Bourne Legacy: “I really have no idea what’s going on.”

This review was originally posted in 2012 on my former college's blog, which is no longer active. I am reposting here as an example discussion of a "relaxing movie" for my Applied Humanities students -- and you.

I tried to explain the premise, as I understood it from previews, of The Bourne Legacy to my friend as we walked into the theatre to see the fourth movie in the Bourne trilogy. As far as I can tell, I was successful.

Jason Bourne was never really a real person, or at least not who he seemed to be, or Jason Bourne wasn’t his real name, and he had a lot of identities when played by Matt Damon in the first three films and in his role as a part of The Program, run by the U.S. government, or by corporations, or rogues, so it’s okay that there’s a new actor (Jeremy Renner) now in the same role, except it’s not the same role, but. . .

Wait, let me start over.

A few minutes into my viewing of the fun, action-packed, pretty-to-look-at, sometimes cleverly-scripted, but just as often cliché-ridden Bourne Legacy, I started to track dialogue that explicitly acknowledged the story is convoluted, but who cares? My notes include the line, “I really have no idea what’s going on,” in quotes – but I have no recollection of who said it, when, or why.

“Is it possible?” one character asks. “I’ve kinda lost my perspective on what’s possible,” another responds. Me, too! “How do you know I’m not evaluating you?” one spy-like guy says. “I don’t. Maybe you are, maybe I don’t care. Don’t you ever not care?” Perfect! The movie spends its first 30 minutes setting up questions, while blatantly supplying no answers. We jump from Alaska to somewhere in Africa, to Korea – quick scenes, multiple storylines, little progress. Blood, drugs, mystery. What’s this? Don’t dwell – on to the next scene, where a character, playing it straight, says, “You’re not saying much of anything.” No kidding! I’m a third of the way through the movie before I care enough to wonder about a plot point – but I’m not bored until the last third when we’ve been told all there is to know.

Jason Renner plays a guy with a name (eventually), or at least a name a couple of people call him, as well as a number. He’s at a training camp where he’s put through rigorous physical and mental tests while taking a blue and a green pill, occasionally returning to a pharmaceutical research lab for monitoring and adjustments. Something happens (seriously, I’m not sure what, and I’m pretty smart and attuned to details) and this program, being run by some organizations and some powerful people (honestly…), spirals into chaos. Pills must stop being taken, and people with knowledge must stop being alive.

Renner’s character (I’m going to call him Aaron, because some other people do at some points) goes on a quest to replenish his supply of chemicals, because the effects they have on him are compelling. He’s so much smarter and stronger than he was without them, and that’s good. He hooks up with one of the research doctors and they take off on a trip to Manila, trying to stay alive and smart and strong.

As the movie goes on, chase scene after chase scene and plot twist upon plot twist, empathy remarkably grows in me as a viewer as I connect to these two pretty characters who don’t know what’s going on either. Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) asks Aaron why he needs so badly to maintain his advanced chemical state, and he responds, “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

I liked the three previous Bourne movies. They didn’t shape my view of humanity or international relations, but they entertained me with intrigue, action, empathetic heroism, and exotic settings. I liked this movie, too, but it’s like Bourne lite, and even while it gives me what I’ve come to expect in a Bourne flick, it also reveals a flaky underbelly.

To wit: what’s a Bourne movie without a car or motorcycle chase on stairs in an urban setting? Legacy gives us that, but in such a way that it somehow feels like, “Here’s your chase scene, I hope you like that we made it 20 minutes long and devoid of any plot or character development!” It gives us the vulnerable yet super-able hero and his reluctant yet capable female sidekick, but then it highlights her need for superhero saving in gratuitous, repetitive scenes. It introduces intriguing political and philosophical situations – a questionably-still-human character chemically programmed to eschew empathy or regret sent to chase down Aaron and the good doctor – but doesn’t develop the premise in any way beyond the surface physical. He’s like a robot, and we’re not as saddened or frightened by the institutional and relational implications of this as we might be if we weren’t running up walls and zipping through traffic for quite such a long time.

Fun (for the most part) to watch, impossible to follow, and undeveloped in potential, The Bourne Legacy is a shot of adrenaline with undefined lasting effects about which I’m ultimately good-naturedly and, apparently, empathetically apathetic.

Freelance on a Couch: Stuff that works for me

#BirthMonthBlogging-1

Things I have learned are good to do in freelance writing and editing while working from home every day that I can mostly on a couch or comfy chair

HAVE A CAT

As a lifelong overachiever, I currently live and work with three of the feline persuasion. If I am not patting, scritching, greeting, complimenting, or sharing laptop space with a cat at least every hour, I can feel the loss physically, emotionally, and mentally. Being happy-ish and healthy-ish allows me to concentrate, persevere, and create. There is science.

YMMV: It seems to me dogs would work quite well in a pinch and why not pet-able reptile or porcine pets, too?

EAT FRUIT

Early this year, I started eating at least an apple a day and I do not care to imagine my life without it now.

