Reinforcements

Sorry for the silence. It’s been an emotional roller coaster for a couple weeks and I will admit that there have been a lot of low points. There have been some high points as well, so I’ll try to cover a bunch of them and not let myself be too gloomy.

I have no idea why I chose the word "reinforcement" for this entry, but I somehow just started thinking about how different applications of it kind of meshed with what was going on.

1) Backup (e.g. Additional Troops)

As those of you reading my blog are probably aware, my parents and youngest sister recently moved from north New Jersey back to Massachusetts. I couldn’t make it for the actual move, but I took a couple extra days around the long Labor Day weekend to help settle in.

I don’t think I realized just how unsettled the whole house still was until I got there, but that’s for later.

The house is, simply, gorgeous. The original granite exterior was built in the mid-1800s and expanded upon over the years to include a kitchen, enlarged sunny family room, and an attached garage. We’ve always wanted to live in a historical house and now some of us do, along with all the quirks: a very steep servants’ staircase, an uneven basement floor, an oddly placed slate patio overlooking the neighborhood cul-de-sac that used to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the crumbly remnants of a road in the backyard that used to be the front yard, the alternatingly chic and questionable style sense of the former owners. Oh, and a couple renovation projects.

That was probably the hardest part for me: because the top floor needs to be renovated, I wasn’t able to help with a lot of the unpacking. I got the guest room and my bookshelves and storage set up, tackled almost all of the dining room, made a big dent in alphabetizing the CDs and DVDs, and helped out with a few other projects around the house. Maybe when I’m back around Thanksgiving I’ll be able to help with some of the dozens of boxes of books…

The best/most frustrating part was that the movers didn’t do a great job of keeping everything labeled and organized by room. Mostly I noticed this when things were missing from the rooms that were mostly unpacked, but we also found a quite a few unexpected items. A box of Christmas decorations was labeled for my room, as were a few decorative objects from around our old entryway. The books and electronics from the family room, dad’s study, and the back room were mostly thrown together willy-nilly. I had two mostly empty closet boxes for my room even though there hadn’t been enough closet boxes for the rest of the family, but breakable mugs and figurines had been put in my dresser drawers without any padding.

Around the unpacking I did get a little fun in: I rescued three tiny turtles from the pool; went up to the roof to take a look at the crumbly chimney; walked to see a couple of the historic local not-witch houses; went into Boston’s North End for a nostalgic stroll by the marina, delicious lobster ravioli at Mother Anna’s, and cannolis to go from Mike’s. Part of me wishes I’d gotten to live in this awesome house in this cool area near this historic city—which may mean that Boston will have to be somewhere in my future.

2) Positive Reinforcement: Scientific Definition

As any psychology student can probably tell you, positive reinforcement doesn’t mean rewarding a desired behavior; it’s simply the addition of a stimulus or incentive to a situation to reinforce behavior. So that guy in Ghostbusters who was getting zapped for failing to predict cards correctly was actually receiving positive reinforcement (in his case, he’d prefer negative reinforcement: having the threat of zapping removed for answering correctly).

In the past couple of weeks, someone near the apartment has taken up smoking. First there’s the gentle scraping sound of the window screen going up, then the flick of a lighter, and a few minutes later I get to share the experience via the stink that wafts in through the kitchen window, sometimes as far as the living room. The frequency of these smoke breaks has been increasing from one a morning to several every day.

I don’t know who’s doing it. Up until this point, I’ve never been aware of anyone smoking nearby, except for maybe the occasional cigarette from someone who crossed the street from the steakhouse to get a little quiet. It’s annoying, but what can you do?

Well, in this case, I could apply some positive reinforcement. Every time I heard the screen go up, I rushed to the window, grabbed two pans, and started banging them together. My desire was to make the environment unhospitable enough that the smoker would find a different direction to face—like out the front window, where there’s more of a breeze to dissipate the smoke.

After some initial success, the subject (who is, my nose tells me, currently at it again) appears to have become accustomed to the ruckus—like bears who run into noise and light alarms around dumpsters so much that they learn to ignore them. Maybe I need an air horn. And “please smoke elsewhere” in Morse code.

3) Positive Reinforcement: Conventional Definition

The use of the phrase “positive reinforcement” to mean rewards for good behavior is so common that it does merit inclusion. I had a great example in mid-August when I met with CC for my half-year review. I had a great report and was given more responsibilities, including a commissioning goal, and told what I’d need to do to be considered for promotion. Yay!

Unfortunately, things got a little rough soon after that. As our office move downtown approaches, quite a few people I love working with are moving on, so there’s some sadness along with the excitement. And I’ve had several very promising leads for book projects fall through or get put on the shelf for a couple months—not that they won’t happen, and I can’t begrudge a writer for wanting to take their time, but I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to reach their goal early so that they can surpass it.

