Monthly Archives: August 2019

Reading Response

August 15, 2019 By in Daily WP, Thirty-Nine Stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Of course I googled Lindsey Stone while reading So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Last week one of our school administrators referenced the cautionary tales featured in Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, a jokey but serious reminder to be careful what we say and share. I remember the Jonah Lehrer and Justine Sacco messes unfolding, and when Lindsey Stone was under fire I was one of the people who just could not understand how stupid a person had to be to pose next to the tomb of a soilder while flipping the bird. Ronson’s book provides context to all three stories. Lehrer was busy and lazy. And a bestselling author, brought low by a no name blogger (named Michael Moynihan). Sacco had a small Twitter following and a string of odd tweets before she boarded her flight to South Africa. AIDS isn’t funny and racism isn’t funny and the two side by side are really, really not funny, and by Sacco’s admission hers is not the voice to deliver any sarcastic public commentary. Knowing your audience isn’t an adage when your audience is a potentially unknowable everyone and their opinions are all over and you cannot be certain what might blow up because you don’t really expect anything to blow up. Stone knew her audience – Facebook friends who got her irreverent humor – and never intended her photo at Arlington to be judged publicly. 

A year ago one of my new colleagues was tagged in a photo on Facebook. In the picture she is sitting next to the bronze statue of a woman, laughing. I recognized the memorial to Korea’s comfort women and that morning approached my colleague and let her know she should ask the poster to remove the photo. She told me they were out in the city and she was being goofy, sitting next to this statue woman. Like, hello friend! The moment after the picture was taken she read the plaque explaining who the comfort women of Korea are, and she quit laughing. But it wasn’t her photo and when her friend posted it she had qualms. When I spoke with her, she decided to talk with her friend, ask for the photo to be removed. And it was. 

At the same school meeting last week another administrator said if it isn’t an amen, it’s an ouch. When I think about Sacco and Stone: was the pile on good? People cried ouch but what was accomplished? The comments were brutal. The judgement went beyond the behavior. Unnatural consequences. If the critique had been quieter both women still might have lost their jobs. (I did wonder where the adults Stone was chaperoning in DC were when she was fake shouting and giving the middle finger). And a quieter critique would likely have yielded introspection. Sacco and Stone might have retreated, cleaned up their online presence, thought how to rebuild. But what happened to both women was such a thorough tear down. 

I put myself in this. 

I say I am so glad I went to university before smartphones. A few regrettable, lost messages on ICQ. A few terrible photos. Emails gone from all but gray memory. My siblings are on Instagram and I look at an occasional post and think about the work of making life look just so. 

Yet I am not spared the desire to document and share. I keep a line between my notebooks and what I publish but even so, I am comfortable sharing the muddle of working out my faith. I am comfortable writing about anger, suffering. Parenting. I am comfortable writing about the uncomfortable. I am practicing how to write, how to say what I want to say. I compost, writing around the same ideas and events for months or years. 

Which is why one part of Lehrer’s experience made me nervous. The initial schadenfreude was too delicious (and the judgement deserved) but once journalists started fact-checking his work, Lehrer was called out for self-plagiarizing, recycling sentences or paragraphs from one article to the next. And then I wondered about bloggers who find book deals, upcycling old posts. Ally Brosh, Ree Drummond. I also compost. I rewrite. I lift a phrase I like from an old draft. I want what I do to be distinguished from what Lehrer did because my notebooks and Piecemeal are together one big practice for the collections or novels I will publish. My transparent process is my justification. Piecemeal contains drafts of what I will or have finished, some pieces I would consider including in a book. Brosh and Drummond’s books evolved from their blogging existence too. I think of this as an extension of creative work, finding new form. Maybe this kind of self-plagiarism is okay. Art has echoes. But Lehrer work wasn’t about a new form or platform. He robbed one previously published article to pad another.

