Self-reflection and self-absorption are not the same trait.
Flannery O’Connor (via par-for-the-curse)
Notes on Creativity
Portfolios, done-zo. Time to ice my eyeballs.
Quote
Soon after Justine Sacco’s shaming, I was talking with a friend, a journalist, who told me he had so many jokes, little observations, potentially risky thoughts, that he wouldn’t dare to post online anymore.
“I suddenly feel with social media like I’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He didn’t want me to name him, he said, in case it sparked something off.
SO YOU’VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED, by Jon Ronson
Roof Toss
It’s finals week here on campus, and the library looks like an emergency shelter. Sleepers all over the floor. Garbage cans overflowing. A lone box of tissues sitting in front of a toilet.
The last time I went through finals as a student was almost twenty years ago, and all I remember is throwing. Throwing my linguistics book across the study room in frustration and surrender. One of my fraternity brothers returning from an exam and chucking his books into the blazing fireplace. And at the end of the week, all of us climbing to the roof with some half-broken stuff–microwaves, box fans, a dead TV–and hurling it down to the parking lot like a bunch of profane Moseses.
In our house, this was an end-of-semester tradition. Inventively, we called it “Roof Toss.”
Idiotic? Yes. Performative? Absolutely. Cathartic? Like you wouldn’t believe.
On my last roof toss, someone filled an empty aquarium with moths. When that thing hit the asphalt, the glass tank exploded, and moths flew out in crazy directions.
It was impressive, but not as impressive as we’d hoped. We forced a chuckle, then began the long climb down. Commencement wasn’t until a week later, but really, that was the day I graduated.
Winter, trees.
Toss-off Poem #82
Even after its leaves are blown out,
the maple tree looks like a flame.
Same bone structure.
It’s one damn thing after another,
the old man grumbles as he rakes.
If you’re lucky, I think. Because if I squint,
you look like a flame, too,
the tall, wild kind on a wick
begging to be trimmed.
Quote
[W]ith social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. What rush was overpowering us at times like this? What were we getting out of it?
SO YOU’VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED, Jon Ronson
Quote
Lucy closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to be alone in the well-appointed room he housed deep within his mind.
UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR by Patrick DeWitt
Russian Soldiers and Potatoes
Growing up, we had a TV in our kitchen, a portable black and white with rabbit ears. My mom liked to watch the news while she cooked. One night she was frying up potatoes and sausages in the electric griddle when I walked into the kitchen. “What’s that?” I said.
Still looking at the TV, she said, “Russian soldiers.”
I thought that was funny, so I told my dad and brothers during dinner, and we started calling the meal “Russian soldiers and potatoes.” The name stuck. It became a touchstone story, one of those Oh, Mom stories we still like to tell and hear.
I’m making the dish tonight, and it’s bringing me back to that night when I walked into the kitchen with my question. I’m seeing it differently now. I see a woman who doesn’t love to cook, but someone has to do it, and it has fallen to her. Her body is in the kitchen, but her head is in the news. It’s the 1980s. In Afghanistan, the Russians are being broken by ragged gangs of mujahideen. The world is changing, and she is trying to pay attention to it, but her son is calling her back to the kitchen. The balance of power might be shifting elsewhere, but not here.
It’s still a funny story, but it’s something else, too. Something to do with yearning, bound. Something to do with stretching, and getting snapped back.
My own kitchen smells like rosemary and fennel. It’s almost time to plate up, but before I get snapped back to my kitchen, my family, I want to stay another minute in that old scene. In my mind, I’m walking into that kitchen with my mother. What should I do? Stir the potatoes for her? Ask her what’s going on in Afghanistan? Maybe I’ll be still. Watch with her. Not interrupt, for once. In that way, we can each be in both places as long as possible.
Toss-off Poem #334: I’ll Just Be Over Here for a Few Hours
I like to be alone
so I don’t have to listen
to other people’s complaints,
which tend to distract me
from my own.