This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, and now seems like the right moment. I apologize in advance if the post is long, but I’ve got a lot to say on the topic, and I hope you stick around for the whole thing. Today, I’d like to talk about my hero. In elementary school, we often had to write about a hero. I could never really think of someone that I truly looked up to and wanted to be like, so I usually wrote about Tecumseh, a Shawnee Indian who wanted to unite all of the North American tribes to fight off the encroaching white man. I thought he was pretty cool, and that was as close to a hero as I had at the time.
If you asked me to write an essay about my hero today, I would immediately know who I wanted to write about. Her name is Amanda Palmer, and she’s a musician. I first heard of her roughly 3 years ago. A friend had gotten an iPod for Christmas, and I was putting music on it for her while she packed for a vacation. When I was done, I decided to drop a few of the things from her collection onto my own iPod. I added The Dresden Dolls on a whim. I’d heard of them, but wasn’t sure where. They then vanished into the black hole of my iPod (at that point, it had over 3,000 songs on it, many of which I had never listened to), and I didn’t even think of the band for another 3 months or so.
One day that spring, I was walking across campus to class and had my iPod on shuffle. A song that I’d never heard before came on, and it sounded intriguing, so I didn’t immediately skip it. After about a minute of the song, I said “Woah. Too weird.” and moved on. It stuck with me, though, and a few minutes later I came back to the song and gave it another go. This time I absolutely adored it. I’m putting a Youtube video of the song here, should you wish to try it out.
After the second listen, I was hooked. I listened to the rest of the album on my walk back from class, and then immediately got on the internet and searched for the band. I found their website, tons of youtube videos, and Amanda’s blog (The Dresden Dolls is made up of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione). Amazingly, Amanda was playing a solo show for her birthday the next week, and it was close enough that I could make the drive. I bought a ticket, got a hotel room, and prepared to be amazed. And I was.
The show was life-changing. Amanda came out early on and announced that since it was her birthday, the opening act was going to be burlesque dancers. Then she came out into the audience and cheered and shouted along with the rest of us. She had two “Ask Amanda” sessions during the show, performed all of my favorites as well as some new songs and some covers, and afterward she came out and signed autographs and chatted. My mind was blown.
Since then, I’ve seen her in concert twice. Once in New York City on New Year’s Eve, and a second time in Nashville. The Dolls have released another album, and Amanda has released three (one solo, one with her “twin sister” Jason Webley, and most recently a Radiohead cover album on ukulele).
One of the great things about Amanda Palmer, in my mind, is that she’s approachable. She definitely has a huge, and very loyal, fan base, but she’s not as popular as, say, Lady Gaga (about whom she wrote a wonderful song). Amanda is on twitter constantly, and she updates her blog with stories and pictures from her life as often as she can find the time to do so. She also webcasts frequently, and holds weekly internet parties on twitter on Friday nights (look for the hashtag #LOFNOTC). She makes it a point to interact with her fans constantly. In fact, she recently left her record label and has been selling (and sometimes giving away), her music directly to her fans. Surprisingly, it’s working for her. When the Radiohead album came out, all of the special packages and physical albums were sold out within minutes (to the tune of something like $15,000).
Recently, when she was in Europe for the Evelyn Evelyn tour, the Icelandic volcano ruined her plans. Her “twin sister” Jason Webley was stuck in the U.S., and she was in the UK, with shows to put on and no support, props, partner, or plan. Twitter came to the rescue (as it often does when she needs a book recommendation, place to stay, ride from the airport, or loaner keyboard), and a band called Bitter Ruin agreed to open for her. Amanda decided to webcast the concert, and delightful mess of unpreparedness, hilarity, and honesty was broadcast directly to my computer. At the next show, they added Jason, via webcam, and the two performed what I suspect was the first inter-continental concert via webcast. It was amazing. The theme of both concerts was “Fuck the Ashcloud,” and she even wrote a song with that title about how her fiance, Neil Gaiman, was stuck in the U.S. and wasn’t going to be able to join her on vacation.