And how the mighty fall. And get up again. Ronson asked what comes after a public shaming. For Lehrer, a public apology that doubled as a second round of tar and feathering. And then sleepless nights writing and writing until he put together a book about love, the necessity and security of primary relationships. Years ago I picked up and put down Lehrer’s How We Decide, probably because I’d read The Tipping Point. Also years ago I glanced at Imagine in a book store. I don’t know if I’ll read A Book About Love but I am interested in how Lehrer recenters his writing purpose and work. Ronson caught a raw moment of Lehrer’s experience. Publicly Shamed is four years old now. Schadenfreude goes a little stale. Lehrer’s writing will now be more scrutinized and criticized and that’s fair, but.

There is a frightening, unreasonable permanence to our online presence. We have to be allowed to live beyond single horrifying moments or choices. Keep the consequences, sure, but when I googled Lindsey Stone I hoped the results would be varied as promised by a reputation.com. Publicly Shamed left Stone in a new job working with autistic children, desperate to keep her Arlington photo a secret, desperate to reclaim some normalcy after a year hiding in her parents’ home. I don’t know what Stone is doing today. The top result for her name is the Arlington photo. She is a lifelong object lesson. Sacco too, perhaps. Her tweet is one of her top results. But also her new employment, returning to IAC as a publicist for Match Group. CEO Joey Levin said to Recode, “With one noteable exception, Justine’s track record speaks for itself. Very few people in the business world have Justine’s indomitable spirit, tenacity and drive to persevere.” I love that. 

Last thing. I like to think I wouldn’t go to an eighteenth century public shaming but there are two literary shamings I stood on tiptoe to watch. One was Mike Daisy. I loved his This American Life story about visiting Apple factories in China. And then I really loved his conversation with Ira. Daisy shared with Ronson that he considered suicide. I do not love that at all. The public shaming I first savored though was when Oprah called James Frey to her couch after the factuality of his memoir A Million Little Pieces was challenged. I drove home from school, parked on the couch with a bag of chips, and hooted at the stern undoing. Frey and Daisy both cited artistic license to reason their lies. But their fault was not hyperbole or poor metaphors. Their fault was purposely misleading their audience to believe a story was real. (Quick digression: I do wonder if the great appeal of Daisy’s work was how fantastic the story was, the image of the old man with a damaged hand marveling that the iPad screen was like magic. And Frey’s recovery was so much more for the depth of the pit. And all those broken teeth. So I wonder if the stories would have had the reach or impact – Daisy’s story prompted scrutiny of Apple’s employment practices, and Frey humanized addiction – if the stories were presented as fiction. Fiction is powerful too). But you know, Frey kept writing. He made up with Oprah. His memoir-ish is a movie. And Daisy keeps telling stories too. 

I have to ask what I would do. 

Probably I will not be publicly shamed any time soon. What I take from Ronson’s book and my subsequent googling is that people can suffer great falls for big and small transgressions and still recover. There are moments I relive with a cringe. Sometimes I slip into a cringe coma. Maybe shame replays coincide with certain ages or places or vulnerabilities. Maybe my shame replays are brought on by a shuddery hormonal cocktail. The point is, we all understand shame. And none of us like to live in it. Shame isn’t healthy. I tell my kids (and myself) to tell yourself true things. Sometimes the truth is you did something terrible but the truth is also that you suffered the consequences, that you learned, that you got up in the morning when you didn’t feel like getting up in the morning. The truth is that you keep on. The truth is that you are still very loved. I want Ronson to return to the subjects of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed in another decade, to show how a brief, startling and awful shaming looks against a stack of years. But I don’t think we need that book. Let’s do our own work, stack our own years.

Twenty-four of thirty-nine. 1588 words. I do think about shame often. I currently live in a culture that – I don’t know how to put it. Does Korea value shame? Shame can teach us. Shame can keep us in line, though what that line is varies. I’m not so interested in sussing the giant, awful wrongs people do to one another, universal wrongs. But I am interested in the range of shamed behaviors and the unspoken ways we shame one another. I am interested in why shame is hard to shake. I am also interested in what my faith says about shame and why it is difficult to live as free.

