Context and Character

May 31, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

As part of my work yesterday, I read a California appellate court case that discussed how the courts distinguish between libelous falsehoods and constitutionally protected opinions. A court looks at the totality of the circumstances—both the language of the statement and the context in which it was made. Whether it is an assertion of fact or a statement of opinion depends on how the average reader would interpret it. Statements made on blogs and Internet message boards often are seen as opinions, even if they might be regarded as factual assertions in another context.

For example, if a mainstream news organization published an article falsely stating that a company’s management had defrauded the shareholders, the article would be libelous. But if a news website published an accurate news story about a company’s financial performance, and then a disgruntled investor posted a comment calling the management crooks, the comment wouldn’t be libelous because the average reader would not take it seriously. The culture of Internet posting is one in which readers expect to find exaggeration and name-calling. As a consequence, most of what’s posted on blogs and message boards is not actionable, even when the character of the statement is such that it would clearly be libelous if published in a more respectable venue.

I’m not among those who lament the supposed passing of a golden age of civility. On the contrary, I believe we’re much better off in a society where most people confine their expressions of hate to yelling at each other on the Internet, as opposed to throwing bricks or forming lynch mobs. The past century, with all its ugly prejudices, was very far from being an age of grand public civility. Still, in light of the Internet’s potential to bring us together, it seems a pity we haven’t made better use of it.

Ghosts of Writing Past

May 25, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

In the dark ages before the Internet, creative writing was a very personal and often disorganized hobby. When inspiration struck, writers scribbled their stories in diaries or notebooks with a ballpoint pen, maybe sharing them with a best friend or two. An occasional article might be thought worthy of the time, paper, typewriter ribbon, envelope, and postage required to type it up and nervously send it off to an editor of a big-city magazine, who would likely reject it (by way of the obligatory self-addressed stamped envelope) because there was so much competition. Writers daydreamed of being published and gaining worldwide acclaim, but most didn’t even have a small circle of friends regularly reading their work.

Now anyone can put together a blog or join an online writers’ group and share stories with readers around the world—it’s instant gratification. The old constraints of scarce publishing resources are no longer a problem. One would naturally think that creative writing ought to be easier, more fun, and less stressful than in the past. But in line with the human penchant for complicating just about everything, it often doesn’t feel that way. Instead, writing has become another sad entry in the long list of modern social pressures.

When we’re not posting new material to our lists and blogs regularly, we’re left feeling guilty and embarrassed. We compare ourselves to the most prolific writers we know, and then we beat ourselves up for being so lazy and inadequate. Like yo-yo dieters obsessing over their meal plans, we devise schedules for when and how much we should write; and inevitably we don’t stick to them. (True confession here: I meant to write this post last weekend, but instead I ended up reading a goofy novel about ghostbusting witches.) We imagine our neglected blogs as virtual vacant real estate, foreclosed upon and boarded up, with a few spambot tumbleweeds rolling down the dusty street.

How did we do this to ourselves? I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s classic observation on human nature in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Tom has to whitewash a fence while the other boys are free to play. He pretends that he’s having great fun, and soon his friends are lining up to pay him for the privilege of helping. Tom has discovered “that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

We have, in effect, turned our writing into work—even when we’re not being paid. We feel obliged to do it because otherwise we’ll lose face with our online acquaintances and plummet to insignificance in the Google rankings. Sometimes the pressure gets to be too much for us, and then we close our blogs and quit our lists, slinking away in shame and despair—only to start all over again in a year or two.

Of course, there’s no reason it has to be this way. Like all cultural constructs, the notion that prolific writing determines our social worth has only as much power over us as we allow it to have. No stone tablet has been handed down from above commanding “Thou shalt not fail to update thy blog.” We can shift our mindset to change our stories back into the playful hobby that they originally were, once upon a time.

Room to Grow

May 11, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Last weekend I moved two hostas that I had planted in my front garden almost a decade ago. They were a gift from a neighbor who found that she had extras while she was doing her spring planting. Because I already had a few hostas of a different variety, I assumed that the new ones would be about the same size. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case, as often happens with assumptions.

For the first few years, I admired the big glossy leaves of the new hostas, which were noticeably larger than the leaves of the other variety. After a while they grew together to form a big clump, and I thought that was okay because the older hostas also had grown close to each other. My husband mentioned that he liked the big ones. They looked very impressive, robust and healthy.