But perhaps the most amazing thing about Amanda Palmer is how ridiculously nice she is. She’s all about equality, friendship, knowledge, and art. She supports small businesses, promotes fellow artists, asks thought-provoking questions and then actually gets involved in the resulting discussion, and listens to what her fans want. She’s the voice of reason and kindness in a mean-spirited world. Every single time I think of her, I smile. She’s making the world better with her music, nudity, tweeting, and absurdity. I honestly believe that.
In any case, the reason that I’m writing this blog now, rather than later. Starting in just a few days, Amanda will be starring in a 43-show run of Cabaret, directed by her high school drama teacher, Steve Bogart. On select nights, she’ll also be hosting Amanda Fucking Palmer’s Late Night Fucking Cabaret afterward. And on one (well, two actually, but that’s irrelevant to my story) of those nights, she’ll be joined by Bitter Ruin, a band that I absolutely fell in love with on the Ashcloud Tour. And I’m going to BE THERE.
OMG. <— Did you see that? I’m so excited that I’ve reverted to saying things like “OMG” because I cannot express myself properly.
So. On October 4th and 5th, I’ll be in Boston, exploring the city and attending Cabaret. I’ll be the one floating around on a cloud, looking supremely blissful, probably carrying armloads of bags containing used records, rare books, gifts for friends, and thrift-store clothes. If you happen to live near Boston and want to attend the show, or if you’ve fallen deeply in love during the course of this blog post and simply can’t miss the show, you can get tickets here. Shows are selling out fast.
And if I still haven’t convinced you, try out these two songs before you go. The first is a live performance of Mandy Goes to Med School, one of The Dresden Dolls’ best songs. Keep your ears open for a snippet of a theme song from a popular tv show in the middle. The second is a performance of Delilah, another fantastic song, with the amazing voice of Georgia from Bitter Ruin. It literally makes me choke up.
And that’s my essay that I wrote about my hero. I hope I get an A!
When we graduated from college in 2009, here’s what our ten year plan looked like:
I’d spend one year getting my teaching certificate while he worked
I’d get a fantastic job somewhere, and he’d start his Masters
After 5 years or so of living somewhere moderately exciting, we’d move to the town his parents live in and start having babies
Hopefully he would find a great job near our home
The kids would go to school, hopefully at the same school I was teaching at.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d do photography on the weekends sometimes
Here’s the plan as of now, backdated to last January
I dropped out of my Master’s program, because it was awful
He took a so-so job in the town his parents live in, and we moved there
I’ll start a teaching certification program this January
In April of 2012, provided the world hasn’t ended, I’ll graduate with a teaching certificate
Either we’ll immediately move to Europe for 1-2 years, or I’ll work for 1-2 years while he gets his Masters and THEN we’ll move to Europe. We’re flexible about which order we’ll do these in
In 4-6 years, we’ll start having babies
I’ll stop teaching once the babies are born, and home school them until high school
Provided I’ve improved enough, I’ll try to provide a second income for the household from photography
I’m feeling much better about the new list, but it’s going to be REALLY trick to squeeze 16 months for my certification, 1-2 years for his Masters, 1-2 years in Europe, and some time to get settled and save up some money into the time I have available before I have to start thinking seriously about having children. I’m 24, and I’d like to have my first child at about 30. We’re not sure how many we want, and we’re open to adopting additional children if our window runs out, but it’s still very worrying.
Today I was leaving the library (I made three separate trips to the library today) with an armload of books, and I had the thought that the books I was carrying said a lot about me. Some of them were on studio lighting for photography, because trial and error will only get me so far. One was Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, and the rest were on education. From this stack of books, I thought, someone could correctly surmise that I’m a photographer, a writer, and an educator.
