writewrite

Merry Christmas

Happy Birthday, Liz! yesterday, that is.  It seems only moments ago we were 17.  What happened to all that time?  Hope you are still celebrating…

There are times when you realize you are still the nerdy, bookish kid you were in high school. The kid who had no idea what was ”in” or ”out”; the kid who spent most of high school thinking that really loud band everyone liked so much was called “Arrowsmith”; the kid who cried when told the ”real” meaning of the lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon. That kid. The kid with her nose in a book.  Her head somewhere besides the current decade.  The kid who apparently still lurks in you, the adult. 

And this is the adult you lapse into writing about in the second person in the hopes that your readers won’t think it actually is you yourself you are writing about, but a more generic, inclusive, embracing “you.”  The kind of you, for instance, who might have been sitting at a conference table this morning talking about marketing ideas for a film, the you who is the only one around the table registering no excitement whatsoever when someone says, “If we use youtube that would be a really good strategy.” Or, they are saying something like that; you aren’t really sure, because you are sure you have no idea what “youtube” means, and everything else this person is saying is so much static.

So you ask.  “What’s ‘youtube’?”

Noises of derision and disbelief around the table.  “C’mon, you know what youtube is.”

You shake your head.  Nope.  Sure don’t.  What is it?

One person sighs.  Explains. Slooooooooooooowly.  “You go to it and put your clips on it so other people can see them.”

Suffice it to say that now you are feeling really stupid.  What is “it”?  A store?  A billboard?  A bulletin board somewhere?  A TV show?  You realize you really have no idea.  And you ask, carefully, again: “So, what is youtube?”  Even as you are asking you realize you are being perceived as a complete moron.  You are getting the same look you get when your students talk about “X-box” and “I-tunes” and “MySpace” and you have no idea what they are talking about.  They tell you, and you sort of get it, making connections in your head to things you understand.  Okay, so like X-box is like Pac-Man.  The students nod, eyeing you as though you are a fossil.  Pac-man?  Sure, right.  And I-tunes? I-Tunes, that’s like a record store.  Right.  And Myspace?  You don’t even tell them the parallel you use for that one: Myspace is like allowing some people to sign your broken leg cast, and not other people, and being very loud about who gets to and who doesn’t during lunch in the cafeteria.  (You’re working on that analogy still.)

But “youtube”? 

Another person sighs. And explains, in language you have no memory of because it connects to nothing in your little bookish world, that youtube is essentially a website where people put stuff so other people can see it.  Videos.  Clips of films.  Works in progress.  Stuff like that.

So now you know.  Youtube.  And you rattle the word around in your head all the way home so you won’t forget it.  Youtube.  Youtube.  Youtube. 

I think I write creative nonfiction because I am an obsessive collector of facts.  I like to know how things work, the right names for things, the history of the right names for things, why things are the way they are.  These random bits of knowledge filter in from everywhere.  The New Yorker, The New York Times, Oprah magazine, photography magazines, fashion magazines, books about horses, dogs, electricity, cookbooks, textbooks, obituaries, overheard coversations, trolling the website, and don’t tell my students, yes, even Wikipedia. 

Having stumbled on a new fact I find it is important to immediately share this fact with whoever happens to be in the room.  At home we call this the “did you know” moment.  The moment when I turn to my patient spouse and say, apropos of nothing, “Did you know…?” and then offer the fact of the minute.

Here then, some recent facts that have caught my attention:

• The Barbie doll’s immediate predecessor is a doll named Lilli, manufactured in Germany in the 1950’s and marketed for adults.  Lilli was a working girl, unabashed about her own sexuality and power.  An early feminist, it seems.
• If you want to find out if an egg is raw or cooked, spin the egg on a flat surface.  Stop it and then quickly let it go.  If it starts spinning again, it’s raw (the yolk maintains momentum and will spin inside the white); if it doesn’t start spinning again, it’s cooked (the yolk can’t move).
• A new field of studies is emerging in academia: Fat Studies.  Yes, that’s right.  Fat Studies.  It seems the focus of Fat Studies is largely (sorry) on the cultural marginalization and mistreatment of People of Size. One of the weighty (sorry) issues of interest to Fat Studies scholars (FSS) is the science which suggests obesity is a bad thing, and harmful to a person’s health and wellbeing.  FSS argue this bad science is presented as a yet another means of stigmatizing fat people.  You can read about this in the most recent New York Sunday Times. 
• At 8:03 a.m. on December 1, 2006, James Frey’s “memoir” A Million Little Pieces had a sales rank #539 on Amazon.com.  There are approximately two million titles on the Amazon list; the sales ranking is based not only on a particular book’s sales, but the relationship of those sales to the sales of other books.  Amazon calculates this with a complicated algorithm which is beyond this writer’s understanding.  Suffice it to say, a ranking of 539 on a list of two million translates into continued royalties ($$) for our fabricating friend Mr. Frey. 
• And a last fact, which may provide some solace as winter moves in: The temperature at intersections is 1/4 of a degree higher than the temperature on the roads which lead to the intersections because of the additional pavement at the crossroads.  Enjoy your four-way stops.