Clean-Out-the-Fridge Soup

The first big news is that I launched a second blog this week. I hope to use "Writing Goodgrass" as a sounding board and collection site for my thought process as I develop the story I started buckling down on in Morocco. I've been pecking at it since then, and since I'm usually too tired to do much on weekday evenings, I figure I can use some of that time to do a bit of character-building. The first post is a history of Jay Goodgrass, the character who gives the project its working title and who's been a long, long time in the making. 

Let's see, what else has happened since the last time I was on here?



Work

Things are already looking up at work. I'm starting to talk directly with authors--or, rather, email directly with them, since that's how most business is done. I did get one phone call from an author to introduce himself and ask a few questions. I've been pleased with myself and grateful for all the training everyone's put into me, since I've been able to answer most questions satisfactorily without bothering my editor or assistant editor.

I also got nominated to be a "superuser" of the company's book creation and status-tracking system. People at Palgrave will get in touch with me when they have questions about how to work it. I'm still new to the system, of course--I've worked out a lot but I still had to be told when and why to use an important button--but I'll have some solid training once I'm back from the Fourth of July. 

My new office space is amazing. I have a nice big desk right next to a window and an air con unit--so I get a view and a cooling breeze. Right across from and facing me is an even newer editorial assistant, so we ask each other questions and help each other out. I arrived right in transmittal season (when we get manuscripts into production) and got thrown into the tech end, and he arrived shortly after and worked his way up through the simple tasks that weren't prioritized in my first weeks, so we have plenty of advice for each other. We also share laughs at the street life below--the crazy guy who sounds like he's speaking a Star Wars language, the screamingly excited tourists, the occasional musicians, and the pigeons that are just a little too fond of sitting on the windowsill to watch us. 

I've been doing lots of research for three of the four editors I work with (surprisingly, the workload is fine). As with the citation translation I was working with at Columbia UP, it's one of those things that sounds like it should be boring but is actually pretty interesting. Well, okay, it can be boring when I've got the names and just need to find the email addresses, but usually I'm going through journals and conference programs looking for interesting-sounding papers and articles. I'm learning a lot about the fields I'm working with this way, since I read a lot of titles and abstracts. I never realized how far economics and business could reach into other topics...but I won't list them, for Palgrave's privacy's sake. 

The addition of the fourth editor I'm working with was unexpected but a blessing. Again, because I arrived in the middle of transmittal season, I got a good run-down of how-to and hit the ground running. As things in the office cool down, this editor always, always takes the time to slow down and explain not just the "how" but the "why" of what she asks me to do--which helps me remember everything even better and equips me to answer questions from authors and any new editorial assistants. 



Not Work

Last weekend was certainly interesting. Saturday I got up early and caught the subway out to Coney Island (which is a freakin' long way away) for the Mermaid Parade. I'd seen lots of posts online about it and figured it sounded like one of those too-strange-to-believe things, so I thought I'd go see it. 

I walked around for a bit, since the parade didn't start until 1 in the afternoon. Coney Island...not much to say about it, really. There's a beach, there are rides, there's food, there's beer. I'm guessing it's a much more exciting place at night when the lights go on. But still, interesting. There were a few remnants of historic Coney Island tucked among the newer stuff: an old building that looked like it had been a theater, a wooden roller coaster, the last remaining "freak" show. 

I brought my own lunch and ate while I read Carl Hiassen's Bad Monkey on a bench by the boardwalk, then made my way down to the street where the parade would be. Honestly, that was one of the best parts: seeing people dressed up and half-dressed up walking around as though wearing a faux-fin was perfectly normal. I spent a bit of time scouting out a good position up the road. 

First, as always, came the cars. Mostly boring, but there were some good ones: 

The Delorean! An amazing recreation that even let steam out the back.

In honor of American Graffitti

Yellow Mustang convertible!

Finally the cars were done. The very last one carried the head of the Boro of Brooklyn, who was thanking people for being there, saying that Sandy wouldn't keep Brooklyn down...oh, and if nudity offends you, it's time to leave! That made a lot of us laugh. No one was actually all the way naked, though some guys in tribal/neptune costumes got pretty close. 