4) Assurance

Along with all the changes happening at work, though, we still have a great team of editors and assistants. My own editor has been supportive when things were rough, and other editors, EAs, and PAs have also offered opinions and advice—potential positives in turnovers, last-minute career tips, moving office decorations, shows to see, books to read, restaurants to eat at, recipes to try. I’ve also spent some time with people who I’ve not had much chance to interact with up until now. Hard to believe it's possible not to have talked much with someone in an imprint this size, but our wedge-shaped office doesn't lend itself to interaction. Which is part of why we're moving. 

5) Reiteration

Support doesn’t just come from work, either. Friends have been willing to listen and offer advice—even hilariously bad advice, when I need a laugh. Cadillac is there every morning for a quick chat to just make me feel human again, to have a conversation that isn’t about work, doesn’t require knowledge of current TV shows, and allows conversations to swing from serious to silly and back again in a few seconds. And, as usual, my family has very kindly put up with me. My mom is a saint. 

6) Strengthening

I’m trying to stay focused on this aspect of the definition, the fact that I really feel like I have a grip on the EA thing and am more than ready to move up. Even if my projects have been slow off the ground, they are coming—that’s something. But I’m also handling some complicated and delicate situations on my own (as a result of the turnover, not negligence on anyone else’s part!) and doing really well. I can answer most questions about our title management system and I know who can when I can’t. I’m writing bulletins about technology updates and monthly successes. I haven’t actually let us run out of coffee despite a surprising lack of anxiety in the office when the supply gets low. (Yes, I’m doing the coffee order. Oh, the irony! (I think…))

To step away from all the vagueness, I also did some literal, construction-level strengthening. A friend, MM, told me and Neline about a cool even that happened last Saturday evening in Madison Square Park: MAD. SQ. TASK, a massive art party for people young and old and a lot of in-between.

Volunteers had brought in supplies from all over: cardboard boxes and tubes of all lengths, sizes, and weights; ribbons pattered and plain, strings and tapes of several colors; hat boxes in at least four different sizes; seven or eight mannequins that didn’t start or end the evening with all their limbs in place; lengths of scrap cloth in a dozen textures and patterns; plain, construction, and wrapping paper; markers, crayons, paints; and odds and ends that included a couple reels of film, ladders, endless rolls of plastic wrap, and foam tiles.

Visitors had to write a creative task and put it in a box, then take one of their own and complete that task. One friend had to build a Broadway set, convince people to act in it, and gather an audience. Someone had to make and share a pizza. One group built a “power tower”. One little girl wrapped herself in tinfoil and went around asking for hugs. One person got five people to join a dance party. One little boy had to start a human wave, and some older guys quickly got on board helping him out by lending their very loud whistles. Several college kids were running around tying people together. Lots of little kids built nonsense contraptions that may or may not have been actual tasks, but hey, they were having fun.

My task was to make a five-foot-tall hat. I had no idea how to start. I ended up getting a hat box with a ribbon in it for the base, then realized that it could be five feet tall without going five feet off my head—so it was five feet tall but started partway down my back. I attached a five-foot cardboard tube to a hat box with copious amounts of tape (going by the “more is more” school of thought), so that the tube was about three feet above my head and two down my shoulders. I did some tying and taping to wrap some shiny textured gold paper around the tube, then did some creative taping and wrapping to attach some overlapping layers of dark green cloth to the top and a sandy gold textured cloth to the top of the hatbox (no glue, no staples, no scissors, and I was lucky enough to find one tiny safety pin among the cloth. Voila! I had an island hat.

But my palm tree was lonely. I decided it needed a mermaid. Again I got creative: I rolled a bundle of brown cloth for the body and secured it with a ribbon, rolled and bent paper tubes that I tucked into the ribbon to make arms, and carefully folded two corners of a scrap of blue cloth into a tail. Zhe looked a little lonely, so I tore a few fish out of green construction paper, drew on fins, gills, and smiley faces, and attached them by taping them to lengths of film that were, in turn, taped to the hat box.

When I finally put the hat on, the hat box covered my entire face. But then, a five-foot-tall hat wasn’t going to be the height of practicality anyway.

My next assignment was to give it to someone. This was fairly easy, though the poor woman I gave it to had no idea what to do with it. Alas, I was the only one to ever wear my creation: it leaned against a railing near some very wildly dressed mannequins the rest of the evening.

7) Reminder

When I’m in a slump, I have an awful tendency to become unsocial even when I really want to be around people. So to combat that, I’ve been trying to do things that I know I like, even when I do give in to the desire for some alone time.

I started with a walk in St. Michael’s Cemetery, which did not seem like a morbid thing to do until I told someone I did it. I like cemeteries. They’re quiet, peaceful. There’s so much history in gravestones, and sometimes quite a bit of personality. There were no terribly old stones that I came across—only the very late 1800s, not exactly impressive to someone who grew up in New England.

