Ten-Minute Answers

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not know if “1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” is the all-time greatest name for a blog or the 75th greatest name, but it attracted my attention when it appeared in the blogging world a month or so ago.

barthelme

Donald Barthelme

The creator usually illustrates her posts with works of art, paintings mostly, from the entire history of art, and is thus compiling a personal version of “The Story of Art.” This caught my eye, as it reminded me a bit of Donald Barthelme, and I think it also raised the bar for my website. (From the start, almost a year ago, I have included music and photos in here; an example: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”)

http://1874firstimpressionistexhibition.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/the-liebster-award/

For the third time this week, The Gad About Town has been noticed and given an award, the Liebster award, given by one blogger to another. It is the second Liebster this year and I am very thankful to “1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” for the attention.

In the blogging world, there are some rules of etiquette in the form of paying forward the “Liebster” attention. Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for the award.
2. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget.”
3. Share 11 facts or things about yourself.

In no order: A. I spend too much time thinking about me. B. Strawberries are my favorite food, and I wish they had protein so they could be a complete meal for carnivorous me. C. Being in recovery makes every day feel like an awards ceremony. D. My love of the number 4. E. Yankees, Giants, Knicks, Rangers. F. When it is fall I think that spring is the best season, and in spring I think that fall is. G. Independent bookstores. H. “Too skinny” my entire life. I. Nascar fan, which no one expects. J. Have not yet owned an mp3 player. K. I want to see Mt. Everest but only see it.

4. Nominate bloggers you admire whose sites have fewer than 200 followers and inform nominees by commenting on their blog.

I am going to repeat something I wrote earlier this week. I have been participating for the last 10 weeks in responding to our WordPress service’s Daily Prompt, which has helped spur my most prolific period of writing since graduate school. (This prolific-ness is a good thing, too, because I am working on a terrific project, due out soon, with another blogger.) Most of the writers with whom I have been communicating regularly, several of whom ask me questions and give me applause every single day, I met via that service. My subscribers have doubled and so has the number of blogs that I subscribe to. Go to the Daily Prompt any day and you will see the several dozen blogs that I read and often like every day.

“1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” is one of the blogs to which I would have given a Liebster Award. A couple others: Joatmon14, A Body of Hope. The under-200 stipulation really is a great and understandable limit, but it truly is limiting.

But, you all get an award! Check under your seats and pass it forward if you would like to.

5. Answer 11 questions posted by the presenter and ask your nominees 11 questions. These are the questions I was given. (This is like being interviewed and this is the part I am only spending 10 minutes on.)

1. What’s the best piece of advice on writing you’ve received?
My first version of any piece of writing is usually an example of over-writing, a case of stating things in a complicated fashion; this is almost always done for comic effect, and then I read it and realize that I am the only audience for the complicated version of the joke. Keep it simple.

2. How often do you write or work on writing (e.g. researching)?
Lately, every day. I was silent for a decade, so perhaps I am catching up on lost time. As I am working on a book, I know that these muscles need exercise.

3. Are you an atheist, agnostic, a believer or something else?
I believe that life is a force that goes on. I do not believe that there is a Big Boss in charge, or that my particular consciousness was around before me or will continue beyond me. But life, whatever that energy is, will. I have a higher power in my life, in that I believe that neither you nor I are figments of my imagination.

4. Do you think this affects your writing?
It has an effect on my outlook on life, so I think that it has an effect on my writing, certainly any personal memoir writing.

5. What’s your favorite book?
“The Secret Parts of Fortune” by Ron Rosenbaum.

6. Who is your favorite author?
James Joyce. Sometimes I think that I like Richard Ellmann’s “James Joyce” more than Joyce, but then I look at “Ulysses” again. Nabokov. I am reading Martin Amis’s newest, out last week, “The Zone of Interest.” Nonfiction: John McPhee.

7. What’s your favorite movie?
“The Maltese Falcon.”

8. Who is the awesomest person you know (or know of), dead or alive?
I am proudest of my sister, for reasons she knows. I can not take my eyes off my girlfriend.