The drum says, "Coney Island Presents"

A quick break for some swing dancing

On the far left there's a seahorse, and on the far right there's a nautilus

On the left there's a snail, the woman in the middle has a very lifelike shark's mouth painted on her neck and lower face, and the guy on the right is a fish school crossing guard. The other side of his sign says "Stop!" with a puffer fish on it.

The "shark" on the right moves in for a kill

This band impressed me--all dressed up as fish and still musically talented

Best.

This woman's carrying a fiberglass shark over her shoulder! 

She brought it up to the fence to look for "victims".

The pool-noodle-anemone and clown fish were really clever!

Little girl, huge stilts!

These two wore outfits made entirely out of old Metro cards

Some mermaids and some cool jellyfish

This woman's dressed as Coney Island's parachute jump

Guys on stilts and, behind them, 

two pirates protecting their loot as they haul it down the street

This adorable little girl had a knitted fin! So cute!

I ducked out around 3 to head back to Manhattan for a MeetUp. That was the part I'd been looking forward to all day. This group sounded awesome and they were going to play hide-and-seek on the Staten Island Ferry. I didn't know how, but it sounded awesome! And sure enough, when I got there I got talking right away. All was fine for a half an hour...then, right as we were about to get on the ferry, I started feeling sick. I had to leave in the middle of a conversation to rush to a bathroom where my lunch came back up to say "hi." Not fun. I was really upset about missing the MeetUp, but I had missed the ferry and I didn't feel up to doing much of anything, anyway. I spent the rest of the day in my room, mostly in bed, reading. I didn't feel up to eating anything until 9:00 at night, when I had some carrots and plain rice. So that day had gone downhill fast. 

Sunday I met up with Mom and Dad in Central Park. We had planned to sit in line and see if we could get tickets to that night's Shakespeare play, but people had been camping out overnight. So we sat around and talked for a couple hours, just catching up, before we packed it in. We went to the Museum of Art to see a couple exhibits and ended up with a Civil War-themed day. 

First we saw Photography and the American Civil War. It was a long exhibit with lots of very small images. We kind of wish they'd put some blown up images or explanations in large print up higher on the wall so we didn't have to fight with everyone to get a few seconds' look at a photo. Part of the fun for me was learning how photography was done in the Civil War, when it was still new. I didn't know this, but photographers would follow the armies not just for battle photos, but to set up tents where they would take pictures for soldiers. These tents had skylights built in to the roofs to get the best light, and a lot of the development process, which involved glass plates, had to be completed right away. There was also a lot of interesting exploration of how photography's place in American culture developed over the course of the Civil War. I knew about the impact of photography vaguely, from high school and AP US history, but not the details of how people reacted to photographs--collecting calling card-sized ones even of strangers, using photographs to document wounds and surgeries to teach future surgeons, a double amputee selling his image to make money for his family. One of the neatest ones of this last type was a photo of Sojourner Truth with the phrase, "I sell the shadow to serve the substance" written on the bottom (paraphrased from memory). She'd commissioned the photo and was selling it to raise money for cause. Quite a powerful thing to have control of your own image.

After lunch we went to the American Wing to see another Civil War exhibit, The Civil War and American Art. This consisted mostly of paintings, with a few photographs (most familiar from the previous exhibit) thrown in...and oh were they gorgeous! Don't be thrown by the overtly patriotic painting chosen to be the face of the exhibition. I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the light in these pictures, so many of which seemed to glow. There were a lot of landscapes, some with Civil War soldiers in them, some depicting the worst disruptions of nature and reflecting the contemporary mood. To my delight, the explanations were full of the psychological lenses that I love! There were comparisons of paintings by artists who had actually been to the front and those who hadn't; paintings by a Northern artist and a Southern artist displayed side by side; paintings by idealistic abolitionists that showed a black man and a white woman exploring nature alone together, and by less optimistic artists that showed children playing with a disrespectful jig doll painted to look like a black Union soldier. Beautiful, thought-provoking pictures, my favorite kind. 

