My dear employer has an amazing new website!
Yesterday we hosted the last day of the Wedgwood Circle’s conference at the office, which turned out to be lovely. I met a bunch of people who I knew or knew about, but hadn’t met yet, and a few I had recently met, and we drank coffee and talked for a while afterwards. Really? My job is the coolest, accented by Michael Card’s pastor stopping by unrelatedly that afternoon to say hi on Michael’s recommendation. (If you knew my Dad, you know how HUGE of a deal that really is.)
So today I am here quite early to let the piano tuner in, and early this afternoon I am hopping a train and heading northward to spend time with my Mom this weekend. My birthday is on Tuesday (the universe’s gift to me will hopefully be that this election is OVER) and so my family is rather happy to see me this weekend, and I, them. In the meantime, Tom will be wrapping the current project and starting a new one soon afterwards.
I have no linkdump for you this Friday, but you should check out The Curator this week for fun with the Met and Doctor Atomic, a documentary film about exclusive Manhattan preschools, and a piece on bizarre performance art by a couple of my friends.
Lastly, for all those who giggle uncontrollably when someone says, “My SPOON is too big!”, this should be good news.
Check out this week’s edition of The Curator!
“In the Parlance of Our Times”:
An Insufficient Appreciation of the Coen Brothers
Jeffrey Overstreet
What has made the films of these masters of the dark comedy so distinct, and what does that say about their newest film, “Burn After Reading”?
New York, New Art
Wayne Adams
A walk through some of the most talked-about openings in the New York art world this fall.
Found Objects: One Person’s Trash . . .
Christy Tennant
Thrift, found objects, and artist Barry Krammes.
We showed Chop Shop to a small crowd on Friday night at work, and it was just as good the second time around as the first. It didn’t hurt that there was lots of yummy popcorn going around, too.
But by the time I got home I realized I was getting sick, and I woke up Saturday with a raspy throat, plugged ears, and a stack of homework to do. Tom headed out to help Ken & Sarah (and Dahlia) move, and I spent the next eight hours writing essays, plowing through esoteric scholarly articles on art and anthropology and such, and trying to unearth myself a bit. It was successful, but a little exhausting!
When Tom got home we started watching The Wire, finally. We’d previously watched the second season, because Tom had seen the first, but as it turns out, this is emphatically not a show where you can actually do that. So we’re starting from the beginning again. I wouldn’t say I’m sucked in, but I know I’ll eventually be really into it and I immensely appreciate the skill in the storytelling.
I did manage to get to church on Sunday. Lots of new faces, and a few new names on our small group sign-up list. Afterwards Tom and I went to Moustache for middle eastern-style pitzas (and the discovery that it’s a Slow Food establishment), then came home and watched Caramel, a sweet Lebanese movie we missed when it was in theaters. We ate a quinoa-chicken-vegetable concoction I cooked up that was rather good and very healthy, to boot.
So here I am, at NYU since 8am this morning, with a giant water bottle on one side and a giant cup of hot tea on the other, which keeps me from coughing. I passed a somewhat sleepless night since I have trouble breathing without coughing, but I feel rather cheerful and am diving headfirst into the work I’ve got this week. This is Tom’s last free week before he starts a job next week, too.
We also have three excellent screenings this week: Wendy and Lucy tonight (directed by Kelly Reichardt, who also made Old Joy), a Variety screening of Blindness tomorrow (directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardener), and Ballast (which finally has a screening I can attend since I started getting invitations in the spring). We also are seeing Marilynne Robinson read with John Crowley at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday night.
And next week, while Tom’s working, I’m supposed to be in meetings in NYC, DC, and Boston, all between Tuesday and Friday. I haven’t been on a business trip since I left BofA in 2007. I’m pulling out the teeny-tiny travel bottles once again . . .
But let me just say that today is a lovely first official day of autumn, and I am happy to be alive!
The times, they are a-changin’.