Fruit was like my least favorite food category (besides the obviously gross ones like exotic sea creatures, internal organs, and rice pudding) before, and in making the change to eating (and craving) fruit throughout the day I wasn’t an overnight success. But it is now the most reliable “yes” in the eating world for me. If I eat fruit throughout the day, I am more likely to be healthy-ish and happy-ish, and that feeds concentration, perseverance, and creativity. It's just science.

YMMV: Chopping celery or carrots is too much effort and arm pain some days, but cherry tomatoes and mini peppers have the quick pick up, rinse, bite, be done quality like apples when veg is one's vibe. NBD.

LISTEN TO AUDIOBOOKS

... at night (or podcasts while folding laundry or washing dishes). Sometimes my eyes sting like peppers from looking at a screen all day and night. But I need some story in my brain besides what I am writing, editing, or researching. I could not do what I do without that, and sometimes I can no longer read with my eyes.

GET DRESSED

I have come to love loving what I am wearing when I work at home on a couch.

WORK WHEN I CAN

Sometimes I cannot read or write during prime Day Job hours. My brain is broken. If I can do it at 8PM, I will. Sometimes I can do it with the TV on or family members or stranger cafe dwellers talking. I can do it starting at 1AM. So yes, your mileage may vary and this is the worst advice ever. But accepting the truth that forcing myself into a tight, scheduled routine was making it harder for me to work cut out a lot of anxiety and false guilt. Part of living with my mental and physical health is recognizing that there are bad days and weeks, and there are good ones. Eating fruit and taking walks doesn't make everything fit in a nice neat job box.

GET UP AND MOVE

I use a device that physically reminds me every hour or so to move. For the most part, I work on a couch, with my laptop either on a pillow on my lap or on a bamboo, air-slotted lap desk on my lap. If I sit all day, I will be unhappy and unhealthy, and my muscles will lock up or spasm. I will feel bruised where nothing but pillow, couch, air, or cat touched me. I will feel exhausted. Sometimes that happens even when I got up and shook it out or walked to the mailbox every hour. See Work When I Can.

CONTEXT

These commonly known stuffs work for me. They are not unique. They might not work for you or someone you love.

I came into my present professional set-up from a life-altering experience of major depression and I have fibromyalgia.

Since 2016, I have been doing some combination of the following, professionally:

1. Researching and writing web copy for a commercial and/or non-profit client, typically of the start-up, information-economy type.This involves consistent, same-old assignments, week on week. I have worked with the same bread-and-butter client (mental healthcare-related) since 2017.
2. Developmental editing, aka ghost-writing and/or story/writing coaching. This involves finding and collaborating with a client on their idea for a book, typically for six-ish months per project.
3. Teaching "nontraditional" college students online through a huge university. This involves guiding and grading through an eight-week term, one or two liberal arts course sections at a time.

This is the first of an attempt to blog a few times in this, my birth month. Topic suggestions welcome! 

Share stuffs that you have learned are good to do in your job: post a comment!

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel


It's a fascinating story that requires experiencing oneself as a voyeur. In the middle I was frustrated with how this true mystery about a man who lived alone in the woods, surviving in large part by theft and by emotional avoidance, was developed in the book. In the end, I recognize I needed that frustration.

Read it if you are drawn to physical survival and wonder about aloneness and compromise. Skip it if you want an adventure.


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A little story or three on bias and connection

I am currently consulting on a book about empathy, and teaching an online course about liberal arts learning. This week in the course, we're considering scholarly sources and the value of recognizing bias. And in that way life likes to do, the two jobs got together in my head, pulled up chairs, ordered coffee, and became friends.

So, I wanted to share a little story (with a couple of stories stuffed inside) about Bias and Me.

This is my third book consultation in a year and through it and other life experiences -- which are what distinguish bias from prejudice in our class material -- I've come to perceive a trend: Sometimes men of a certain age, professional success, and global experience develop a bias against the new-old-days and in particular the present ways of so-called communicating.

(Foreshadowing: our protagonist Rini isn't sure the ol' days were so good nor the new ones so new or bad.)

In this job, it came to a point in a chapter on communication and empathy -- in particular, on social media. Some folks, based on their experiences riding high in various communications professions (like marketing and broadcast journalism) a few decades ago, have a pretty strong idea that "new media" are bad. The nature of social media is to divide and reduce the globe and all of us to angry, small-minded, non-thinking word- and meme-combatants.

(Fun fact: Wikipedia tells us "dumbing down" was a phrase in use in the 1930s. The good ol' days.)

Enter Rini, professor of media studies, analyzer of communication across cultures, user of Twitter (like, a lot). My bias is toward seeing people who dis "social media" as people who don't know social media, or at least have not observed or experienced its potential. Nothing pushes my buttons like implying the good-ol-days of newspapers and telephones and broadcast TV news and cups of tea in a parlor were the Unbiased Way God Intended Humans to Communicate. Let me pass you one of my spare copies of Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985, okay?

So, I pulled together all these wicked positive data on how social media (Twitter) can save the world and along the way, I 1) had to wade through all these dominant data that show social media is designed to exacerbate our biases; 2) remembered a fantastic book I'd been reading earlier this year; and 3) remembered a fantastic academic paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in Toronto in 2002.