He Sat Across From Me

August 5, 2019 By in Daily WP, Thirty-Nine Stories, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

An essay from Starbucks. Sit long enough and an essay comes along, I suppose. As I drafted this I thought about tense. I kept the conversation past but I use present tense at points. I like writing conversations in present – that’s why I decided to write this one in past, for the practice, and to see what it feels like after.

This young man sat across from me. He asked, as he pulled the chair from the table, and I nodded as he sat, folded and unfolded his arms across his chest, dropped his hands to his lap. He looked at me directly and said he liked my hair. He thought my hair was beautiful. My husband thinks my hair is beautiful. He tells me he loves the color. The day this young man sat across from me I wore my hair down. Maybe it can be beautiful. This young man introduced himself with an English name, Sean. I asked why he came over to me. 

You look interesting, he said, And a little – cute. 

On the table between us was my notebook and a novel I was reading and my iced latte. If Sean dipped his head he could have sipped from my straw. I moved the glass closer to me. I said thank you. Then I looked at him. Smooth skin, sparse whiskers at his chin and cheeks. A good haircut. Slender arms, tapered fingers. How old are you, I asked. 

How old do you think I am?
I’m not playing that game.
He told me he is over twenty. I said, Well, I am much older.
That doesn’t bother me. 

I rested my elbows on the table so he could see my rings and he nodded at my hand. What is the story of that ring, he asked.
The story is I’m married, I said.
He nodded. Are you a teacher here?
I nodded.
Where? At an international school?
Yes, at an international school. When I said the name of the school he knew it, knew people who went there. I asked about his schooling, what he was studying now.
What Trump learned before he became president.
I played nice. Business?
Sean nodded.
What kind of business are you interested in? Like, do you want to manage a business, start your own? What will you do?
I want to be like Elon Musk. I want to work with space travel.

He was disappointed when I told him he is the second young man in as many months here who has expressed interest in working with space travel. The first was a graduate I talked with about his future plans, for an alumni post on the school website. Sean, I wanted to say, get over it. A lot of boys want to build a rocket or fund a rocket or ride in a rocket. Sean, I wanted to say, I am being respectful to you but this whole conversation will go nowhere and you’ll walk away feeling a little dumb. Not because I make you feel dumb but because you’ll realize you just spun a fantasy into halting conversation. Sean, I wanted to say, I am not mean enough to tell you to fuck off.

Really, what were my plans for the fifteen minutes he sat across from me? I was midway through a dark thought. I had already regretted wearing eyeliner and mascara when I hadn’t brought a make-up bag for touch ups. Before Sean sat across from me I pulled a long breath through my nose and told myself not to cry, just get through the day without crying in public. Later, in bed with my husband, I said that if an older man had sat across from me, I might have been flattered. Instead I wondered if this was a joke, or a dare. The Starbucks was full of students, clustered around an open text or gossiping or snapping photos of their drinks. 

Sean rubbed his chin. It is only fair I ask you how old you are, he said, since you asked me.
I’m thirty-eight.
You don’t look thirty-eight.

I wanted to say, I feel thirty-eight. I do not feel twenty-nine or twenty-five, or any other elastic age. I feel very thirty-eight. I may be exactly halfway through my life, I wanted to say, or nearer to dead than that. But Sean did not betray surprise. He repeated that age did not matter to him. 

When I was twenty I started running again after a year or so of eating Chinese take out and drinking beer. One of my first runs was eight miles and I nearly threw up. I just made myself keep running around the lake eight loops. When I was twenty I was a double major in English and history, with a minor in writing, but I’d drop the history major two or three classes short, swapped for education methods courses. When I was twenty I started going to the Lincoln Hills juvenile correction facility to lead poetry writing workshops with troubled, criminal boys who were not allowed to say last names. When I was twenty I thought I would write poetry forever. 