As mentioned in the sidebar which accompanies Comment’s articles today, I’ve joined the editorial team at Comment as Associate Editor. What exactly that means, we’re still working out, but it’s a part-time position with many and varied interesting responsibilities. I’m thrilled with the position and delighted to be working with such a great magazine and organization.
I also have accepted a part-time position beginning in September at IAM, which if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know is close to my heart. I’ll be doing a lot of things, including working with artists to get their events off the ground, other event planning, coordinating the office, doing some design work, and probably lots of other things that crop up in the course of the year. Being relatively familiar with the inner workings of IAM, and knowing my future co-workers quite well, I’m very excited about the position.
What does this mean for NYU? Well, firstly, I’m biting the bullet and sticking with grad school, because I love it. I’m twenty credits and a thesis from having the degree and it’s completely worth the time and cost. Employment-wise, I’ll hopefully be doing a few hours of contracting work for my current office for a few more months, beginning just after Labor Day, helping them to make a transition and closing out the projects, though I won’t be an official full- or part-time employee.
And of course, I’ll still be writing articles, mostly film reviews for Paste and Christianity Today, and I’ll be the editor-in-chief of The Curator, which will be launching by the end of this month.
Yes, I’m excited!
Three years ago today was my first day at Bank of America. How time does fly . . . well,kind of. On the other hand, that was a lifetime ago.
Keith Gessen, who wrote a novel that came out recently that I really rather liked, All The Sad Young Literary Men, and edits the literary journal n+1, talks about the perils of being a working writer and still making your bills, especially in NYC. Definitely worth a read.
I have meant to blog, but my life seems to be devolving into madness owing partly to badly written technical documentation, partly to crazy Captain Ahab, and partly just to the limited hours available in the day. No real end in sight. Bring on the caffeine!
It hasn’t been a long week, obviously, and it hasn’t been that busy, but I feel like I’ve been too exhausted to really deal with the days and their many frustrations as they come. Oh well. There’s always next week.
Last night, though, was fun - especially Sam Shepard, who is seriously hilarious and told a story about his horse and a movie and a stuntman named Choo-Choo.
We have a full weekend that will hopefully still be a bit of a respite, and I’m excited, because I have a screener for Mongol sitting on the coffee table waiting to be reviewed. And Stone Park for brunch tomorrow, which can make nearly anything better.
In case you’re interested in (part of) what I do to pay the bills, the magazine I edit and publish just came back from the printer and is now up on the web as well. It’s available as a webzine, which I don’t design (I’m in the process of revamping it, in fact), and a print version, which you can download as a PDF. This is our “green” issue. Happy browsing.
I haven’t got much to say; I went out for a run around 7am today and Tom was home when I got back. Long night at the Guggenheim for him!
And I’m looking forward to a long weekend of paper-making, in the hopes of putting my own feeble little brick into the wall of scholarly knowledge within the week. Long live the academy.
I’m not trying to impart wisdom here. I’m too young and inexperienced to have much in the way of wisdom. But lately, a lot of people have made comments to me (in person and online) to the tune of “how do you do it?”, mostly because, well, I do work a lot, and I don’t miss deadlines, and I guess this isn’t normal. :) So that’s all this is.
I’m not a particularly high-energy person. I can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning and felt rested, even after sleeping a long time. (Yes, I realize this is probably not a good thing!) I would almost always rather be on the couch watching mindless TV than doing anything else.
But when I moved to New York, and nobody was telling me what to do at any particular time, I realized that I could turn into a serious lump, the kind of person who only got off the couch to go to work so as to pay the rent, who always eats Chinese take-out and never does the laundry or makes the bed, the kind of person who always talks about doing things, but never actually does them. And I didn’t want to be that kind of person. Realistically, if I expect to do anything significant in life, I have to form good working habits so that I have some structure from which to deviate. :)
In that vein, I established some practices that I mostly live by, and I think these help me to keep doing what needs to be done . . .