And I recognized and sort of acknowledged my own bias that was suppressing a point of connection that was right there in the research. In 2002 I wrote about my observations and experiences of being a U2 fan online and in line at concerts where a hundred-fifty or so of us would gather from the wee hours of the morning on the day of a concert to ensure we got inside the arena first, to grab the closest spots in the general admission sections right up against the stages. We knew where to line up, who we might see again from the last city we attended, and what the parking and public bathroom situations were because of our interaction in online fan forums. (Many were using them, too, to arrange places to sleep and transportation to the next gig.)

This was pre-Twitter (though it continues in that vein through today), but it was a similar concept and it actually brought my client's and my competing biases together, introduced them, got them settled in comfy seats, and ordered them coffee and pie as they got to know each other.

My argument about the (potential and real) valuable outcomes of social media use is that it can connect humans who may be especially disconnected. Maybe geographically, more often sub-culturally. It allows people to say and hear what they might not otherwise say and hear. My client's argument about the (potential and real) harmful outcomes of social media use is that it can divide humans and cater to especially strong perceptual and confirmation biases. It walls them off from seeing or hearing what they would really rather never see or hear. In addition, this perspective goes, it makes us all "bowl alone," not talking to each other in person or making eye contact.

 So how about if we looked at some examples of people using social media to connect across such vast divides, face to face in situations that would otherwise justify fear and biases? That's where (techno)sociologist Zeynep Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas book comes in, and especially two extraordinary stories on p. 106-108. I highly recommend buying the book (proceeds support refugees), but it's also viewable without cost (link and click-through above). I won't retell her two stories of social media meets face to face here. They are striking examples of overcoming bias in particularly volatile circumstances, and they reflect arguably uneven examples of self-awareness and recognition of bias. Go read 'em.

So we come to one of the questions in this week's class: What is the value of recognizing one's own bias? For one, for me, it is the potential for productive, even genuine connection that can result, and the movement toward more whole, integrated understanding of (and empathy for) our co-humans. Bias isn't necessarily wrong or even bad, if we think of it as an angle. Angles gonna angle. Proportion is all out of whack. But we usually know how to make an effort to take in some other sides in the pursuit of truth and love.

(Plus recognizing bias's super useful in information literacy and doing academic research.)

post script: I want to note here that this ain't rose-colored and everything we perceive is not real and all we need is not just recognizing our bias. I still see that social media use can be fruitful even when it doesn't lead to in-person-breathing-the-same-air. But it's a good starting point that can help make a connection, which is needed in order to communicate and learn at all.

post-post script: I have a fair share of biases, and when I can get around to the right spot to recognize (or, more significantly, acknowledge) them, some fine combination of these happens to happen: I slow down. I shut up (for at least a minute). I get curious. I ask questions. I do research. I read another book (follow another Twitter handle). I might, but only briefly (because all of the above), feel embarrassed (or, more sophisticatedly, chagrined; or, less intensely, regretful). You?

"Nah" no more: my first #NaNoWriMo crashed my slumber party

Literally right before I fell asleep last night, literally right before 2 a.m., my head flooded with an almost fully-formed idea for a novel.

I had characters, dialogue, action, and setting, setting up scenes on the sound stage in my brain as if arriving for rehearsal and I was just standing there on the side wondering if I was the production coordinator or had just wandered into the wrong room.

This little situation had not been on my agenda this week. And extra especially, it had not been scheduled for the middle of the night. But I guess it's the stuff of writer waking-dreams, so once I realized what was happening, I started typing away on my tablet's screen and didn't stop for maybe 30 or 45 minutes.

It's not an altogether unfamiliar event, but I definitely haven't had the gang all show up ready to be typed (or, back then, written in a spiral notebook) for probably decades. I've followed through a few times, but since about fourth grade never completed a full fiction manuscript. And even then I kept adding chapters because it was really a bit of a soap opera.

(My elementary novel - written on my own time in the midst of math and language arts and best-friends-angst and passing notes and whatever else it is kids do when they're nine and an old soul - was titled The Smiths, The Jones, We'll Break Their Bones.)

I'd been thinking about writing a short novel to experiment with Amazon self-publishing to see if there was anything promising in that world, but hadn't thought about it in a while and was always hung up on the absence of an actual story. Characters, I got. Characters galore. And dialogue. And settings. And background music, costumes, and animals and such. But plot progression? A key obstacle and goal? Look, we're all just trying to get by, I can't think of the grand stuff right now.

Until I did.

Ridiculously, it's a "YA" gig, starring a ninth grade girl, which is not in the universe of ideas I'd been visiting.

At just before 2 a.m. last night I was thinking about how to stop thinking. I was imagining tomorrow-today, with a 10 a.m. work phone call, half-a-day's writing assignments now two weeks overdue, and a little thing called being "under the weather" by some. I was succeeding in stopping the imagination and starting the blessed blank sleep. The timing was silly, but the gift was a gift.