I am writing poetry forever. I think how to write all of this, and before I string a sentence, I float in phrases and dashes, poetry enough.

I waited for Sean to decide our conversation was through. He asked how I liked it in Seoul. He asked what I thought of the culture. We talked about school. I said that I taught in South America and the Middle East before, and that people are people. I said I liked it here. We talked about the pressure people feel here, the students to earn a grade, the parents to raise whatever kind of child, the professional expectations. I wondered if Sean thought about failing at his space venture. I wondered if failure could be trend here. Fail forward. Fail fast, fail often. But I did not ask. I did not feel like extending our conversation. Instead I wanted to return to my own dark thought, or read the novel still open between Sean and me.

As abruptly as Sean sat down, he stood. He thanked me for my time. I said it was nice to meet him and wished him a good rest of the day. He took the stairs up and after his legs were gone from view I stared at the space he’d just been, the empty chair. I wanted to turn to ask the young women nearby did they see that, hear that? What was that? I was thinking about failure or flattery and couldn’t concentrate on the novel. The day was hot but I wasn’t out in it. When I was twenty there was a man at least ten years older than me. He smelled like cigarettes and read my poetry. We sat next to one another and if he ever guessed I wanted to taste the cigarettes on his tongue he was too kind to say.

Twenty-three of thirty-nine. 1111 words!

Get Over This All Over Again

August 2, 2019 By in Daily WP, Thirty-Nine Stories Tags: , , , Leave a comment

At Starbucks at a small square table by the third floor window. From here I can watch foot traffic. I can see houses built close together up a hill. Yesterday I was here to draft in my notebook. Today I came to draft on my laptop but when I arrived, taking this table away from the ac vent, not under a speaker, I sat unmoving for a long time, thinking about how my own suffering affects my husband and children. Since mid January my left knee has swollen every other week. An exhausting cycle. In June an MRI confirmed cartilage damage, a nearly healed bone bruise. I quit walking in the mornings. I continued physical therapy exercises. I cut sugar from my diet. But the pattern holds. In June, the doctor prescribed medication with the caution to take the little pills only for a little while, and only when needed. The anti-inflammatory probably eats my stomach lining. So I took the pills to reduce swelling. The swelling did not reduce. I took the pills when I had no swelling, thinking to stave off the next round of swelling, but the swelling came. I quit the pills and the swelling was on schedule, no better or worse.

When my knee is swollen I must be more cautious. I am slower. I usually wake to weep before I carry on with the day ahead. Sometimes I think of chopping my leg at mid thigh or taking a hammer to my kneecap. This injury is healing. The mystery of such an exact pattern of swelling is what walks me along the line of despair, a small fear at my neck that I am somehow making this happen to my body, that my mind is fucking my joint, because the injury should be healed now with the rest/ medication/ pt exercise/ ice and heat therapy/ rest/ more rest/ fasting/ other dietary changes/ prayer/ rest.

I ask the Holy Spirit to renew my mind. I think about the net of fascia the length of my body, the kinks in my nerves, knots in my muscles. Heal my body. I wonder if I am supposed to be magic about this suffering. Like once I knock out the right ratio of hope and joy in the middle of suffering, perhaps then my body will release itself to heal. I miss the cadence and breathing of a morning run, and the work of my body, the sweat and calm after. But I really miss the ease of a day. When I make plans now I count out the days to know my swollen knee might make the walk difficult – it isn’t really the walk that is difficult at all, only the effort of keeping a plan, the effort of keeping on. I am tired of thinking that this must be the last time my knee swells. This must be it. This time for sure. 

I am not healed yet. I will heal but I am the middle of not healed yet. Maybe I am at the middle end of not healed. Maybe in a month I will wake up and not weep because my whole being will just know this particular light momentary affliction is over. That is what I am like – I have these moments of clarity when I know the shift in my body or mind, when I can recognize an end or beginning, when a truth settles. 