Except that I’m not, really. A long time ago, I read Stephen King’s On Writing (the title of this post is no coincidence) and was struck by his idea that if you want to be a writer, and you write, you’re a writer. That’s all there is to it. I’ve applied this philosophy to my life in general, but I’m beginning to somewhat doubt the truth of the statement. I want to be a professional photographer, but I’m not quite there yet. I want to be a writer, but I haven’t written fiction in, well, years. I want to be a teacher, but I don’t yet have my certification. I know that these things are part of me, and I’m working toward them, but there’s only so much you can get by reading a book. At some point, you’ve got to do.
I haven’t written fiction in a long time for two reasons. First, I don’t really have an audience. Even websites devoted to writing and critique have few members with the stamina to read short stories or novellas. They read the shorter poems and ignore everything else. And I’m not part of a writers group, nor am I good enough at writing to be sending things off to publishers just yet. So I feel a little silly writing things that no one will ever read (unless I force my husband to take a look). Also, I just feel silly writing. There are a lot of people out there who call themselves writers but are not very good at it, and I think people tend to poke fun at them. Writing is a scary thing to begin with, because you put so much of yourself into it, and no matter how good you are, there are going to be people who don’t like it. And when you add in the fact that some people are going to make fun of you just for trying, it makes getting started very difficult.
Regardless, if I think of myself as a writer, I need to write. Since it’s been a while, I thought that maybe I would try some story starters online. The first one I tried, which claims to have millions of starters, apparently just combines parts of speech into a sentence, so you get something that goes like this: “The adjective person / action verb / direct object / preposition and place / verb or prepositional phrase that probably doesn’t make any sense with the rest of the sentence.”
Some examples:
The dirty undertaker deleted the email near the vault to prevent the accident.
The mean haircutter composed a song in a dark alley to discover the dark secret.
The hilarious tutor polished the table near the dark corner to answer the challenge.
The funny dog handler scribbled a note in a closed gas station for the killer bees.
While these are pretty amusing, as far as I can tell there’s almost no way to create a believable story from any of these starters. Although I would like to see a story about killer bees who can read. Anyway. What I thought I’d try was to write a story using a technique that Orson Scott Card suggested in his book Character and Viewpoint. Card recommends starting with something simple, and asking questions until you get a good story. Here’s an example of how this might work.
Ok, so I think we’ll start with a guy. The first obvious question is how old he is. Let’s say he’s a teenager. No specific reason, but I think a lot happens to teenagers and so he might be interesting. Ok, so what’s happening to this particular teenager? Let’s say his parents are out of town. Well, why are they out of town? Mabye they planned on being home, but their flight was delayed because of a huge snowstorm, and the person who was staying with him has to leave. So now we have a teenager, home alone in the snow. So what’s he going to do? Well, he could throw a party, but that’s been done a lot. He could do nothing, but then we don’t have a story. So let’s say he goes out to play in the snow. But he lives out in the middle of nowhere, so there’s no one to have a snowball fight with, and no one to see a snowman if he builds one. There aren’t any hills, so he can’t even go sledding. So he’s bored. Maybe he decides to build something to surprise or amuse his parents when they get home. (We’re assuming he likes his parents. Not sure how believable that is. Maybe he’s a young teenager) How about a fort? He can block the driveway, and build a snowman army, and it’ll be hilarious. So, what happens next?
As you can see, I got a lot out of just “It’s a story about a guy.” I didn’t plan any of this out in advance, I just brainstormed. And it got easier as I went on, with less questioning or backtracking. It’s not a bad technique, though I think it works a little better when someone else is asking the questions. That way, you don’t get off easy. Card’s point is that you can start with nothing and build a pretty interesting story. He encourages writers to think deeper and move past boring or cliche answers to questions. I’m not sure how successfully I’ve done that in this case, but I’ve tried. In any case, I’m going to write this story, and then post it here. Provided I don’t chicken out. Fiction is scary, folks.
I have not eaten
any plums
Or cherries. Or grapes
I have eaten two kiwis, but that is unremarkable
And I know,
you are probably
in a hurry to shower and go,
like every morning
Forgive me
I was thinking of you
and I thought maybe
you would like to know
(I dug this fairly bad poem out of the depths of my email archives, and thought I would share it. It is, of course, based on a poem of the same title by William Carlos Williams, whom I adore.)