And would you look at that - it's National Novel Writing Month next week, a possibly fun thing I've never done and rarely paid attention to. Oh, it's also adding a new teaching gig, continuing two writing/consulting gigs, weeks broken up by health care appointments, securing Obamacare for next year, nephew getting married, here come the holidays Month.

But I'm in. You?

Welcome to College!

 In bed, throw the covers on your head / You pretend like you are dead
No way, you can fight it every day
 But no matter what you say
You know it, the rhythm is gonna get you
 No clue of what's happening to you
But I know it, the rhythm is gonna get you     - Gloria Estefan

Thirty-eight of my forty-five years as a human being have included at least one First Day of School. Eighty-four percent. I didn't even live with a cat for that many years! For more than one of those years, I had First Days of School in two different countries. I've had the darn things in five states, on ten different campuses.

In a couple of weeks, I'm having one again, for the first time in a couple of years.

This time, I will spend the least amount of time ever for a First Day of School planning what to wear. I probably won't carry a backpack. But I am planning for some jitters, meeting new people, asking for help, and most likely taking a lunch break. And supper. Maybe midnight snack.

At the end of October, I start teaching an eight-week first year seminar online for SNHU. My role, in keeping with the distinct SNHU approach, is as a mentor and guide, weaving my knowledge, connections, suggestions, advice, feedback, and encouragement into the established structure of a "Perspectives in the Liberal Arts" course. My undergraduate, adult-learner students' average ages will be around the age I was starting my last new school, in 2004 at UConn, a bright-eyed doctoral student with two First Days of School (in two New England states) that fall.

They'll have more than one full-time commitment, probably kids and a job and a return to school after some time away. I hope they'll be curious and hopeful and determined. I hope I'll empathize and be helpful, resourceful, and at least a little bit funny sometimes.

In the calendar year 2016, I had no First Day of School for the first time since Y2K. My first days since then have been many and varied. In shifting professional commitments to consulting, writing, and editing, I now experience jitters and meeting new people without the comforting embrace (or bookends) of the rhythm of schools. I don't get much orientation and knowing who to ask for help is not handed to me in announcements and handouts.

But some familiar things have bridged the gap. I have a lunch period, for one. (Because my office-mate-host-brother invites me to shadow his work-from-home schedule.)

So I'm gearing up for my new First Day of School and more schedules and priorities and commitments living in tension with each other. I'm filling out my color-coded calendars (don't think I'm not buying three-dimensional school supplies just because the class exists in a net of ether). I may actually buy a new (comfy) outfit. I've had lots of help from The School in figuring out who to ask for help. And I'm excited about learning and wrestling with ideas, new weekly topics, and assignment due dates with a group of humans sharing my First Day of School.

(Except the online course is almost totally asynchronous.)

On the roundabout road to not much to do about not much new or now

via Goodreads

On the Road with Charles Kuralt by Charles Kuralt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Read through my 2017 eyes, this vignette collection is occasionally sweet, rarely--though not never--provocative, and always repetitive. Besides a few gestures at poverty, which is never confronted, just overcome through good will--none of the stories incorporates conflict. It's a picture of the people on the back roads of the US that is too comfortable in nostalgia and its yearning for authortative, meaningful, cohesive, harmonious pastness: The Past and The Old Ways which must be glorified because goshdarnit they're the good ol' guys. The book works as it's designed, in spurts of short and vivid anecdotes. But if I weren't reading it to get some genre context for a comparable current project I'm editing, I'd have had no drive to keep reading to the end.


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Part I: Shelter

I didn’t know, when I drove three days down here two years ago, that I wouldn’t be driving back.

Well, my brother drove most of the time.

Two years ago I packed up half my college-professor-office and cleaned up my condo, both on the north shore of Boston. I turned in final spring semester grades, stopped by doctors’ offices for one-last-appointments, and headed southwest to my family roots in DFW. We drove through horizon-blurring fields in New York, shared a quick and quiet Lake Erie beach moment with a van of Amish women, ate pizza and filled up with gas in a possibly sad, once-industrial town in Pennsylvania.

I think it was the day after Cleveland residents protested the acquittal of an officer who shot unarmed individuals that we skirted that downtown on an Interstate. I remember driving over the Ohio River into Kentucky while eating a fragrant orange; my brother was driving. I rode, sore and serious but happy for a sweet little moment and view, in the passenger seat in front of a semester’s worth of stuff, halfway to my overdue half-year sabbatical. It rained most of the rest of our way, and I think I was the one gripping the wheel through hail and flash-flooding in Texarkana, after a night in a leaky motel room decked in mood-matching decor.

Two months later, I quit my job, flew back northeast, packed up the rest of my office, for good, and piled a relatively modest layer of book boxes in my condo’s spare room, out of the way of a year-long housesitter. I probably wouldn’t be back, but who ever knew.

A year ago, I shipped the boxes southwest, clearing a financially underwater, nor’easter-leaky, brilliant-for-me home of all the furniture and most of the household items and old paper files accumulated over 10, some 14, years.

One of the absolute best things about the last year for me is no longer owning a home. I did love that home.

I bought the shiny, corner condo in a converted 19th century shoe warehouse at the junction of small but busy streets in downtown Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, in 2006, after spending a liminal year completing my doctoral coursework in Connecticut.