For the last event of the day, we went to hear a presentation by the curators of each exhibition. Some of it was summary--Mom and Dad noticed that they were some of the youngest people in the audience, never mind me, and the slide show probably made a good overview for those who might not have been up to fighting their way through the long exhibits. But I did learn some more cool tidbits, and it was interesting to hear the curators talk about how they organized an exhibit (even if I did think the photography curator was a bit over-selling the facial expressions of people in photos). To cap it all off, a brass band came in to play some Civil War-era and -themed songs, including a version of an aria from an opera Lincoln saw, soldiers' cap favorites, and Dixieland--the last after a quick explanation that, while the South had appropriated the tune for an unofficial national anthem, the song was so popular that Lincoln went out of his way to talk about "reclaiming" the song for the Union in a speech after the war. 

After that we went out to dinner at a multi-Asian restaurant. I brought home the leftovers and mixed them with the last of last week's stir fry to spread the flavor. 

Ah, but you're probably more interested in the blog title, aren't you? Over the past couple of weeks I've accumulated odds and ends in the fridge, since no grocery store lets you buy only as much as you need at a time. So I pulled together everything I had: 

• cabbage
• carrots
• green beans
• mushrooms
• rice
• three 1/2-inch long pickled red peppers
• garlic
• onion

There's still some of the last three things left, but they'll keep longer than the others. All of it went into a pot of chicken stock with some cumin and came out delicious--and perfectly spicy! Okay, maybe just a tad too spicy, but whatever, it's good. I only need four more meals until I go home for the Fourth. 

Happy Fourth of July, folks! 

Sergeant Hathaway, Homosexuality, and Why I Can't Just Love BBC

Here's a post that's a bit more topical and a bit less all-about-me. Though I do have to start it with myself. 

So I guess I have a thing for British TV mystery series. My family started watching more of what came over to Masterpiece Mystery from the BBC after Sherlock rolled through and I've found Inspector Lewis, another show to love. Where Sherlock is extreme, full of Characters-with-a-capital-C and the fantastic, Inspector Lewis is more realistic and down-to-earth, with some characters who could pass in the real world as actual people. And it airs more frequently, always a plus. Another pro is that it's kind of nice to have a show where I have to do the thinking for myself--the Sherlock fandom may have taught me a lot and gotten me thinking, but it also does a lot of thinking for me. Which has both its good and bad effects. 

I watched my most recent episode of Inspector Lewis twice, a first for me with the series. It's called "Life Born of Fire" and it's on Netflix, which is where I watched it. (Inevitable spoilers, by the way--I'm not even going to bother trying not to give the whodunnit away.)

This episode gave a better picture of Sergeant Hathaway, the Benedict Cumberbatch sound-a-like who's Lewis's "better half" or "mini me"--the forensic tech can't decide which. This being a show that focuses mostly on the mystery (hurrah!), there hasn't been much character development for him in the episodes I've seen. Not that I've minded. The series is very much focused on the titular character but it's slow to reveal extraneous details even about him. When I saw Hathaway playing in a little band in a previous episode it was something of a shock to the system. You mean someone other than Lewis has a life outside of their work? 

Granted, that is one of my favorite things in stories: interesting back stories for the non-main characters, the hows and whys of the people in the background. So when Alan Cumming said we'd get to know a bit more about Hathaway, I got interested...until his script had him poking the viewer's brain about why Hathaway is unmarried, lives alone, listens to chamber music, and keeps his apartment neat. Because obviously no man who is or does any of those things can be straight, is the implication. 

On the one hand, interesting: I'm always interested in seeing how women and minorities are treated when they're the focus of any show (rare). On the other hand, I'm already annoyed with the stereotyping and exclusion. 

The episode went on to hit non-heterosexuality high and low, with a wearylingly familiar emphasis on the latter. Some things I did appreciate:

• A female character who helps the episode pass the Bechdel test actually cites homophobia, rather than some euphemistic "discomfort" or "intolerance", as the reason a religious dean is refusing to permit a Pride march on university grounds. This character also, eventually, turns out to be straight, which is nice since you'd otherwise be forgiven for thinking, based on the episode, that people who are gay and people who aren't don't mix socially at all.
• Lewis's relatively long-lasting restraint in asking Hathaway about his orientation and reiterations that it's "none of his business"--because it isn't, and it's refreshing to have someone on TV at least acknowledging that, if only respecting it in the breech.
• Hathaway's little speech to Lewis. Paraphrasing from memory, here: "So, what? There's boys and there's girls and a line down the middle, and if you like shoes and musicals you're gay, and if you read Loaded and eat (some sort of candy/power) bars you're straight?" 
• Hathaway never does come straight out and label himself. (Oops, pun.) The writer's restraint on that count is, frankly, astonishing. I was also grateful that his secret wasn't a sappy love story, and even more so that it was something that would have actually challenged and changed the character.

