if they seem dangerous, keep a hand on your bag, act like you know where you’re going. I was determined to pass as a New Yorker, having no idea how laughable that would be. As if a tiny blonde girl wandering 7^th avenue in an oversized Casual Corner blazer on a weekday afternoon pretending not to look at things could possibly be a native.

But no one blinked.  In the eleven years since, every time I come back to NY, no one blinks. No one questions my right to be here. Yesterday, while I was waiting to cross Broadway at 149^th, a man turning the corner in his car yelled out the window, “I hope you have a great day!” This giant city remains the single most welcoming place I’ve ever been– a phrase I just stole from my busmate.

Last night, Julianne and I stood between two bridges, looking over the Hudson towards Manhattan, with the sun setting through the cables and the water glittering in a way that SUCH DIRTY WATER has no right to. We talked about every movie about the end of the world where the Statue of Liberty is swept over by the towering waves of God’s wrath or our own selfishness.  We talked about the dragons of this particular city and about that ridiculous blazer I kept in my closet until I went away to college. We talked about the millions of New York stories being told so loudly that they drown each other out, and how I always like the schmaltzy ones where people take care of each other because this place is too bright and too tough to do otherwise. We remembered to each other the passion fruit macaroons we just ate– how the bright, orange cookies cracked in our mouths like shells.

Being cool in high school

From Jezebel’s Jenna Saunders. Full post is well worth the read:

“The countess and I walked over, looked at the men, looked at each other, then looked again, more awkwardly, at these laughing golden boys — and immediately I knew that all the liquid eyeliner and velvet ropes and jet planes in the world will not stop and have not stopped me from remaining the person I was in high school. There’s a certain kind of popularity that, if you should be so lucky as to experience it at 15 or 16 or 17, deposits in its wake a sense of pure social mastery that never really leaves you. And there’s a certain kind of awkwardness, bodily shame, and tongue-tied single-sex-high-school befuddledness in what I still think of as “mixed” social situations that precludes any kind of innate suavity and leaves one always at the mercy of frizzy-haired shoulder-tappers.”

Swoon

I’ll tell you a secret
let’s make this perfectly clear
there’s no secrets this year

I saw (500) Days of Summer on Friday, and I loved it. I’ll just say that right at the beginning. In fact, I thought it was one of the most sincere films I’ve ever seen.

The movie sets up Tom as a melodramatic and deeply disappointed romantic, opposite the skeptical but equally melancholy Summer, and the narrator tells you right at the beginning that the couple doesn’t make it and that this is not a love story. Which is true. But it is, I think, a story about what happens when love is missing, or when it’s defined wrongly. But more than love, the movie is about honesty: as a virtue, a shield, a tool. Summer, the object of adoration in her inferiority-complex-inducing vintage dresses, is maddeningly frank with Tom, and his inability to accept her version of truth as real, at least for her, is the eventual downfall of the relationship.

“Love is a fantasy,” she says to Tom. Romantic comedies are full of this sort of line: usually spoken by a character who’s lost faith in love, but who is eventually convinced otherwise by an infatuated partner in a last-ditch race to the airport. I always laugh a little here, because the point was never whether love is real or not. The point is what you believe and what you’re willing to prioritize and make real, and if someone who is invested in your choice, who stands to gain from it, is trying to convince you that you believe something you don’t and YOU GO WITH THEM, then YOU are at fault when it eventually goes down in flames. Because all you’ve done is accept their version of the truth, not changed your own in any appreciable way, and that is going to come back to you someday.

Lay your head down at my feet
I’ll blow you kisses while you sleep
and when I know you’re safe and dreaming
my escape plans in full swing

Summer doesn’t make this mistake. She likes Tom, likes being around him, likes having sex with him, but when she suspects that might not be enough for him, she makes this even clearer than she had before. “I’m not looking for anything serious,” she says. “Is that ok with you?” Girls and boys, this is when HE becomes responsible for his own problems. Right here. Because he says that’s fine, and then has the audacity later to blame her for his pain. Blames her for being 100% completely honest with him. Blames her for not feeling the way he wants. Which is understandable, because being in love makes you lose some of your control and rationality, but it’s sort of like blaming gravity for being such a downer.

I’m thinking of the latest Silversun Pickups album, particularly the first track, There’s No Secrets This Year. That’s the song at the top of the post here and that I’m quoting, in case you skipped it, and it’s too perfect not to include when talking about this movie. Just listen to the slide at at 4:44, which is when the song goes from an avowal of perfect forthrightness into an almost threatening declaration of non est mea culpa:

Better make sure
Better make sure you’re looking closely
before you fall into your swoon

YES, for reals. I love that moment so much, because the thing people don’t say about honesty is that truth can be as much a shield as anything else.  How often has someone said to you, baby, I just want you to be honest with me, and not thought about the consequences? Like, if I told you I might leave you, and then I did, you maybe have grounds to be sad, but you have forfeited your right to be angry. See how I did that? Non est mea culpa. It’s not a revelation of personal truth that makes one more vulnerable, in fact it’s exactly the opposite: it protects, and it’s what Summer does from day one.  The whole album continues in that vein, it’s this really delicious seduction somehow accomplished with a baseball bat. By the time you get to Catch and Release, the line, “Later on, don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it,” is almost unnecessary: a really poetic, calculated admission of the abdication of responsibility.  And no one but Tom can be blamed for taking the lure.