That Connecticut year, the time of Katrina, when I welcomed maybe temporary, maybe not, undergraduate students from Louisiana universities into my Humanities discussion sections at UConn, I commuted once, usually twice, more than once three times a week back up to my office and a friend’s tiny living room-filling air mattress north of Boston. I drove back and forth to teach a class, advise students, help to manage an academic department in a time of extended growing pains.

In my year-leased Connecticut home, I slept on an eternally-flattening air mattress of my own in a dank apartment building in the woods of Ashford, Connecticut, with sketchy cell coverage and familiar neighbors I never got to know. I'd smell and hear the late night meals of Ramadan as I walked down the mildewy hallway to my dark, mainly empty space; or hear the fighting couple across the hall and wish they weren't, or eye closed doors wondering which ones protected the package-under-the-lobby-mailbox-stealer from my disappointed glare. Mostly I was too tired to care.

It was like living in a turn lane or elevator stuck between floors, my books stacked on plastic shelves even I could put together without instructions. It took me a few months to figure out that my cat Buddy’s frequent seizures at night while we snuggled with our skeptical new companion cat Georgianna inches above the stale carpeted floor were connected to the ever-increasing punctures leaking air so we’d wake up on two comfortless layers of rubber, to the sound of a garbage truck or drunk college student at the dumpster gracing our backlot window views.

The year before the in-between year of air mattress living, I slept on a borrowed mattress in the borrowed attic space room of another generous friend’s home on Boston’s north shore, commuting the opposite direction to Storrs once, twice a week in snow and rain and bouncing cell coverage. That’s when Buddy became my friend, The Little Bastard inherited sequentially two floors up from friend to friend to my borrowed apartment, where I believed I could tame the angry adolescent beast or laugh and bleed to death trying.

That’s when I housed my papers and non-blow-up or fold-up furniture and knickknacks in a storage unit on Route 1 I still refer to as the place I lived for two years.

I fell in love with my restaurant and train station views from the high-ceilinged fourth floor windows of my new condo on a lightly raining day. The windows were huge and I almost grew elastic arms to hug them as my gracious friend and I stepped into the wide open space, just to check it out, not yet anticipating an adventure of rewarding proportions trying to hang window treatments in a space defying pre-fab rods and other hardware. I bought the extra longest sets of curtains from JCPenney and Ikea and made a home for myself and my cats that several friends came to recognize from their commuter rail train windows across the street over the next 10 years.

(The short-sale contract for my condo a year ago specified that the washer, dryer, and window treatments were to remain as part of the deal.)

It was a bubbly moment in a real estate market about to implode. An overpriced, idealistically pitched condo designed as part of a plan to create some kind of connection between a catalog-picturesque, private, woodsy liberal arts college up the road and around the lovely bends, to the urban community in my new city with a view of Boston from the public beach. I fell in love with the windows.

After completing my dissertation and what I thought would be the longest, hardest part of my college faculty tenure - commuting between two states for nearly seven years, advancing my degree and chairing my department while teaching full-time - I bought myself a little lemon tree. Shipped to citrus-barren New England from tropical Louisiana, my new pet held its own, with I think seven beautiful yellow lemons in its first full year and another few each year after that until things fell apart. It grew tired and brown and a little mean, producing fragrant blossoms that transformed into Tic-Tac-sized green baby fruit before shrivelling up and dashing hopes.

I never bought a new bed or mattress after the one I got for an unfurnished apartment just North of Dallas in my two years between first-round grad school and becoming an under-30, tenure-track faculty member in Massachusetts. After two rented apartments and a two-year stretch standing on its head in the storage unit I called home on Route 1, I placed the little double bed on the light wood floor in the condo and the cats and I slept in it until we didn't. After Buddy left this mortal coil during my first sabbatical in Texas, Georgianna grew weary and arthritic and I bought pet stairs to help her snuggle up. Then in the last half-year before she joined our Buddy in the afterlife of no pet pain, which turned out to start the hardest year and a half of my college teaching era - leaving seven years of double-duty with grad school looking like a day floating on an intertube on a softly lapping lake in the shade by comparison - I broke the bedframe down and brought the mattress down to stay on the floor so George didn't have so hard a fall when she tried climbing into bed. The night before I became the ex-owner of the condo, my sister, niece, and I leaned the old mattress up against the dumpster downstairs and I slept on the floor cushioned by an unpacked quilt.

The day before I turned in my key at the real estate lawyer’s office for her to close in my absence, we walked the dry-bone lemon tree that could until it couldn’t down to the parking lot dumpster, out of sight of my movie screen windows for 10 years in my own, owned home. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, I didn’t go out the way I went in.

These days I sit on a hand-me-down office chair at a fold-up desk in the corner of my brother's living room, watching fearless squirrels mangle bird feeders intermixed with scenes of black- and tufted-crested titmice and chickadees gathering for sunflower seeds every few hours just inches from the window.