Some things I did not appreciate (I'll try to limit myself):

• With the possible exception of Hathaway (and only because I give him the benefit of the doubt--see the end of the post), there is not a single non-straight person who is not a flaming stereotype, a villain, or dead. 
• Homosexuality means gay means men who love men. Women? What women?
• Obviously any gay man would be willing to undergo a sex change, since the only thing that matters is who they love, not their own body, autonomy, and identity. (Seriously!)
• Everyone involved in promoting gay rights is aggressively glad that the people who oppose them are dying horrible deaths. Not one, "It's sad but it is better for us," just "Good!" and "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" and the like. It's not a convenient heart attack, it's grisly murder. 
• Love is made out to be the only reason you should respect someone who's gay.

I'm getting really sick of that first one: a flaming stereotype, a villain, or dead. Seems like those are the only options in TV/cinema, or at least what I've seen coming from Britain. For all they seem to be more open about homosexuality (in that it actually appears), the pop culture is littered with wink-wink homophobia. I'm not going to go into detail, but here are some of the examples that come to mind: 

• Sherlock: Obviously. One "It's all fine" shackled with stereotypes (1:3, 2:2); dogged, groundless insinuations (all episodes); villainous non-straights (1:3, 2:1); lesbians who go straight for the main character (2:1) (there are hundreds of posts online breaking down that last oversimplified point).
• Downton Abbey: Thomas is pretty much evil. Maybe he gets a bit of sympathy towards the end of the last season, but he's still a homophobe's walking nightmare. (For the record, no, I will not be coming back to this show. The soap::interesting character/plot line balance has finally tipped too far even for someone with as much millennial anxiety as I have.)
• 40-something: Points for a lesbian rather than a gay man, points rescinded since she's mostly homosexual to be a joke.
• Bridget Jones 2: Saw this when my roommate watched it. Another lesbian, another joke.
• Doctor Who: Jack Harkness is wonderful for those in the know, but he's another extreme...until you get to Torchwood and get to see that there's a bit more to him than just his sex drive. And it seems like every time the Doctor is standing next to another man, there's a gay joke. Oh, and if the character's a non-straight woman, they're more likely than not going to bite the dust.
• Bend it Like Beckham: It's been a while since I've seen it, so I could be misremembering, but I think there's a decently sympathetic portrayal of a gay man, and a character gets to say that "there's nothing wrong with being a lesbian"...but again, that second one is mostly undermined by the many cheap laughs surrounding it. (Though I will admit that one of my favorite lines is, "She's not a lesbian, she's a Pisces.")

There is, however, one British film I can think of with one of the few portrayals of homosexuality that made my throat hurt (my equivalent of crying in the theater): Peter Guillam from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. For once, sexuality and a raging libido did not define the character. I don't know who was responsible for this, since my dad's read the book and tells me it wasn't in there to begin with, but I would dearly love to shake their hand and thank them. 

But back to Inspector Lewis. Let's play "flaming stereotype, villain, dead," with the self-identified gay characters in this episode, shall we?

• Will: Dead. His suicide opens the episode. Relatively realistic character, but speak well of the dead and all that, right? Hathaway does say that when Will came out to him, he was under the impression that Will "thought we'd kiss and everything would be rosy" (again, paraphrased), which gave me a twinge of annoyance in the "Is it so impossible for a 14-year-old boy to want to come out to his best male friend without being sexually attracted to said friend?" department. 
• F.P./Zoe: Villain. S/he's the one who spent three years having a sex change just to try to make his/her boyfriend love him/her without feeling religiously guilty. Because obviously that's a no-brainer choice to make even if you're not transsexual.
• Conan: Flaming stereotype. Prime example: "Drinks! We need lots and lots of fruity drinks with little pink umbrellas! *gasp* Did I mention I was gay?!" (again, paraphrased)

There's no apparent reason why any average person of any orientation would want to be around any of these people. They don't/barely have lives outside of their sexualities...except for Zoe, who is relegated to the usual woman's role of being there to be the grieving girlfriend for most of the episode. Conan could probably have his own blog post, for all he was a tertiary character in the episode. 