But they just kept on growing. I realized that I had a problem when they started overgrowing the front walkway. Because hostas are round plants with leaves growing out from the center, they can’t be trimmed along one side without ending up lopsided; so cutting them back was out of the question. Last summer their leaves stretched halfway across the concrete next to my porch steps. Visitors and pizza delivery people had to tread carefully to avoid stepping on them. Now that they had become so enormous, I was left with an embarrassing display of gardening foolishness in full view of all the neighbors. There was no doubt those hostas would have to be moved farther back in the garden to give them more room to grow.

I wasn’t looking forward to that chore, though, and I kept finding reasons to put it off. The heat of the summer wouldn’t be a good time to move plants; and once we got into the cooler autumn weather, there was always something going on that made a convenient excuse. Then it was winter and they dropped their leaves, allowing me to ignore them until the spring. I finally got around to moving them last weekend.

Relying on assumptions when we don’t have enough facts is, of course, human nature. It served our ancestors well for most of our history, when people often had to make immediate decisions on which their lives depended. Was it a hungry wolf in those rustling bushes, or was it a deer? Did that group of men from another tribe, coming into view over the hill, have plans to attack the village? Making snap judgments was a very useful survival skill in those days.

Now we have easy access to information, and most of us aren’t likely to find predators (human or otherwise) lurking near our homes when we step outside. Still, both our decision-making processes and the structure of our society took shape when life was much more precarious. We make assumptions all the time, just as our ancestors did; and when they are challenged, our first reaction is fear. We’re afraid of what might happen if we let ourselves get distracted thinking about other possibilities, only to find out that there really was a wolf in the bushes after all.

So when we’re told about a group of people who need more room to grow in our collective cultural garden, we don’t want to hear it. We react with denial: those big leaves can’t be taking up that much space, can they? Maybe we step on them sometimes, but hey, there’s got to be some way to shove them back where they belong and make sure they stay there. After all, they weren’t so much in the way before. And just think of the nuisance it would be to dig new holes!

Then after a while, our society grudgingly decides it’s time to stop putting off the chore, just as I did with my hostas last weekend. Even though I’d been dreading it and making excuses for the better part of a year, it wasn’t really that hard after all.

A Dusty Green Horizon: Candles in the Window

April 30, 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Stories

Carrying only one bag, Laila stepped down from the train onto a plain concrete platform, newly built like much of Libya’s infrastructure. A ticket booth to her left stood empty in the twilight… [This is Part 2. Continue reading this installment, or read the story from the beginning.]

Time and its Telling

April 16, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Humans are a storytelling species. Even when we are not sharing stories with others, we’re full of internal narratives or “self-talk” by which we make sense of what’s going on around us. Sometimes we may talk out loud to ourselves; but more often, although we are silent, a constant dialogue goes on in our thoughts, describing our perceptions and sorting our thoughts into recognizable categories. We draw these categories in large part from the narratives our culture has taught us, often on a subconscious level. They may not always be accurate or to our benefit.

As a result, we’re likely to stress ourselves out unnecessarily by framing our experiences in terms of the popular complaints of our society. One of the most common ways this happens is in what we tell ourselves about time. The modern world is busier and more complicated than ever before. We have vastly more choices in our daily lives. This gives rise to free-floating anxieties that we can’t easily describe, and we end up expressing them in terms of not having control over our time:

“I’m too busy. There is too much going on. I don’t have time to get anything done.”

Our friends and family members are likely to respond—again, in a socially scripted way—by suggesting that we have too many obligations on our busy calendars and need to simplify our lives. While that’s not bad advice in itself, what often happens when we allow ourselves a few quiet, unhurried moments is that another cultural script promptly kicks in:

“I’m bored. There is nothing going on. I need to find something to do with my time.”

And round and round we go.

Time is, of course, neutral; it passes at the same rate regardless of what we happen to be doing. Our perceptions of time, however, are constantly changing in relation to our environment. For most of our history, people’s lives consisted of simple but time-consuming tasks such as hunting, gathering, and domestic chores. It would never have occurred to anyone to complain of boredom because there was always more work to be done. And because the work had a regular and predictable structure, with little room for individual choice, there was no reason to feel anxious about how one’s schedule was managed.