Two years ago I moved to Texas. One year ago I sold my condo in Massachusetts. These past two years have been more liminal than the air mattress adventure of 2005-2006, when then I knew the measurable goals and final move-back plans, with my very own new home on the horizon. I have lived in the familiar homes of my family, become entangled with their cats, and acclimated to the sounds of suburbia and the edge of the countryside.

Turn around, bright eyes (but don't look at the map)

Every now and then we are minding our own business, getting our work done, making our stuff, when a stupid jerk starts yakking away about how we are just going to embarrass ourselves or we simply can't make what we're trying to make. The voice is coming from inside our heads!! and it is like a cat pushing our papers off the table, but with greater malicious intent and, significantly, way less self-esteem.

My friend - no really, it was a friend, not me - and mutual tweet-follower Michael tweeted a call for help this morning (hi):

How do you guys beat your inner critic? How do you shut that jerk up? What're your favorite strategies? Asking for a- me, it's for me.

— Michael Edwards (@sudomichael) April 12, 2017

How do we out-wit the voice?

So, a few trusty practices came to mind pretty quickly. Not because I don't have to sit and listen to the inner critic literally every (okay, every other) day as I write, but because I do. There are these things that do happen to work sometimes.

Go back and look at (a) Something I made awhile ago that was probably pretty good. When I see it is great, I can keep going. and/or ... https://t.co/nevl7YOkuV

— rinila (@rinila) April 12, 2017

1. Remember a project my gut tells me was done well and re-view it. That will shut the "meh, why bother" voice up at least for a while.

- Rini's Personal Writing Archives, Four-Year-Old File

 2. Remember what some people (or gatekeepers) said about something I did and re-view their responses. That will give the voice someone else to argue with while I get back to work.

Then another friend of the Original Poster suggested (in addition to tried and true setting small goals and checking them off) a tactic that has had the opposite effect on me sometimes. He recommended reflecting "on the personal trail you are blazing," but I find that zooming out and looking for proof of Good Work in a big picture trajectory actually invites the mean voice to say, "So this map doesn't impress much, does it? You're no closer to the X than you were five projects ago. Wait, I can't even see the X -- what treasure are we searching for anyway?"

Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit tired

Of listening to the sound of my tears

Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit nervous

That the best of all the years have gone by

Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit terrified

And then I see the look in your eyes 

- Bonnie Tyler

That can be a trip-up for the upwardly or treasurably mobile among us. The thing for me is to do The Thing that is being done now well, and to remind myself that a Thing or Two has been done well before, so don't get all mired in the map. Just this one thing now, okay.

Of course, life and creativity and productive work are none of them just a bunch of unconnected things. I am fortunate in that I have never been especially stuck on the single, ever-forward-moving path idea. But I understand its temptation and its authoritative claims for a lot of maker-workers, and Purpose driving - maybe for some, even, a 15 Year Plan - has its virtues.

There is a third Silence the Downer Inside tactic I practice even more regularly, and that is the move so fast my mind can't mess me up move. This is when I do what it takes to build some momentum - in my case, in writing - and pound out 750 or 1,000 words or more in one breath. I usually tell myself going in that "it doesn't matter if they're good or not" but that's all I'll say to myself about it because this exercise is not about self-affirmation, it's about action. Most of the time when I exhaust that burst of productivity, I look back over it without trepidation and find there is good, usable stuff right there and as a bonus, the Critic Inside got distracted and is taking a nap or something.

A caveat, for me, is necessary when it comes to pitching and self-promoting -- as in a job application, book proposal, letter of interest... They're a tricky Thing when it comes to revisiting and powering through, because the whole Thing is to deny the critic within and without.

I'd like to get better at stopping and taking more time to represent Me, rather than Perfect Pitchy Me in these projects. Because sometimes I see or think up something I want to do and I'm in such a hurry to get my "Pick me!" in front of the Picker's eyes first that I bulldoze right over the good that comes from self-criticism -- the humor, the carefulness, modesty.

So, that's my take on what to do to do good stuff when I doubt the stuff is good-able.

You? Hit Michael's tweet up (if he's still looking), or share around here with us and me.

Of Women and Sports Fans

Oh hi sportball fans and non sportsy friends and people. I am working on a thing. Maybe you could help.

What would it take for you to watch professional or national collegiate women's games on TV?

What would it take for you to get excited about a professional or national collegiate women's game or tournament?

I am particularly interested in (a) basketball, (b) hockey, (c) softball, and (d) soccer.

There's been a bunch of stuff written and said about "Why [Men and/or We] Don't Watch Women's Sports." I'm interested in some additional current, personal perspectives from real sports fans and non-sports people alike.

If you wouldn't hate briefly sharing your thoughts and feels, please do. No long, deeply analytical replies necessary! Comment on this post, FB or tweet me, or take my survey!

Feel free to state what seems to you like an obvious or not-new reason or point, if it's true for you. Or, hit me with some insight or personal perspective if you got it.

I'm into answers that are true for you, not (in theory or "well actuallyness") for Our Society. For you.