I want to emphasize that he only plays so negatively in the context of the TV stereotyping culture I've already mentioned. Conan's over-the-top, in-your-face attitude is grating when it's only a notch up from the usual portrayal, but it serves an important purpose. The religious right in "Life Born of Fire" are also stereotyped and extreme (though hardly equivalent), but their voices are heard: in the religious institutions, yes, but also in the action of banning a pride march from the university and the ability to set behavioral standards for the community. The only feasible way for Conan can express his right to do and be whatever he wants is to do it loudly and obviously--he could even be deliberately exaggerating stereotypically "gay" behavior to make others uncomfortable. When he's in full, public rallying mode his mannerisms are more balanced, but when he meets Hathaway at a bar and delivers that "pink umbrellas" line, he's probably testing for a reaction. When Lewis has to bring him in for questioning, Conan's behavior is more exaggerated than ever--not a wise move with the police, of course, but as someone who's probably been dragged in front of deans quite a few times, he's probably sick of being singled out. Calculated or not, the controlled stereotypical behavior is pointed. Problem is, when almost all the other gay characters on TV act similarly, that point gets wider and wider until it's about as pointy as a watermelon.

Now, I'm not saying that I wouldn't have been bothered at all if there was maybe one more average-Joe gay character. Frankly, aggressive extremes of almost anything make me a bit uncomfortable: religion, fandom, hobbies, sports, work, culture, countries... I'm generally a chill person; aggression makes me uncomfortable. (It's hard for me to watch blockbuster movies these days, when even the good guys are aggressive extremists.) But it seems as though the ensemble characters in "Life Born of Fire" couldn't be anything but--as though the writer/director was afraid the viewer would miss or disbelieve the fact that someone some guy was gay if they weren't made-up, wrist-flicking, lisping, wearing pink or purple, talking about regular and numerous one-night-stands...etc. 

In fact, in light of this it's almost charming that Cummings opens the episode with relatively less pernicious stereotypes for Hathaway. (Disclaimer: I say "less pernicious" as someone who is not subject to these stereotypes and, therefore, really without right to rank perniciousness.) Cleanliness, an appreciation of wine and classical music...these things would be too subtle for the writers of "Life Born of Fire" to give a gay character. At least not without throwing in some shiny purple furnishings.

I guess what's most frustrating for me is how close this episode and the shows listed above get to making statements about important topics without, ultimately, saying anything. There's a time and a place for changing the culture, it's true, but there are ways to do that without making a documentary. 

• Cut back the stereotypes. Yeah, flamboyancy is going to be running high at a gay pride march, but there actually are a few homosexual people who don't live and breathe that lifestyle 24/7/52. Have one of the main secondary characters who's introduced in a neutral area not be identifiably gay at a glance, just to shake things up.
• When you have a character say a Big Idea, try to have them stick to it. 'Course saying one thing and doing another is pretty common, so time and place and all...
• Was there seriously no LGBT group on Oxford that the directors could have recruited to fill out the crowd scenes? Not only would you get some real people and real exposure, you also wouldn't end up with only fifty people representing an entire city's LGBT and allied population. 
• At least have the decency to write your sex-changing individual as transgender. Cripes. 
• For the love of God (how topical), if you're not going to acknowledge the "BT" part of LGBT, at least recognize the other half of homosexuality. 

I'll close with a bit of a pet theory. (In the real world I'd say I have no right to say this, but since I am talking about a fictional character and I did study narratoloy, I think I can get away with it.) The show ultimately seems to say that Hathaway is straight. He kisses and intends to sleep with a woman (yeah, before he know she's a *woman (if she doesn't still identify as male) (did I use the * right?)) and he shows up in the last scene carrying the two items he associated with being straight: a copy of the porn magazine Loaded and the candy/power bar with the name I can't for the life of me remember. But if I hadn't just written hundreds of words about the ham-fisted handling of homosexuality in the episode, I'd be inclined to think that Hathaway was some gradient of asexual. 