9. How would you define creativity?
Making 2 + 1 = G. But not every time.

10. How long have you been on WordPress?
According to WordPress, since May 2013, but this blog went live in December after starting it on Blogger.

11. Do you write for a living?
Not at the moment …

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 9 asks, “10 minutes. You and your keyboard (or smartphone. Or tablet. Or pen and paper). No pauses, no edits, no looking back: it’s free-write time!” And that is why my answers are what they are.

A S(n)ob Tale

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a snob.”

“Hi Mark.”

“I don’t like going into new situations or meeting new people. That means I’m a snob about everything, right? A social snob. If I already have it or know it or know you, I don’t want it or you to be added to or replaced by anything because the new thing or person can’t possibly be as good as the one I know or own.

“But this goes against what I tell myself and what I know from experience is true: that every new person I meet might—in just a few weeks—might be a best friend who I can not imagine life without. Every new person is a friend I am going to feel snobbish about and possessive of in a little while.”

“I think we’ve had a breakthrough. Shake hands with the two people next to you.”

“No.”

* * * *
Snobbishness is my form of insecurity about my own likes and loves; I resist introductions to new things and people (to my detriment, as even I acknowledge, but I resist all the same), as if I am insisting that what I already possess and love is sufficient.

At its most benign, this gives me a collection of quirks. At a bookstore, I do not purchase the book from the top of the pile of identical books. Instead, I find a copy below, as if “my copy” sat there untouched by human hands and unseen by human eyes until I found it. Yet I love used books and their lived-in qualities. My own books appear unread, with the spine uncracked. I do not lend books to people who crack them open, and I know which of my friends treat books in said fashion. In my world, there is a right way to read books.

At its most malignant, this gives me a truly stand-offish air, a self-presentation that of course only serves to reinforce my prejudicial thought that the people I love and the things that I already know are quite fine as they are.

* * * *
De gustibus non est disputandum. Loosely translated, this means, “There is no reason to argue about matters of taste.” There is no fighting over subjective personal likes or dislikes such as colors or sounds. You can not successfully argue me into liking certain smells. I can not punch you hard enough to like what strawberries taste like. I can show you how to make coffee the way I like it, which of course is the only way to make it, but there is no amount of money I can present to you to convince your taste buds to agree with mine.

(Dark roast, half-and-half—I know, I am such an American—enough half-and-half to convince me that the color has changed, even though a painter with a color wheel might be hard-pressed to find the change, so, no, not much half-and-half. Sugar.)

I am aware that there are best practices for using tools and producing things and enjoying many foods and drinks, and I know that these are usually merely socially agreed upon practices developed through experience. They are not universal physical laws or properties of mathematics. They are suggestions. One ought not teach a student to play piano like Chico Marx, but if you meet someone who taught themselves his method, do not urge them to un-learn it.

I took a lot of pride in and occupied too much of my brain with knowing these “best practices”: the best way to make a whatever or know which color goes with which season or which performance of this or that piece of music is the one to enjoy. Knee-jerk snobbishness is the opposite of enjoying something. It is blind and deaf and meekly resistant (no matter how loud the protestations) to the new.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 8 asks, “Even the most laid back and egalitarian among us can be insufferable snobs when it comes to coffee, music, cars, beer, or any other pet obsession where things have to be just so. What are you snobbish about?”

In Support of a Good Friend

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Perhaps the best thing one can feel about one’s friends is the desire to tell everyone you meet, “You ought to know so-and-so,” or “I hope you can meet …,” about them. Even better than that, I suppose, is telling your friends that you think of them in this way. I am grateful that this is a familiar feeling in my life.

I would like all of you to meet my good friend Kat. She is one of the more remarkable people I have met: 20 years old but with many more years than that in life experience, honest up to the point just before it becomes “honest to a fault,” curious, and funny. A good beginning songwriter and keyboard player. She has many ambitions, and one is to study in England; because no one would have given her a chance to attend college at all but she is a student at The New School through her own initiative and work anyway, I think that she will be attending school in England. She needs help with this, however.