I’ve really been working on my photography recently. Like, so much that I’ve been dreaming about it. Incidentally, this is something that happens to me often. I once spent days trying to beat a dumb fish game, and then dreamed that I was playing it at night. Miserable. (OH NO! I just looked up the fish game so I could link to it, and have now been playing for 20 minutes. Do not click that link, the fish game will eat your soul!)
Anyway. I’ve been working on photography, especially studio photography. Yesterday I had a small photoshoot in my living room with a couple of friends. This was my favorite image from the shoot.
My friend should totally be a model. The really cool thing about this picture is that it was taken in my living room. That blue background? My living room wall. I used a flash with a blue gel on it to make the wall blue. Crap! Now you all know what my living room wall looks like and will probably come rob me blind.
The other great thing about this picture is that it means I no longer have any reason not to do a 365 photo project (which is exactly what it sounds like. You take, and post, a photo a day for a year). I can now take really great portraits in my own living room. And, since I finally figured out the settings properly, I can start taking professional-looking self portraits. All of which is to say: make me a contact on flickr, because that’s where I’ll be posting the awesomeness.
I may not have a job, but I am making art. And I may not have lost the 20 pounds I wanted to lose this summer, but I am working out and feeling better about my body even if I seem to have plateaued after losing 5 pounds. (I’m telling myself that I’m not losing weight because I’m building muscle, which is heavier than fat. It might even be true, but the bowl of ice cream sitting next to me begs to differ). I even won a contest this morning, and now I’m going to buy two Regina Spektor CD’s at Borders with my rewards. Or some books. Or movies. Or I’ll just carry my gift certificate around for months, torn by indecisiveness.
Also? This is my life.
It’s a pretty nice life, really. Yes, I might miss my grandmother every day, and I might be quieter than usual (when not bursting with excitement), and my husband might now ask me several times a day in a worried voice if I’m ok, but when I say “Yep, everything’s great” I mean it more and more each time. Things will be just fine.
My grandmother protected me from everything. Even, it appears, Chuck E. Cheese.
I haven’t been here much. I have been keeping up with the blogs in my reader, which incidentally means that I did see your fantastic post, Velocigoose. I’ve seen everyone’s fantastic posts.
But I haven’t been writing. I’ve been grieving. My grandmother passed away on April 9th. Just before that, the two little girls that I love more than my life and would fight to adopt if I was a millionaire moved to live with their grandparents. My brother, 10 years younger than me, moved to Missouri to live with his mother.
I’ve become (hopefully temporarily) a stay at home wife. Most days, things are good. Some days, I’m horribly sad, or physically ill. It makes finding a job really hard, and would probably make keeping one even harder. I’ve been working really hard on my photography, and I’m improving at studio lighting like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve also been working on my book, or at least on the research, a little at a time. Those things are good.
I’m planning on participating in a lot of projects in the near future. The Sketchbook Project is the first of these. I’ll be working with the theme of “you’d be home already” which I picked because I feel like I’m still making a home for myself. I’m also planning on participating in the 3-Day Novel Contest. I’m going to write a fantasy novel for that one. I’m also going to try NaNoWriMo, though I don’t have an idea for that one yet. Friends and family are returning from their summer travels. That’s good. I’m planning a huge birthday bash for my husband, which is also good. School starts soon, and I’ll be volunteering at some local elementary schools to verify that I actually want to be an elementary teacher before I turn in my application for the program I want to get into.
I feel sort of hollow. There are so many good things in my life, so many things to look forward to. But the people that I most want by my side are gone, or don’t exist yet. It’s been a really rough year for me, and while I think things are looking up every day, and have been for a while, I’m still carrying the shadow of that year around with me. I feel like I haven’t grieved enough yet. I haven’t grieved demonstrably enough yet. So when I think of writing for this blog, it becomes yet another thing on the list of things that I don’t want to do because I don’t have the energy. Except for tonight, when I got out of bed after an hour of reading and came into the living room to write.