I have a few reasons for this, but the main one is that scene in the car with Lewis, when Hathaway, exasperated, tells the DI to go ahead and ask ask him about his sexuality already. Most people would take that opportunity to identify. Hathaway had just admitted how cruel he'd been to his old friend, who'd come out to him when they were fourteen. Being gay would be a comparatively easy admission, and one that Hathaway, with his Oxford education, would definitely link to the now-shameful event he'd just described. Being straight is seen as normal and normative, so it's not like it would be a burden to give up that information. 

Asexuality, on the other hand, is still widely unknown and unrecognized. I've heard otherwise intelligent people say that it doesn't exist, that an asexual person couldn't survive, and that asexual people are essentially plants (which isn't even accurate--most plants reproduce sexually). I've read about people who were told their asexuality was a mental or physical disorder, the result of trauma or abuse, the result of bad sex or no sex. Fact is, people who are asexual were born asexual with the same relative frequency that people who are straight were born straight and people who are homosexual were born homosexual. But asexuality dismissal doesn't just come from straight people--it can come from anyone who grew up with a sexual mindset, which is most of the world's population. This means that even many LGBT communities aren't welcoming, safe places for asexuals. I'm not saying this to knock them; it's just a sad-but-true fact, for the time being.

And here we have Hathaway talking about "a line down the middle" instead of answering a question he gave Lewis permission to ask. There are other ways he could identify, of course, but I'm inclined to lean toward the one that would require more explanation than he'd probably be comfortable with giving. Yeah, he goes home with Zoe, but being asexual doesn't necessarily mean never having sex. There's generally nothing but our minds stopping us from sleeping with anyone regardless of our orientation, after all.

That closing scene gave me such mixed feelings. I was so, so grateful that Hathaway hadn't identified: it left the show open for interpretation and didn't leave me feeling locked out of the entire episode. But I did feel let down by what felt like "reassurance" from the script that, no, don't worry, we don't have to be sympathetic to someone who's gay from now on. Because really, the simple reading of the episode that most viewers would give it does leave us with straight-as-rail Hathaway. I might see the magazine and snack as a joke at his own expense to thank and apologize to Lewis, but wouldn't most people see it as Hathaway admitting which side of the "line down the middle" he falls on? That is, if there was any question left in minds unfamiliar with queer studies that Hathaway wasn't straight; kissing and cuddling with a woman would probably have meant identification to me even a few years ago.