I never say that “I’m just not motivated enough to do X.” Kids need to be motivated to do what they need to do, but adults are supposed to be able to do things whether or not there’s a carrot dangling in front of their face. Same for saying “I just can’t [do that thing I need to do]“. Yes, I can do it - I have the time and I am physically able. If I don’t do it, it’s not because I can’t - it’s because I’m choosing not to.
When I wake up in the morning, I usually want to roll over and hit the snooze button. Then I realized that the extra twenty or thirty minutes of sleep, no matter how good it sounds, doesn’t realistically make any difference, so I just get out of bed. (See above!)
In the last year or so I’ve become a little more crazy about my health habits, because I don’t really have time to be sick and I seem to be extra susceptible to it, especially in winter. So, I get up a little earlier in the morning to exercise for twenty minutes (which, by the way, if I can exercise in our tiny apartment, anyone can exercise), I take supplements (a multi, an essential fatty acid, and a gingko biloba, and Emergen-C if I’m feeling under the weather), I don’t drink coffee except on the weekends and instead drink a lot of green tea (no mid-morning crash), and I sorted out foods that I seemed to be sensitive to - chief among them dairy - and stopped eating them. I seek out vegetables and proteins and try to save any “bad” eating for the weekends, when I’m out with friends. I choose to take the extra minute and “just do” things that are easy to slack on, like flossing my teeth or putting my clothes away properly at night. ;) A little goes a very long way.
I “overcommit” on purpose. This is a dicey one and I realize it’s a slippery slope. I don’t take on more than I can possibly do (or at least, I try not to do that), but I do commit to work that I know I should do, but that will require effort I may gripe about later - article assignments, grad school, whatever. I take on a challenging workload because I don’t work well unless I’m under a deadline. (This, incidentally, is why I have the highest regard for novelists and people who don’t necessarily work under assignment. They do it because they do it, not because someone is tapping their foot and breathing down their neck!)
When I write, I just sit down and pound it out. I am the most scattered writer in the world, I think, but I write my thoughts down, and every time I have another thought I quickly start a new paragraph and type out the thought, because my brain doesn’t retain things from moment to moment and I don’t want to lose any of them. Anne Lamott says something in Bird By Bird about writing a “s***ty first draft”, and that’s exactly what I do. I’m confident enough to know I can do it, but only only gained that confidence by doing. (If you’re a writer, but you don’t write, then you’re not a writer.)
Oh, and I use Google Docs to hold all my articles, so that if I’m at work and I have a sudden thought, I can input it into a document and still access it from home.
I rigorously keep a calendar. I once kept all my appointments and things-to-do in my head, but that flew out the window ages ago. Last year I used a Moleskine day planner, which was great; this year I’m using a combination of Google Calendar, Google Sync, and my Blackberry. I check the calendar every morning and I make sure to cross things off my list as I do them, so I feel a sense of accomplishment. The calendar holds everything - workout, laundry, screenings, meetings and deadlines at work, grocery shopping. I’m totally comfortable moving things around on the calendar and rescheduling and even removing things, but it keeps me sane and lets me not worry about forgetting something.
Until my to-do list is done for the day, I don’t take a break beyond a lunch break (during which I’m often reading for class or an article). Taking a break to “goof off” makes me lose serious traction and the day goes haywire from there. Working till it’s all done means more time to relax after the work is done, which also means more time to spend with my husband.
I take a Sabbath. I wasn’t good about this in college and I definitely paid for it. On Sunday, I don’t worry too much about what I’m eating, I don’t work out, I drink coffee, I go to church and brunch with friends, I read books that interest me (rather than books for school), and I watch bad movies with Tom. Basically, I don’t do anything that’s “productive”, in the sense of crossing it off my list. All those things are wonderfully productive and regenerative in their own right. And though I’m not really happy to see Monday come, at least I’m not already completely exhausted.