Not that he remembers any of this. “You just do what you want, don’t you,” he accuses, in the final scene when he asks her why she danced with him when she was about to marry another man. To her credit, she doesn’t answer him the way I would have wanted to, with, “Yes, you moron. Why won’t you pay attention?” She doesn’t even roll her eyes, which is gracious of her, and probably due to the benefit of being in the position of security here, being the married one. It no longer matters whether he thinks of her as selfish, whether he thinks she cares about his feelings or not, because it is probably better for him in the long run to think of her as flawed. In fact, that was the problem all along, says the movie, that he made her too perfectly idiosyncratic, quirky but essentially harmless, with no hidden rocks he might crash upon, which seems extraordinarily unfair given that she told him that was exactly what might happen. We only ever see Summer as Tom wants her to be, not as she actually is.

Consider with your ear
We are still sincere

Not that Tom is a jerk, not really. Just deeply misguided, which the narrator points out right at the beginning: he works for a greeting card company and thought the end of The Graduate was about true love. All of which makes him patient, and adoring, and very cute, but also the most frustrating creature we have ever seen. I have to feel a little sorry for him, though. Summer lives in the real world, and Tom doesn’t, and therefore Tom’s life is always going to suck a little more, as he proves in a sad-sack I-quit outburst that manages to offend all of his coworkers except the stupid one, who claps. (Because he likes it when morons make a scene? Because he’s bored? Because he also thought the nice lady’s pictures of her cats would make terrible cards but was too cowardly to actually put that into words and say so? Not sure.) Whereas Summer doesn’t even have to feel guilty about any of this, because her own straightforwardness absolves her.

Who knows?
How this feeling grows?
Was it truly worth –
Truly worth the starting
Who knows?
Why the engine’s blown
Hope it’s truly worth –
Truly worth the parting

We never find out if that frankness makes her happy, though. She does end up getting married, and the thing she didn’t think would happen, that she would be sure of love as a truth for her in specific, not the vague dreamy bliss that Tom is after, seems to come true, so maybe. It’s a nice thought.

All in all, it’s quite a delicately rendered little movie, very pretty and luminously shot, and with the kind of story I can get behind. Both characters are played well, I think, and the director heightened the adulation of Deschanel’s character, which is exactly as it should be. She has a muse-like quality that works here. And Gordon-Leavitt’s Tom is puppy-earnest and violent at the same time, wonderfully childish. You have my 100% recommendation to see it, and I hope you tell me what you think if you do.

“Account for as much of the soul as you can get away with”

This is all over the internet already, but just in case you missed it, I’m going to give you a reason to take a look.  Shenk’s article about “What Makes Us Happy” is long, but useful, and unlike most reports on sociological  studies, doesn’t focus purely on data, but on the humanity behind it. Which makes sense when the object of your study is humans.

Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Yeah. It’s that good.

So few words per day

I’ve been hibernating lately, but I hope you don’t think I’ve abandoned you. I’ve been reading a lot, and thinking a lot, and have half a dozen posts gasping around somewhere, but when I do write, it’s all for work, so much so that even when I’ve got a decent idea for the blog, I often don’t have it in me to compose a post. A reporter friend said to me recently, “I only have so many words in me a day,” and that’s exactly how I’m feeling. What’s really a shame is how many of mine are wasted on pointless emails.

So I’m trying to write and say less, but hopefully better, simply because I’m daily becoming more sure that I don’t know anything about anything. Andre Gregory once wrote, talking about artists:

We began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning — learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you’ll begin to realize that you just don’t know very much — you don’t know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work. The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn’t have much patience with questions and questioning.

I don’t like to call myself an artist, because I’m not, really. But I do write, and want to continue writing, and right now I’m actually making a living doing so, which is kind of incredible. But as Gregory describes, I find my own questions to be a giant distraction, and I have no patience for them. It drives me crazy that I don’t know enough, that I’m not already a genius, that I’m having these fractal-like debates in my brain all the time, and it’s enough to convince me that I am assuredly much better off listening to someone else, and letting that whole big mess just sort itself out on its own time. I’ll check back in when I’m 52. Maybe by then I’ll have learned something. (It almost makes me wish the mentor-apprentice relationship was still a thing, because I think I’d like that.)

So instead I’m trying to focus on the tools themselves:  on story, on lines, on language, even when I’m writing things for work that don’t mean a whole lot — hopefully learning some kind of skill with the limited amount of words in me. Trying to have patience with the process.

That’s Not My Name

I hereby nominate That’s Not My Name by the Ting Tings for song of the decade. Stay with me, now, I promise this is not just gratuitous musical taste-sharing. Embedding is disabled, so you’ll have to click-through to YouTube: That’s Not My Name, The Ting Tings.