I don’t have (m)any friends. I don’t know yet that I have a home that I feel comfortable claiming as my own. But I do have a great husband, a great apartment, a new family-in-law that will back me up even though they sometimes cause me no end of problems. I have talent and love and hope.
In any case, I’m still here, and I’m still listening. I’m just not saying as much. I hope that will change, because getting things out is almost always better than keeping them in. And wherever you are tonight, whoever you are, know that I hope things are getting better for you too.
So obviously it isn’t Tuesday. In fact, if I don’t finish writing this post pretty quickly, it won’t even be Wednesday before you read it. My apologies. Things have been a little bit crazy around here.
Anyway, on to the exciting bits. My current weight is 144.6, which is less than last week. I’ve started weighing myself every other morning in order to have some consistency. 144 is within my goals for this week, but I think that next week will be the real challenge, because it will be the first week that my weight loss goal will be outside of the possible daily change. I really need to focus on exercise with this coming week, which is going to be a little tricky. Right now, everything from tomorrow afternoon to Sunday night is booked solid, with no room for swimming or yoga, let alone a more traditional workout. I’m just going to have to find other ways to exert myself (long walks, etc) to stay on track.
Tomorrow I’m planning an update on what’s going on in my life. I’ll also tell the story of the very good excuse that I have for not posting last night. Until then, adieu.
Several summers ago, I started a blog. It was the first blog that I’d ever had that stuck for more than a few weeks or was updated more than once a month. I wrote several times a week, had lots of hits, and was very proud of myself. I wrote on a number of topics, most of which were designed to either be helpful to my readers or to bring in new readers. Very few were about me, or about things that really mattered to me. As I’ve said, I had a number of hits, but as far as I could tell, the only actual reader that I had was a friend of mine who also had a blog.
Oddly enough, completely by coincidence, the last time I posted on that blog was exactly a year ago. (OOOOOOH. Spook-y!) I stopped writing because I was busy. I was going to grad school, planning a wedding, working, and in the midst of a horrible depression. I wanted to change the direction of my writing, but it seemed like too much work and I knew that no one was reading. So I abandoned it.
The point is that although I loved writing that blog, and although I loved seeing the hits build up, I wasn’t part of a community. I wasn’t getting comments, and when I was, they weren’t interesting or thought-provoking. While I was writing that blog, I was also reading a number of bloggers. I picked them, mostly at random, from 20sb. If you spend any time over there, you probably know of them. They’re big names. The thing was that although I found myself needing to continue reading these bloggers (because how could I live with myself not knowing if their big move went ok, or if they ever found that special someone?) we didn’t have a lot in common. They didn’t inspire me. I couldn’t even think of anything to say in the comments. It wasn’t working.
I started this blog because I needed a place to write. By then, all but one of the 20sb bloggers had vanished from my Google Reader, and that one only stayed because she takes beautiful pictures. I decided to start trying to find new blogs to read, because I wanted to be blogging as part of a community. So whenever I find a blog that I like (either by hunting through groups I like on 20sb or checking out what’s listed on other blogs that I enjoy), I drop them into my reader. I then continue reading them until I either get sick of them or they stop posting. Usually this doesn’t happen.
This has made blogging a lot more fun for me. I get comments. I leave comments for others. I’m inspired by what I see elsewhere. And I’m learning. I’m following people who are doing things that I want to do, who like things that I like. I’m following mothers, photographers, funny girls, wives, readers, writers, geeks, lesbians, teachers, blogging rock stars. There are 25 blogs in my reader right now. I read them all. Every time they post. I love it.
This week, I did the thing that computer owners most fear. I caught an unkillable virus. It started innocently enough (luckily for me. There is nothing more embarrassing than having a broken computer due to internet porn). I was browsing pictures on the National Geographic website, and Firefox crashed. When I reopened it, I was informed that Adobe Reader was out of date and that my current version had a major security hole that could lead to viruses and spyware. So, like any sane person, I went to the Adobe website and updated to the newest version.