Except the first and last principles here, these are just what works for me, my working style, and the way my life is structured. I realize that I work fast, my work is well suited for short bits here and there that add up to a whole, and I live in a small space with one adult and no children, which means relatively little housework. I don’t claim any of this would work for anyone else, though I suspect much might. But as I read about the people who do significant and good work in the world, it seems that they are willing to push past mental limitations and their own laziness to do more, and they just never say they can’t do something.
What disciplines, principles, or tools do you use to do the work that’s set before you?
Rather than being at Calvin like, oh, pretty much everyone in the universe right now, I’m still at work, hoping to have the magazine packaged at at the front desk for the printer to pick up on Monday. Hurrah!
So I’m going home once that’s done to start trying to gather research for my paper. Not to jinx it, but I’m postulating something along the lines of how the “new” evangelical film, produced by filmmakers from outside “the church”, has a lot in common with the classical definition of kitsch. I think I’ve got a lot to draw on for that. (If you’re in IAM, you know what I mean, but I do have a lot of scholarly work to back it up as well.)
Happily, today was delivery day at the house; the cable guy came to hook up our internet, the new bookcase was delivered, and the refrigerator has finally arrived (hurrah for groceries again!). Oh, and yesterday we got a coffee table, so now I finally have a place to scatter all my papers and set down my cup of tea while I work, since I don’t have a desk. Tom uses our desk and his job requires a lot of papers to be around all the time. I don’t really mind. After sitting in front of a desk all day at work, it’s nice to work from the comfort of the couch.
I have grand plans to spend most of tomorrow writing reviews for three books that only just came in the last couple days, watching a film and writing a review, wading through the five scholarly books I have from the library and tagging what’s useful, hopefully getting the skeleton of an outline down, then heading off to a pre-Tribeca Festival press screening and a friend’s staged reading. It’s times like these that I have a love-hate relationship with being a writer; on the one hand, it’s pretty easy for me to start writing a paper. I’ve gotten past the whole fear-of-the-page thing by now, since I’m always under the gun. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly hard to write scholarly work when you’re used to turning out Paste-worthy snappy writing. Academia seems not to look kindly on wit. My academic prose will never be too dry, but I have to kick myself into big-word mode.
It’s nice to be able to use big words, though. I’d gotten out of the habit.
From yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in rural Kentucky, where she spent her childhood exploring the alfalfa fields and wooded hills surrounding her home. She started keeping a journal when she was eight years old and has continued to do so her entire life . . .
. . . She was working on a Ph.D. thesis on the social lives of termites when she decided to abandon a career in science and try to become a writer. She took a job as a technical writer, which forced her to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day and do nothing but write. She later said, “I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”
Ah yes. The magazine I edit at work is found here. You can see that the archives need a serious upgrade, something I’m hoping to work on over the summer. The subject matter & aesthetic aren’t my preference, but I’m getting some good solid experience since I’m in charge of getting each issue out the door - from solicitation for articles, to substantive editing, to design and layout, to publishing.
I do love editing, so I hope someday to be editing something a bit closer to my interests . . . but this is a good interim step.
I’m starting to get confused about what day it is. I feel like it’s just getting light when I come to work (it isn’t, the sky has just been very cloudy), and it’s already dark hours before I leave the office.
So, backing up, we saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Tuesday night at the Angelika. It was outstanding, a visually beautifully film, stirring, and still accessible. I wrote a review here. If it comes to your town, don’t miss it.
Which makes this as good a time as any to say that I’ll be writing a blog (not like the blog I keep here, but more of a free-form semi-weekly column) at the upcoming Conversant Life which launches in January. The blogging team they’ve assembled is a little staggering, and I’m completely honored to be included. So keep an eye out.
I seem to jinx myself every time I mention what we’re doing before we do it, but I’m going to risk it anyhow. We’ll be at the Bowery Poetry Club tonight for the CD release party of one of our favorite slam poets, Taylor Mali. Hopefully we’ll be seeing Juno tomorrow, and we have plans to be at the Sarah Lentz & (many very talented) Friends Christmas concert at 7pm, at St. Paul’s Church in Carroll Gardens on Saturday night. (Details on Facebook here.)