Nowadays, with all the options created by modern technology and our interconnected world, we have a multitude of scenarios playing out in our minds at all times as part of our internal dialogue; and we haven’t yet learned how to deal with it. There are so many choices that it has become overwhelming.

Last week a bird flew into my garage and couldn’t understand how to get back outside again. Even with both of the garage doors open and sunlight streaming in through the doors, the bird was so confused by the unfamiliar environment that it just fluttered around aimlessly. My husband tried yelling at the bird and waving a broom at it to chase it away, but that didn’t help at all—the bird only got more anxious and befuddled, while still not finding its way out. At last my husband hit on the idea of closing one of the garage doors. With only one possible exit, the bird promptly oriented itself and flew out.

Although humans (usually) have more sense than birds, I believe that we have a similar need for clear landmarks to guide us when we navigate our surroundings. In the context of time management and choosing among multiple alternatives, humans create such landmarks by developing routines and rituals. Those of us with an introverted temperament put more effort into organizing our homes and work spaces in predictable ways. Extroverts focus instead on social rituals, such as sports, shopping, and Friday night at the club. But the underlying motivation is the same—finding something that makes sense in a chaotic environment.

We need a new set of stories to explain our relationship with time. What can we tell ourselves about our ability to control and manage the choices available to us? How can we feel comfortable without always having to be in constant motion from one activity to another? Where can we find examples of how to live productively while looking upon time as an abundant resource?

Putting Words to Expectations

March 28, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

It’s often said that marriage takes a lot of work. My husband and I have been married since 1988, and in many ways we find it easy to get along with each other. We have similar views about many things, such as relationships, society, responsibility, money, and raising children (although we’re mostly finished with the latter, now that our kids are away at college). Our household division of labor works well for us. We enjoy each other’s company and do a lot of things together; our kids’ friends have commented on how cute they think we are when we wear matching clothes. We still have the stuffed animals that we exchanged when we were dating, as well as many other sentimental items.

Even so, we’ve really had to work on understanding the differences in how we communicate. Most of my thinking is in text mode, and I usually take words at their face value. Nonverbal signals such as a cheerful voice register in my mind only as general indicators; they don’t trump the actual content of the words. If there appears to be a mismatch between the words and the nonverbals, I ask for clarification. My husband has a very different way of processing conversation; he relies much more on external cues and often responds to nonverbal impressions rather than to the actual words. As a result, we sometimes end up having muddled and frustrating conversations where we don’t realize that we are not talking about the same thing.

Another cause of confusion is sorting out what questions don’t call for literal answers. Let’s say that my husband asks me in a grumpy tone why I didn’t do something that he usually expects me to do, such as bringing in the mail. That doesn’t really mean he wants an explanation of why it wasn’t done. He just wants to be cheerfully reassured that I’ll take care of it. And to complicate things further, he’s not inflexible about who does the task; he is not in fact demanding that I should always be the one to do it. If I send a text message asking him to bring in the mail when he gets home from work because the weather has turned yucky, he is perfectly happy to stop his car at the mailbox so that I won’t have to walk along an icy driveway. What bugs him isn’t the chore itself; it’s the disruption of his routine when he gets home, sits down at the desk expecting to read the mail, and only then finds out that it’s not there.

There’s a saying that we both find instructive: “Failed expectations are the source of all conflict.” This is particularly true with regard to conversation and nonverbal signals. People often assume that their body language and use of words should be easily understandable by others. When that expectation proves false, we don’t immediately know how to go about broadening our concepts of interaction to include other styles of communication. Often what happens is not that we consciously judge the other person’s way of communicating to be wrong; rather, we don’t even comprehend the extent to which it may differ from our own.

Modern society is becoming more aware of differences in communication generally, as well as within marriages and other relationships. The bookstores are full of self-help titles that purport to explain how women can better understand men, or vice versa. Some authors focus on more specific circumstances: a marriage between an older woman and a younger man, for instance, or between people of different neurological types. These books have been criticized, often with good cause, as being full of simplistic and inaccurate stereotypes; yet they continue to sell because they help people to make sense of baffling situations, even though in superficial ways.