And I think that's why I had to watch this episode twice. I never planned to go into religion as a career, but like Hathaway I had an extremely religious phase. I don't remember doing or saying anything homophobic, but that may just be because I was practically ignorant of the existence of anything but heterosexuality until I was in seventh grade. I thought for a few minutes that Hathaway's transformation from conservative would-be priest to liberal, queer-community-informed sergeant was unrealistic...then I remembered my own growth over the past ten to twelve years. Granted, I was and am significantly younger than Hathaway would have been at both start and present. But still, that radical change, that irrepressible knowledge that I once did and said things that today make me wince at myself, and that desire to confront things that make me uncomfortable are all reasons why "Life Born of Fire" merited a second viewing. I'm probably more annoyed, not less, now that I've seen it again and thought over the points that stood out most to me...but I'm also grateful for the people in my life who helped teach me how to think critically about why shows like Inspector Lewis can seem progressive while also being subtly homophobic.

~~~

I'm not optimistic that I'll get responses, but I'd love to hear from people who have reactions or knowledge they'd like to share.

A Month in the City

Well, here it is! Finally!

I can't say it's been an easy first month, or a particularly enjoyable one, but I'm still pleased with how things are going so far. 


Work

This past week our office was finally rearranged. Now, instead of sitting on the other side of the building with two secure doors and a hallway between me and the people I work with, I have a desk by a window right across from an even newer editorial assistant. One person I work for is about fifteen feet away in an office, the other's about thirty feet away in an office shared with another assistant editor. Plus I'm kind of part-time assisting two other editors. The  new EA is assisting one, though I have a feeling that he'll be in high demand with other editors--and me, if I need a hand with formatting manuscripts and such.

The people I work with continue to be a wonderful group. So fun and friendly, ready with advice about where to find a book club (*ahem*, must get on that), how to navigate ever-busy IT, and ready to answer the same question they answered three weeks before (hey, I hadn't used the scanner since my first week, and even a veteran assistant editor had to poke the machine a bit to remember how to do it!). 

Probably the best part about last week was getting to sit down with the editor I work for and talk about goals. There's a lot of young blood at Palgrave right now and our editorial director has been talking about goal setting--but I'm still so new that I barely know what my goals should be. I mean, I have private goals like, "Think of something intelligent to say at the ed board meeting," but they're not exactly career-revving goals. But when I went to talk to my editor, she had a nice little plan laid out for me in which I'd be using the summer to get a handle on everything, working with several people to learn the ropes, and take over the former editorial assistant's duties as she transitions into her new role as an assistant editor. So by the end of the summer, I'll be all set and I'll know what I'm doing. Sounds good to me! 


Not Work

I've not done as much exploring yet as I expected. First of all, there's getting my out of my habits of unemployed isolation, which takes some doing. I'm not exactly an outgoing creature, for being such a social one. But the killer, two-week cold didn't help much. I lay in my apartment on the wood floor, feeling hot and miserable for most of a Saturday. Not a good day for the esteem, let me tell you.

But all that's in the past. I got my toes wet earlier this week by spontaneously going to see Carl Hiaasen speak after Mom tipped me off that he was going to be at the Union Square Barnes and Noble. Mostly I just wanted the excuse to "expense" a book purchase to the family, since my parents collect Hiassen's books. I had some much-needed laughs as he shared stories about how the Pirates of the Caribbean movie monkeys inspired the titular "Charlie Sheen of monkeys" of his most recent book. Key quote:

"A lot of books I read in high school and college would have benefited if it had a monkey in the plot. Silas Marner would have been an easier read..."

Basically Hiaasen's another author that I'd just love to be friends with. I capped off the evening at the book signing by telling him that, "My mom grew up in Pensicola, her parents live in Fort Meyers, and my dad says the only things he likes about the whole state are below sea level." Felt good to give one laugh back to a man who gave me such a good evening!

Last night I finally plucked up the courage to go to a social MeetUp--at a midtown pub at 10PM! I will honestly admit that I was a bit nervous about being out so late at night, but once I got myself out the door I realized that there were plenty of other people out and about. I had a good time, though, and met a whole bunch of interesting people, including:

• A young couple from New Jersey who had a shorter commute to the even than I did
• A social worker and a case manager, who interested me on Becky's behalf
• A married lawyer whose wife told him to go out and have fun while she was at kickboxing (at 10PM?), who'd been unemployed and writing a novel and was just getting back to the job search
• A recruiter who seemed about my age, lived in the LES, and was just generally awesome
• A young woman from Malaysia who'd gone to school in Boston and then taken a job that moved her to New York
• A man who'd been an Egyptian expat for six years--I showed off my lack of skills in a language he barely understood, he told me to head to Astoria for some decent Egyptian and Moroccan food, and we discussed the way the media's coverage/lack thereof of the Arab Spring and its aftermath

I left with the LES recruiter around midnight and we walked all the way back to Avenue C together. Great night for it! Warm enough that I carried my coat. It was so nice to just chat about nothing and everything again. And when we went our separate ways and I walked the last ten blocks alone, I didn't feel nervous once. 

This morning I got up around eight and went for a jog along the East River Promenade. Once again, it was just a matter of making myself get out and do it. Once I was out, it felt great to be moving again and I didn't have to worry about how I was doing, looking, or sounding because there were people of almost every ability level out doing their thing. One of the most remarkable people I saw was a woman jogging in a full niquab, her hot-pink sweat pants just visible between her sneakers and the edge of her black dress. That takes dedication! 

Well, I think that's about it for now. If anyone's reading this and wants to know more about something in particular, go ahead and ask.