She is pursuing her own fundraising this month at this site: Help Kat Study Abroad.

Kat has some details for us:

Attending college was a huge first step into making a better life for myself than the one I had come from. After spending some time in foster care as a kid and constantly feeling the need to fight to be heard, I am adamant about helping others find and share their voice.

Being in college has helped me to start on this journey, but I feel it is important to take my goals a step further. My goal is to study abroad at the University of Sussex next semester, and I need your help!

The University of Sussex is located in Brighton, which is known for its effective role in a variety of social movements. Attending the University of Sussex would develop yet provide opportunities to learn through real life experiences. Some examples of opportunities I plan on getting involved in include an organization called Mind Out, which is a mental health service targeted towards LGBTQ people. As someone who is a member of the LGBTQ community, I feel it needs to be incorporated in my activism.

What follows is an autobiographical essay that Kat wrote earlier this year. It is reprinted with permission.

“In My Skin” by Kat McCauley
Nothing felt real. The words that were coming out of my mouth were not my own. I was watching life around me happen, and had no say in the outcome of any of it. If anything was felt, it was discomfort, but even that felt far away. Everything felt far. I was floating further and further away from what was supposed to be my body. It was like going in and out of consciousness. I was told my mind was playing tricks on me. I wanted so badly to feel, but there was nothing gradual about who I was at the time, and any feeling that became present overcame me like a tornado. Before I knew it I was unmanageable and going down a long dark hill at a rapid pace. I was fourteen years old, and had never felt more alone. I was so good at pretending to be social, that no one knew how truly antisocial I had become. I was a chameleon, and could pick up on anyone’s personality. I could be anybody’s best friend. But nobody knew me.

I had been struggling with severe depression and feelings of dissociation for a few years, and had tried to keep it together.

Having just gotten out of foster care, I was learning quickly that suppressing my feelings was not going to work for me anymore. I had tried so hard for so long to be the perfect image. I wanted to control how people saw me, but eventually the truth caught up with me, and I had to learn to feel things as they were happening. It was a huge challenge, for I had never, until being in foster care, had the chance to experience my feelings in a safe environment. Feeling was something I viewed as dangerous and weak. I wanted to persevere. I wanted to be the one who did it all alone. Feelings became completely overwhelming and unintelligible for me. I had spent so long suppressing them, that if a feeling came up, I would go numb. The number I was, the further away I felt from myself.

It was at fourteen years old that I realized I could no longer persevere alone. I showed up to school one morning, something I hadn’t been doing very often, and ended up being sent away to a mental hospital by a guidance counselor who had become aware of how much I had been struggling. Terrified, I was forced back into my own skin, a place unfamiliar and lonely. While this was not the last time I would be sent away, being in the hospital taught me a lot about true bravery and strength. While being away in a safe space I began to face some of the demons that had brought me there in the first place. It gave me breathing room to begin to process some of the trauma I had faced growing up. It gave me the chance to learn how to take care of myself.

I can now see that strength comes in many forms. For me today, strength and courage come in the form allowing myself to be raw and to be seen. This is where the growth happens. This is where I can begin to heal. Through the love of the people who see me, I have been able to reclaim the love I’ve always wanted to have for myself. For a long time, my biggest hope was to want to want to feel safe. I realize now that I wanted to be okay the entire time; I just didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t think that someone like me, someone who came from dysfunction, someone who didn’t even feel connected to a body, could ever even consider the possibility of being safe. Today, I know it is possible to be safe in my skin. I am able to love and be loved in an authentic way. I am able to feel and to process the experiences of everyday life. I am able to live comfortably in my skin. Always Remember: YOU are LOVED. You are important! Most urgent of all, YOU ARE WORTH BEING SEEN.

I did not know Kat in that difficult period of her life, but all the work she has put into pursuing her truth over these years has given my friends and me one of the most authentic human beings we have been lucky enough to know. You ought to know her. I hope you get to meet her. I hope you can help her.