Also, it’s a good day when a check comes from a publisher and you stare at it for a while, trying to remember what it’s for.
Heading to the office to run over the proofs, but by lunchtime, the magazine will be out the door and in the hands of the printers. Hurrah!
And bigger news, kids: I am going to grad school in January. The admissions office at Gallatin called this morning to let me know. Still waiting on Draper, but the good thing is that I know I am going, and that in either place, I’ll be studying twentieth century American literature and cinema. This is the culmination of a lot of longing . . . and I’m so excited.
Hello, internets.
It’s suddenly become very busy around here; Tom’s shoot started today (he was up by 4:30am and may be home by 9pm) and runs almost until Christmas, and my list of projects and deadlines is growing.
I’d been avoiding pitching articles for a while this summer, and considered leaving off until the New Year, but that’s basically been thrown out the window (be careful when you ask the Almighty for guidance) and I’m happily and slightly frightened-ly staring at my list of deadlines. Since I hope and plan to be in grad school in January, and to continue in grad school for roughly a decade, I guess my nice restful post-college era is coming to an end. It’s been fun, but we all know that I prefer to live dangerously.
I went to Barnes & Noble on my lunch break and splurged on the recent issues of two magazines I’m ashamed to have not read previously - Poets & Writers and Blueprint (which I resisted because of the Martha Stewart connection but opened and loved immediately). They’ve gone on my wishlist and I’m awfully glad to have them in my tote bag.
I’m seeing some friends from college on Thursday night - people with whom I spent a lot of time during various high-stress times (student orientation, senior capstone . . .). I’m excited about that. I never really meant to ditch RPI entirely; it’s just that nobody I knew from the class of ‘05 moved to NYC with me. Since then, that’s changed, and I’m glad.
A lot of my internet poking-around activity in the last year has involved trying to hunt up a good website for logging my books. Chainreading wasn’t interactive enough, LibraryThing didn’t have the features I wanted, and I had trouble finding anything that worked exactly as I wanted. But I finally took a look at Goodreads recently, and I’m hooked. It’s excellent. Here’s my page - add me, if you have an account!
This is a pretty great article from Comment about film as a vocation (and quite a bit about the nitty-gritty, too).
So, you’re probably wondering if we’re still alive. Indeed we are.
On Saturday night we went to the latest Zoae Series, which Tom was photographing. We were there very early and got home rather late to pack.
After church on Sunday, we headed to Port Authority (another gates-to-hell style location) and took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, where my grandparents met us and drove to Wildwood Crest. I grew up vacationing there with the whole family every summer, but because of travels, jobs, wedding, and the craziness of the last couple years, I hadn’t been there in a while. We had a really great time, visiting the beach, shopping in Cape May, eating on the waterfront, playing video games in the arcade, and essentially just soaking in the sun and relaxing. And we were happy to discover that it’s pretty cheap to get there from here; hopefully we can go for longer next year.
We took the train back on Tuesday and made it into town in time for the M.A. information session at Gallatin - there was a mix-up with the location and Tom ended up just going home and bringing our bags with him, while I went to hear what they had to say. The program is incredibly appealing to me; the freedom to structure my degree around my interests is such an exciting concept, full of possibilities. I wasn’t aware that they only accept about half their applicants. A little intimidating, but hopefully I have the chops for it.
I started work on Wednesday morning and so far it’s been good. I have a great set-up, the people are nice, the location is great, and most importantly, the coffee machine makes great coffee (in stark contrast to life at the good ol’ B of A). I’m trying to settle into my duties, but it’s making sense to me. I’ve never really had such a sense of fitting into a job before. There’s a learning curve, but at least I know that I can do this. It fits with my talents. And Tom has been incredibly supportive through the whole thing, which makes such a difference.
So anyhow, I’m back on the map and ready to go. How are you?