BAM. Broken computer. All of a sudden, I couldn’t view any web pages. Firefox informed me (twice now in writing this I’ve typed “informated” which is not a word. What?) that the page I was trying to view was a reported attack site and that Internet Explorer could not display it. Well, Firefox, first of all, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are not reported attack sites. Second of all, maybe if you weren’t secretly outsourcing your work to Internet Explorer, we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.
Fine. Clearly I had a virus. I decided to do what any somewhat-computer-savvy girl would do. I attempted to do a System Restore. No luck. Apparently, systemrestore.exe was infected. Oddly enough, so were picasa.exe, taskmanager.exe, and pretty much any other program I tried to open. Also, there was a spiffy little box down in the lower right corner of my screen which informed me that I had a virus and asked me to activate my anti-virus software. Uh-huh. Can we talk about how I have NO virus protection, because I’m too cheap to buy it and too afraid to download something free?
Time to get out the big guns. I turned off the wireless, restarted my computer in Safe Mode, and tried to do a System Restore. Nothing. It wouldn’t even open. I then got creative. I downloaded a trial version of McAfee onto my husband’s computer, dropped it onto a thumb drive, put it on my computer, and tried to run it. I’m not sure what I expected, but I think you can all guess what happened. Yep. Nothing.
At this point, I might or might not have turned the computer off and ignored it for two days. Finally, I called my new uncle-in-law (I gained 8 uncles-in-law, not including 3 uncles-in-law by marriage, when I married my husband) in California and asked for his help. He’s the resident computer expert in my new extended family. The prognosis was not good. After asking me to do a few basic things that I probably should have known how to do myself, he announced that I could either spend hours turning things on a few at a time in Diagnostic Mode (yeah, I didn’t even know that existed) in an attempt to find the problem (and then do WHAT, I wanted to ask), or I could give up and restore my computer to factory settings. Apparently, the virus in question plants itself and takes over your registry and you’re pretty much out of luck*.
I wasn’t too devastated by this information, since most of what was on my computer was already backed up on my external hard drive. After being told that jpgs most likely posed no danger, I spent about 24 hours transferring the remaining files, 1 gig at a time, on a thumb drive, from my computer to my husband’s computer and then to the external hard drive. Despite the fact that I didn’t actually put any files on his computer, it started acting a bit wonky, and then Adobe Reader (you, again?) crashed, so when I finished moving the files I quickly did a System Restore. I am now paranoid, but am currently using his computer to compose this post, so I suppose it’s not infected. (Though for some reason the search bar to the right of the address bar in Firefox isn’t working. I’m too lazy to restart Firefox at the moment and see if that fixes it).
I just thought of something. What if the virus is now on the external hard drive? Ahhhhh! I hate computers.
In any case, I managed to make my computer all shiny and new again (on the inside at least. The outside is still covered in dust, scratches, and fingerprints). Apparently you just have to open the Recovery Manager, answer a few quick questions, not get excited the first six times it restarts, and voila! you have a like-new computer. Now, of course, I have to set everything up the way I like it, reinstall the programs that I need, find CDs for the things that need CDs, etc. It’s an exciting adventure that I’ll probably hate every minute of. (Of which I will probably hate every minute? I can’t stand the not-ending-sentences-with-a-preposition-rule.)
Maybe I should just go back to pen, paper, and an abacus. Regardless, it seems that all is well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. Goodnight, and good luck.
*Side note. Why do people make viruses that do this? Yeah, I suppose I could have activated their “virus software,” probably messing up my computer even MORE, but I couldn’t use any programs or get on the internet. I clearly knew that my computer was broken and unusable, and immediately shut off its access to the internet and then turned it off. How does this benefit anyone? I thought hackers were all about stealing your credit card information, or using your computer to send speedily-replicating viruses out into the ether to TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD. (I’ve been watching Animaniacs, sorry). If anyone understands the motivation behind this, feel free to enlighten me, please.