Also, if you can stretch your imagination beyond "I'd watch if there were more on TV," that's super helpful, too. But, for sure, note that as a factor if it's true for you, then consider as well: What if there were, at least for a trial period to gauge ROI, more coverage available?_______________________________________________________________________

If it helps to keep in mind, I watch 10-15 professional or national collegiate (men's or women's) sportball games a year, but I read about them every day, not least of all on my great friends' social media. My interest and questions are honest and sincere (if not entirely earnest).

Related reading: "When Girls Became Lions" book (review).

Listing Some Books, Episode 3: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Edible Bugs

The Book Review, by The New York Times, is my most satisfying podcast habit presently. It has in-depth conversation about one specific book and author, followed by a roundtable discussion of several books, highlighting what the participants are currently reading, thinking about, abandoning, or paying attention to.

When I listen, I jot titles and authors down for future consideration. I may be moved by the topic, the personality of the author being interviewed in the first segment, or the presentation of emotional or intellectual response by the critics and readers in the last segment.

A few weeks ago, Mohsin Hamid's voice drew me. As he talked with host Pamela Paul about his latest novel Exit West, he sounded warm, self-reflective, sensitive to complex perspectives, and familiar. It turns out, I'd heard him in the car just a few days before on Fresh Air talking about his book with (the hypnotic-voiced) Terry Gross.

This latest writing experience, he said, was different for him because he told the story more than he wrote the novel.

I had probably written his name down before he finished his first sentence about that concept: story in relationship to style. I am a sucker for meta-art and -stories, especially when they're good.

So I checked the local library (via the super amazing wonderful Library Extension I've attached to Amazon and Goodreads), and found one of Hamid's earlier novels available for electronic checkout.

I am currently reading and about 25 percent through The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Subject-wise, in its story of a Pakistani man's experience of September 11, 2001 as a young business analyst in New York, the 2007 novel offers a lot for my tastes as a reader. Globalized identity, religious tension, academic-intellectual life -- all are topics on my lists.

Then there is the device. The Guardian called the narrator's voice (or its effects?) "quite mesmerizing." But so far I've felt more contrived at than engaged. The Pakistani man tells his story - so far - entirely as a one-side conversation with the American he encounters on the streets of Lahore. So far, I don't get it and I don't feel it, if it means some kind of transcendent novel-reading experience owing to the means of storytelling.

I know the story will be - it isn't yet, really - compelling in an inevitable way. It promises to be part love-story, but probably even more so friendship, betrayal, and an un-simply-named quality that any story of 9/11 (implying surrounding consequence) must have. But the one-voiced, excessive-conversation-based storytelling so far mutes the character for me.

For the first couple of nights I approached the book, I read a chapter each evening. . . because it felt like a Thing to Do. A device, almost, for reading the device. And the chapters are sensorily vivid with street and institution sounds and images and smells and temperatures. So I am there, at least for the moment. The character-voice is more than what he has shared so far, no doubt. And I can't deny the trustworthy personality that includes an occasional and funny throwaway Top Gun reference. It-he will evolve: he's nervous in the present, in subtle contrast to increasingly - if youthful - assuredness in the narrative's past.

So I have renewed the book from my library and will probably move through it with more speed now that I've come this far, in reading and reporting. There is also my comfortable resistance to judging a meta-style story's gimmick before the end. Happily I have experienced "that click" when in the end, the way the art was made, made the art just right in its final turns. Sarah Polley's 2012 documentary Stories We Tell rested that case for me when I viscerally went from "c'mon, what are you doing and why are you doing it" to "oh! yes" with the kind of force where I can still picture myself as I was watching. Maybe, then, the monologue-on-the-street novel and I will connect before I'm done.

Most nights this week I have also been listening to Daniella Martin read her Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet before I go to sleep. Given the relative randomness of its topic in my usual scope of interests and the quality of the writing, I'm thinking I must have picked it up as an Audible Daily Deal or some such recently. I cannot remember, and it was never On a List. But it's making a pretty interesting case and the author's dorkiness is growing on me and last night it made me nostalgic for my tarantula-eating days in Cambodia 13 summers ago and waterbugs in China not so long ago.

Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:

Came across: via a podcast, a radio show, library availability, and probably a passing sale.

Caught attention: because of voice, religion, academia, and curiosity.

And then: Renewed to finish reading (and, in the case of eating bugs, will put on my Lifestyles to Consider list).

Accessed: Library, Audible sale.


Listing Some Books Episodes all done for this go-round! Previous: Two comedic cultural essay to-be-read-list books and Recently finished Dark Money (with meta).

Happy booklisting!

Listing Some Books, Episode 2: You Can't Touch My Hair and I'm Judging You

Podcasts and #hashtags, newsletters and friends, books on cool topics and shelves in bookstores -- these are a few of my fav-or-ite things that move me to add new titles to my array of "to read" (and "to check into and maybe read but also probably not") lists.

This week I am blogging a few books from my current (March 2017) lists. In our last episode, I reported finishing reading Jane Mayer's chronicle of billionaire buried politicking in Dark Money. Now I am thinking about titles that haven't even made it to my bookshelf yet.

2a and 2b. Wikipedia Brown's (@eveewing) #ActualBlackWomen favorite books thread on Twitter:

a. You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain. By Phoebe Robinson, with a highlighted forward by Jessica Williams.