Are you back? Has your life, like, totally changed? Is your boss/small child/romantic partner wondering why you just got out of your chair and created whirled madly around your cubicle/living room/bed? Congratulations, you have just accomplished the goal of the song. You have been recognized, though perhaps only as a future mental patient.

Classic story: fighting to be recognized in an uncaring world (“they forget my name”) without being reduced by the people who do call you by a name (“they call me Stacy…that’s not my name”), and desperately, maybe hopelessly, crying out for someone to call you by the thing you want to be (“are you calling me bird?”). If you watch the video, there’s this moment when she goes from combative and jittery to this soaring question, and then collapses right back into the fray. Genius.

And aside from all this meta-brilliance stuff, it is the best. song. ever. for a friday afternoon. In the middle there are three unique melodies and two voices spinning around each other and this bright thread running up and up and up and the drum is INSANE and I cannot sit still or write in coherent sentences fortheloveofallthatisholy.

“Snark is not the poison; it’s a home-brewed antidote”

I could not have defined snark better than Adam Sternbergh just did:

Where exactly did all this snark come from? Did we simply transform overnight into a nation of venal assholes? I’d argue that slackers adopted irony not as a pose of hipster cynicism but as a defense against inheriting a two-faced world. When no one—from politicians to pundits—says what he actually means, irony becomes a logical self-inoculation. Similarly, snark, irony’s brat, flourishes in an age of doublespeak and idiocy that’s too rarely called out elsewhere. Snark is not a honk of blasé detachment; it’s a clarion call of frustrated outrage…

Consider how much of our public speech—in politics, celebrity, sports—is composed of spin, prevarications, and barefaced lies. If you’re looking for a telltale moment from the last election as to the state of our political discourse, don’t look toward Sarah Palin’s mean-girl snark attacks at the Republican Convention (as Denby does) or to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Look instead at that unguarded moment when commentator Peggy Noonan let slip her true feelings about Palin’s nomination into a hot mike—in contradiction to what she’d just said live on-air. Or consider the oft-made but pertinent point that postdebate commentators reside in “Spin Alley.” When we live in a world where professional analysts on TV can be trusted to simply say what they actually believe, then I think we’ll find that snark will start to turn its own volume down.

He even mentions TWOP:  “Any visitor to Television Without Pity (tagline: Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks), or similar snarky fan sites, can see that its acid-tongued readers are the best fans a culture could hope to produce— informed, demanding, passionate.”

Guys, I am going to MARRY him because he UNDERSTANDS me.

Googling myself terrifies me

A recent email conversation with a friend got me thinking about the nature of my job. I’m getting paid to write, which was sort of the goal, and do managing editorial, which is exciting, and best of all I’m writing about something I’m interested in.

However, some days I reach the point where the pressure to produce becomes stifling. I have a lot to learn both on the writing and the editorial sides, and the fact that I have zero journalism training is sort of paralyzing. It doesn’t help that neither of my bosses are media people. They are supportive, and do their best not to get in my way, but when it comes to the work I’m doing, they can’t really give me much guidance. Ergo, I have a massive inferiority complex about being able to figure it out. I’m sure I eventually will, but it bugs that I’m sort of forcing my readers (you know, all 37 of them) to go through that process with me. Seems a bit unfair to them, really.

There’s also the fact of the internet, upon which everything I’m doing now is searchable and cataloged. In case you’re curious as to what I mean, try Googling my full name. (I’ll pretend you weren’t so curious about my fabulous life that haven’t done this already. I’m not linking to them because, so far, my name is not actually connected to this blog anywhere and I’d like to keep it that way for a little while longer.) Last I checked, fully 4 pages of links come up, all written by or connected to me. My first and last names are uncommon enough that there’s absolutely no one in the world to confuse me with. Scroll down far enough and you get to some old 19th century pioneer records, but the point is that six months ago, those records were basically the entire first page of links. Now, they’re buried under blog posts, biodiesel articles, random op-eds and conference live-blogs, all from yours truly.

This is unsettling because who knows what about me will change? Deleting things from my Facebook profile is easy as pie, but when I write an article for a major outlet it’s pretty much there for the foreseeable future. In a few years I may look back at the stuff I’m doing now and just want to hide.

And the last element of the perfect storm: the persona. When someone can see your entire canon with a few clicks on a search engine, it makes you painfully aware of the “character” that’s being constructed online, and the way it represents you (or doesn’t). And it’s not hubris, either. It’s just the way the Internet works: this can happen to anyone with a significant online presence. I tell you, reading pieces like Emily Gould’s in the NYT Magazine, or seeing what’s happened to some writers’ personal lives, terrifies me to my very core. Not interested! In fact, I’m more inclined to semi-hermitage than any kind of public attention, even if it is positive.

And finally, the main thing is just that I feel so enormously TOO YOUNG for this. I can’t possibly have something to say, at least nothing that hasn’t already been said by someone far more precocious or prescient than myself. And I don’t have the benefit of wisdom that older writers do. As Barbara Kingsolver says to her students: “Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.” But here I am, and it’s suddenly my job to be if not wise, at least intelligent and well-spoken.

Think I can observe the speed limits long enough to get somewhere?