If I had relied on a self-help book for an explanation of what my husband thought about bringing in the mail, the book might have told me, “Men need routine!” And while that wouldn’t have been altogether wrong, it also wouldn’t have been the whole story. I might have reached the conclusion that I had to bring in the mail every day, rain or shine, to avoid any gripes about it. Then I would have felt resentful while slipping and sliding my way to the mailbox on a snowy winter afternoon, when in fact there was no need to do that. A much more useful approach was simply to talk with each other about how best to deal with the mail situation, while recognizing that we had different perspectives on it.

To understand why our expectations are not being met, it’s first necessary to examine our underlying assumptions and to acknowledge that they may be in need of revision. Self-help books can be useful in taking this first step of reframing things we find frustrating as communication issues that reflect our different perceptions, rather than as deliberately annoying or senseless behavior. But ultimately there are no shortcuts for the work that is needed to discover how a loved one communicates. While it would certainly be much easier if we could simply buy a book or attend a seminar and then comprehend everything perfectly, real life is way more complicated than that. As with learning to accommodate diversity in other social contexts, we must be willing to refrain from prejudging the other person’s experiences of the world and to seek understanding by way of respectful dialogue.

Fashion Statements

March 11, 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Stories

Connie surveyed her face in the bathroom mirror and decided that her sister Natalie was right—she really was starting to look old. The deep vertical lines between her eyebrows told the history of the worries that had gone into raising her children. The creases that started beside her nose and curved out around her mouth told of the smiles that had been a part of the journey too—the cheering at soccer games, the laughter at family parties, and the pride when all three kids left home for college and the wide world beyond.

“It’s very easy to get rid of those lines, you know,” Natalie had said yesterday, when she took Connie out for lunch at a posh Manhattan restaurant to celebrate Connie’s fifty-third birthday. “Everyone gets Botox and dermal filler nowadays. Nothing to be afraid of; it’ll only take a few minutes.”

Chewing on a forkful of arugula, Connie had tried to sort out what bothered her about that suggestion. It wasn’t that she felt afraid. There was something on a deeper level that made her uncomfortable, having to do with how fast the world was changing and life’s familiar landmarks being erased.

“But we shouldn’t always have to change who we are.”

“You’re taking it way too seriously. It’s a fashion, not a social conspiracy. You color your hair to hide the gray streaks, don’t you? What’s the difference? Connie, in today’s world, when a woman gets to be our age, she needs every advantage she can get. There are always younger women looking to steal our husbands, you know. Everything seems like it’s going along fine, and then one day, poof, he’s gone. That happened to two of my friends last month. Two!” Holding up two neatly manicured fingers to illustrate the point, Natalie fixed an earnest gaze on her sister from beneath her perfectly smooth brows.

“I’ll think about it.” Connie had never been much of a debater on social issues or anything else, and by now she just wanted this awkward conversation to be over. She broke eye contact and looked away, picking up the glass of iced tea that the attentive waitress had refilled for her.

“Okay. I’ll text you my doctor’s name, address, and phone number. She has a lot of experience, and you can be sure of good results. It’s nothing to worry about, honestly.”

Natalie had sent the information the next day, as promised. The message included a link to the website of the doctor’s office, which shared space with a beauty salon and spa. Colorful photos invited Connie into a courtyard with tall cascading fountains and lush greenery. Stone sculptures of mythological figures held out their hands as if to promise eternal youth and beauty to the fortunate visitor. Connie could almost feel the refreshing mist and hear the birds singing.

Of course, the mist surely came from a machine hidden somewhere in the artificial rocks; and if there were any birds, they were no more than an audio recording. Wasn’t that just the way life was nowadays, in a society that was all about fashion statements and getting ahead? And wasn’t she being silly to think it could be anything else?

As she began to turn away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Connie noticed that the door of the medicine cabinet had been left ajar. Its mirrored surface displayed the same reflected image, creating an endless row of darkening faces that grew smaller and more distant until they finally became unrecognizable.

Connie looked down at the phone in her hand, which had gone into power-saving mode and now showed only a black screen where the cheerful photos had been. For an instant, she almost expected her hand to disappear, too.

The phone looked solid enough when she put it down on the counter, though; and so did her hand when she closed the medicine cabinet firmly. There was no reason to worry. Everything was normal… whatever that might be.

Listen

February 28, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

Like most people who start a new blog, I’ve had moments when I felt unsure as to whether I could write enough new material. There are always plenty of things going on that might be worth writing about; the challenge is in finding meaningful ways to describe and relate to them. It can seem overwhelming at times—so many experiences and perceptions to draw from, so much going on in the world, and the inevitable doubts about what has been overlooked and whether one’s small efforts really have any meaning to others.