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain what the book is about, since I have provided the title and I have no more read the book than you have. Possibly less. Eve's invitation for recommendations of (recent) books by black women brought out a few mentions of this essay collection. That and a few other points prompted me to do two things:

(1) Look it up on Amazon. Which, thanks to the seriously greatest thing ever invented - Library Extension - simultaneously tells me if my local public library has a hard and/or electronic copy available.

(2) Confirming that it looks like something I would like to read and finding my library can't help me out, I added it to my running Kindle wish list (that could feed into a later-library-borrow list, an audiobook list, or a I-don't-remember-wanting-this-book:Delete list).

From the Amazon blurb:

"Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day."

This is probably a book I will actually read sooner than later, unlike most books on lists and shelves. The intersection of race and feminism and comedy put it in that sweet spot of levity + reality that feels like oxygen some days. Also its currency pulls me in -- both as a book I've seen mentioned in other tweets and lists since its release last fall and because the author's podcast, "2 Dope Queens" shows up as a popular and rec'd title every time I open my listening app. The pod's not on a list yet.

And, the double-edged rhetoric of "I shouldn't have to explain" hooks me like cat. I'm glad we do still sometimes love enough to explain when it seems like if we - the explanation needer - could pay real attention, we might already understand.

b. I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual. By Luvvie Ajayi. 

Speaking of advice and explanations. This one showed up even more times on the Black Women Authors thread, and on a pile of Best of Last Year lists. It went right on another soon-to-be-converted "to read" list: the public library has a hard copy!

I ended up adding I think five books from the Wikipedia Brown twitter thread and scrolled by another five or so I had read within the last year, which probably got on the to-read list because of another #hashtag, conversation, or list. Including a few less recent but I-recommend ones such as Adichie's Americanah, my first (not last) Octavia Butler book Kindred, and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:

Came across: via a call for recommendations by a writer-voice-woman I admire and follow on Twitter. Knew the names and titles from previous un-followed-up references.

Caught attention: because of intersecting of multiple points of interest for me: race, comedy, women, popular media, calling out b.s.

And then: Trip to the library WHICH NEVER FAILS TO WIN THE DAY.

Accessed: Might go audio on the first.


Listing Some Books Episode 3 up next: Currently reading lists. Previous: Recently finished Dark Money (with meta).

Listing Some Books, Episode 1: Dark Money

If I were writing a song about a few of my fav-or-ite things, books and lists would rank higher than brown paper packages tied up with string.

This week, I am going to blog a few books from my lists of this month. First, I'll share a couple of thoughts about the books. Then, on the meta side, I'll think about how and why I come to pay attention to the books I do and what I take from the experience of reading and listing. If any of this makes you think of a book you've read, would recommend, would anti-recommend, have heard of, have on your list(s). . . sharing is caring.

1. Dark Money. Finished. Semi-Recommended.

An eerily familiar list of names winds through this exposé of the ways that very rich, self-interested people openly and hidden-ly manipulate specific government policies and public information. Published in early 2016, the book names at least half a dozen figures I had only heard of since the political rise of Trump. (He has only a small role, himself.)

Jane Mayer's extensive research accomplishes important stuff in a book that risks being dismissed as "one-sided," or worse, melodramatically shallow. Most significantly for me, she spells out specific, direct consequences of dark (or, in some cases, sort of transparent) money. Climate change - regulations, reputations - gets enough detailed discussion of donors' influence on members of congress to make me educatedly mad.

I rated the book just three stars out of five on GoodReads mainly because I could have done with just an updated long-form magazine piece. In fact, it began as just that -- but I never read the original article because I can't seem to get myself to read many magazines electronically or paperwise in the last few years. So, it's good it was a book because I am glad I was exposed to the systems and outcomes of dark money. But, it got a bit redundant (at least for me, at my level of interest).

One of the reasons even 400-page books win out over 15-page magazine stories has to do with my thing for motivational-lists. In this particular case, I use GoodReads to motivate me to keep going both in finishing a long book I'm interested in (but might walk away from because of eleventy other shiny things in my space) and in moving through my to-read piles.

If you can point me to an app that lets me list and track and rate/notate all my media (books, movies, podcasts, articles) consumption in one spot, please do so in the comments or tweet me. I'll put you on my Nice, Helpful People list. I use Diigo and Evernote to track blog posts and magazine/newspaper articles read/to read and find neither one friendly enough to keep up with.


Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:

Came across: via some forgotten tweet. Or probably a Best Books end-of-year list.

Caught attention: because of its intersecting of multiple points of interest for me: politics, economics, popular culture names (Kochs), current buzz.

And then: I'm not planning to pursue the book's subjects further in any focused way. I learned about how parts of our culture work, I became familiar with powerful people and movements, and I got clued into following as related things develop (through general news coverage). It's not on my To Dig list.

Accessed: the e-book from my public library and ended up buying it to finish when I kept getting bumped to the end of the wait list for renewal.

Listing Some Books Episode 2 up next: A few books added to my "To Read" List this month.