There were definite waves of fashion among the headstones. Newer remembrance walls for ashes and urns broke up the field, as did a couple rows of honest-to-goodness mausoleums. Near the front of the park the tombstones were massive in width and length, at least four feet high, with bigger plots and a handful of names of each stone. More modestly sized stones for individuals (and a few couples) filled the middle, though there was a lot of variety in decoration. Well, sort of. There were carvings of pillars and flowers and scrolls, but there were also a heck of a lot of crosses. I only realized when I saw one star and crescent that I hadn’t seen any stars of David.

There were also a lot of languages, which was a first for me. I’ve seen some tombstones in German, but that’s about it. St. Michael’s had Greek, Italian, Russian, Polish, and quite a few alphabets and languages I didn’t recognize, with a few Chinese, Japanese, and Korean letters scattered among them.

Right next to that crowded, newer section were some scattered older headstones among very large trees: one of the oldest parts of the cemetery, I believe. A far corner was dense with a variety of Asian texts and stones as tall as I was with what looked like quite a few names—family plots, I assume. I made my way back toward the entrance over a hill, through some very Edwardian-looking grave stones that were more like statues and decorations than simple markers.

What struck me most was how impersonal so many of the stones were. Granted, I wasn’t expecting it to be full of unique memorials like Barre, Vermont’s Hope Cemetery, but I expected a bit more individuality from New Yorkers. Names, dates, maybe a photo—that was it. Only a few had really personal touches: one made sure that everyone will remember he was a Yankees fan, one was a piano player, one a doctor, one a “ladies man” (that was carved on the back of the tombstone, which I thought hilarious), and in one perplexing instance the stone didn’t say anything but “MOTHER”. Those last two really struck me, since they seemed to have several possible stories behind them.

I also made note of good names as I went by. Graveyards are great places to browse for character names. I won’t include the one absolutely brilliant full name I found, since it was a relatively new memorial, but I’ve included some of my favorite individual names.

First names:     Marija     Roque     Tekla     Madiana     Orsalla     Edilia     Spyros     Quiescence     Suoma     Toman

Last names:     Rovensky     Skerbel     Timberman     Vartholomes     Dragos     Arrington     Templeton     Grassner     Spinner     Wickersheiner     Lallathine

On the subject of characters, I haven’t been writing but I have been inspired and taking notes like a fiend. I usually only dream vividly when I don’t sleep well (and yeah, there’s been a good bit of that lately), and one morning I woke up with a place and a situation and the beginning of a story clear as day in my mind. I started throwing characters at it, first from Sherlock and Elementary, but they rapidly spun out of character until they were only vaguely recognizable (though I may still play with them that way)…then, oh boy, I got Frankenstein involved. Mostly it was a desire for me to throw in some characters I’ve been building, one of whom was Frankenstein’s creature. (He likes to cook. It’s a long story.) Then I remembered “Pride and Prometheus,” a gloriously grim and gothic short story I read a while ago, and decided to get some Bennett sisters involved. I’ve cut myself off for now until I get some more plot hammered out.

As a result, I’m back to doing what I love: research. I’m gobbling up what little information and scraps of literary criticism there is about Ernest Frankenstein (the second son and the only Frankenstein to survive the novel), figuring out just how much I’m willing to fudge the properties of phosphorus in a steampunky world, looking up the thickness of permafrost, brushing up on the history of the transcontinental railroad, and very determinedly ignoring the last two digits of the years I’m looking at. We’ll see what happens.

I also had a chance to indulge in something I rarely do: fire! I had a few packets of checks with my parents’ New Jersey address on them and I’d finally gotten around to replacing them. I wasn’t sure how to dispose of them, so I figured I might as well do it completely. I brought the checks to Massachusetts, found the old “wolf pot” (an iron pot that’s always stood by a fireplace…except when we’ve repurposed it as a Halloween candy bowl) and carted it down to the pool side. Not exactly a bonfire, but fun nonetheless. It made me want to light a real fire and try cooking in that big old pot.

Food is has still been great. I’ve been out with coworkers and friends for Japanese in the East Village, vaguely South American nachos and tres leches cake, a Korean burrito (man, I love New York!), and a good old burger.

I'm also still volunteering. Since I missed Labor Day Weekend, I actually gave Xavier a try on a first Sunday. Man, was I reminded why I don't go on those weeks any more! No issues with M. Creepo, thank goodness, but the coordinators sure were doing their best to keep the hungry miserable. I took a certain savage pleasure in fetching takeout containers, extra cups of juice, and coffee--other coordinators have only ever encouraged us to do that kind of thing, since the whole point is to be welcoming and friendly! The usual post-volunteering lunch crew wasn't there, so I indulged in Panera's over the end of The Marlowe Papers.

So yeah, I’m doing what I can to get out of this funk of mine, though it’s taking more work than I’d like. Hopefully my next update will be a bit more cheery.