When I stepped outside a few days ago to bring in the mail, I noticed that the crocuses and other spring bulbs in my front garden had started to come up. There were no flowers to be seen, but only the blunt green tips of the leaves, pushing their way through the hard snow-dusted ground. The garden was quiet and still, except for a slight breeze that moved the tips of bare branches almost too slowly to be noticed. This scene left me with a strong feeling that if I had been closer to the ground, and if my ears had been sensitive enough to hear what was going on below the surface, there would have been a tremendous amount of life and activity to which I could listen.

Many of the people I’ve met online are social change activists of one sort or another. Sometimes they feel that it is an overwhelming struggle and that the world is too full of injustice for their work to make much difference. They despair of ever being able to get enough people to understand their point of view. They wonder how they’ll find the energy and resolution to keep on speaking out regardless.

Both anxious bloggers and overworked activists can benefit from a slower pace every once in a while, rather than struggling to be in control of the narrative at all times. We can’t control everything that goes on around us, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s enough, like the crocuses, just to send up a few hardy shoots into the sunlight while waiting for nature to take its course. Sometimes it’s enough just to stand still amidst birdsong and gentle breezes. Take a breath, taste the changes in the air, feel the energy of life all around, and listen.

Listen.

Old Stories from the Bottom Drawer

February 22, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

This scenario will be familiar to many writers: You start working on a story, but it doesn’t unfold the way you had in mind. Some parts of it resonate very well, perfectly expressing the feelings and ideas you wanted to get across. The other parts aren’t right, but you can’t spot the reasons why. Although you know that the story needs more work, the details of what’s wrong with it are unclear.

So you put the half-finished draft away in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, if it’s written out by hand. If it’s on the computer, you drop it into the folder where old incomplete stories go to die. Then you move on to another project, kind of thinking that you’ll come back and finish it after a while, but knowing that there is a high chance you’ll never look at it again.

Time passes, and you don’t think about the story at all. One day you’re cleaning out the file cabinet or deleting old files from your computer, and you discover the story again. Now all of the flaws that eluded you before are embarrassingly obvious. Scenes you once thought hilarious look silly and juvenile. Those brilliant insights on the world are trite. There’s a factual error here and a clumsy ungrammatical sentence there. You used a word or phrase that all your friends were using ten years ago, but now it is widely seen as ignorant and offensive. You wonder what you were thinking when you wrote it.

Even with all its flaws, though, the story has some good points. There are descriptive paragraphs that create vivid mental images, fantastic settings that make you wish you could go take a walk there, and — even after all this time — a lively cast of characters who pop right out of the story and have a few things to say to you about their world. So you decide it’s worth revising. You chop out the stuff that doesn’t work, and you write new material to bring together the parts you like. When you’re finished, the story may not look like you first imagined it would, but you’re pleased with the results.

I believe that our society goes through a similar process of revising its cultural stories. We have lots of faulty assumptions, stereotypes, and outdated models of how the world works; and they’re all stuffed into the collective bottom drawer, right next to the bogeymen and scapegoats that go along with them. On the rare occasions when the drawer gets opened far enough to let a bit of sunlight and fresh air into its dim musty depths, we may notice that something in there doesn’t look quite right. But often it seems like too much trouble to find out what’s in need of fixing, so we just push the drawer shut and keep on doing the same old stuff we’ve always done.

We can go on like that for a very long time before an unexpected event prods us out of our complacency. A new scientific or technological discovery shows just how far wrong the experts had been on a particular subject, or a disadvantaged minority group starts advocating for equal opportunity loudly enough so that they can’t be ignored anymore. Then we’re faced with the difficult task of rewriting cultural narratives long taken for granted. But after we’ve owned up to our mistakes and invested the resources needed to fix them, not only do we find that it was worth the time and effort — we wonder why we never got around to it before.

A Dusty Green Horizon: Shadows at Sunset

February 17, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Stories

Outside the train a desert landscape darkened toward nightfall. In the glare from the overhead lights, the window reflected pale gleams of color from Laila’s headscarf, patterned in dusty shades of green and brown. She had been born not far from here… [Read More]

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