This healing is not for my own body only. Justin reminds me nothing is wasted. I think I could take the mind or the body but both at once is a bit much. And both at once is wearing on my family. We make a joke of it but I cooked a dozen times since January, and when Claire said she missed family dinners like what I used to make, I bought box macaroni and cheese: this is not a joke. This is terrible. I keep thinking I will unearth old motivation. I make myself do things now. I make up reasons why it matters that I keep doing things. This summer I spent seventy dollars on board games, an aspirational purchase for the winter evenings ahead when we’ll sit around the table playing a game and eating popcorn. This summer I also burrowed under a blanket and told Justin I was tired of trying and now I want to try not trying at all. 

Claire looked at me the other day and told me I wasn’t fine, that I didn’t need to pretend I was fine. But she wants me to be fine. I want me to be fine. Yet we live with a weird dichotomy. I am fine and not fine. Today I am asking the Spirit can I please be okay where I am? Can I be okay even if my body continues to disappoint? Can I have peace before I ask? I do not need to be pleased with my circumstance to accept how it may work my body and mind for my good and God’s glory and to ask for that, at least: do what must be done to make me more of who I am in Christ. Any day, situation, relationship shapes me. So this too. So this too!

Yet. Now I am thinking what to do for my husband and kids if this goes on for much longer. Both children expressed they miss me on family ventures around the city. My knee is stable enough I can go along, but slowly. The slowness frustrates me. But Justin and the kids love me enough to walk alongside, slowly. I would rather try not trying. I would rather hide in a darkened room. Points earned for going to the park or making a meal are not adding up to what I want and there is my mistake, thinking that once my knee heals and I can move through the day with ease, then everything will be okay. It is true that I will feel better when my body is healed: I will move again, my brain will welcome endorphins with sweet relief. Probably I will sleep better. Likely I will spend fewer hours staring out a window. And it is true that my family will feel better when I am healed: imagine me making crepes just because, or trekking Seoul Forest with the kids while Justin takes a home day. But I don’t really want to wait until my body heals for all of us to be over this suffering. 

It’s like I have to transcend this shit. Quit playing if. If my body were healed I would have gone for a run this morning, come home and kissed the kids while I was still hot and sticky from the humidity, stood in a cool shower, dressed without thinking what pants still fit. We would have left the apartment twenty or thirty minutes later than we did because I could have kept a walking pace. I might have googled “best brunch in Itaewon” and found a new cafe to try while the kids went to VBS, or I would have walked to our old favorite cafe down the hill, or hiked up the hill to a trendy spot for a Dutch cold brew served with a square of dark chocolate. Now I would be walking back to church to pick up the kids. I’d have drafted the story I woke up thinking about, instead of staring at the sidewalk below, or the shops across the way. If my body were healed I would hop on my bike when we get home this afternoon and head to Shinsegae for dumplings because Grant and I have been craving dumplings. And after we’d all head outside for a warm evening stroll and ice cream. I would go to bed expecting another lovely, uncomplicated day tomorrow. 

Tomorrow I will wake up and have to get over this all over again. But I want to do more than get over the suffering and through the day. I want this middle to not feel like a waste of ticking days until I get to the part where I don’t have to pep talk myself in the bathroom, whispering that I am okay, this is okay, I belong here now. I love the people near me, dearly. I ask the Spirit for joy in my heart. The mercy of this year has been that joy hasn’t gone completely dark. I want more though. I want a ridiculous portion of joy. I want to know better how to love my family. I want my husband and children to be okay even while I am not. But God I want to be okay too. I want to know better that the process matters, that this long wait to heal my body and mind is part of healing my body and mind. There is no way to end this. 

Twenty-two of thirty-nine. More wandering than I prefer. 1486 words. There are ideas here I want to say the right way, like the weird dichotomy, like wanting me to be better not just because I will directly (finally, gladly) benefit, but because I also feel terribly about the burden my suffering is for others. No glamour in this, just the shit of it. And my desperate holy reach for the Spirit to move.