I'm featured on the new blog Tweetabix, which posts interviews about the habits of individual Twitterers.
The one thing that I would add to my answers is that I find it okay to monetize through Twitter, so long as it is subtle, and both includes and is in addition to real content. For example, I run advertisements using Magpie, but only ones that link to worthwhile sites, and only often enough to be a rarity on my stream.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Gypsy (An early incarnation of the story.)
I've done lots of exercises and a couple of stories centering around a schizophrenic girl, Gypsy, named after one of the Manson killers. Here is her earliest appearance in a full story.
In backwoods Vermont farmland, a trailer-sized home stands in defiance. The tired white paint is tinged with yellow and clay-red around the corners and windowsills. A foot of insulation is exposed on the side, pink like burn scars and thick like muscle. Though grass around the property is scarce, weeds grow as they please, overshadowing the two concrete steps that precede the screen door. Inside the decrepit building are the only creatures for miles: four young women on an organized killing spree.
Sue pulled into the driveway just moments ago; the dirt road is still billowing up in breaths around the wheels of her car. She steps through the door, with brown paper bags gripped in both hands.
“I’m here.” No answer; Sandy and Mary would be asleep. Early morning naps never claimed Gypsy, though. Sue leaves the bags on the counter for whoever might want to claim them, and walks with haste to the bathroom door.
Sue looks at Gypsy through a crack in the bathroom door, deliberating over whether or not bothering her is worth the attention. The girl sits on the porcelain vanity, staring into the mirror. Some schizophrenics lose track of their personalities; Gypsy, she never wanted to acknowledge them in the first place. She doesn’t keep separate names for her separate identities, but merely shifts shape in front of the mirror.
She is straddling the vanity lazily, one foot in each sink. Gypsy whispers to her reflection, softly, as if comforting a child. Single-word murmurs and sissified whines make up her speech. (Is it perverse to be impressed by such an utter lack of normality? In the house, Sue is not alone in her vague reverence. Any contempt towards Gypsy is a veiled attempt at imitation; the respect she receives is similar to masochistic flogging—or better yet, Sue thinks, clinging to a friend who you know hates you, and who, deep down, you hate too.) Sue opens the door gingerly and steps in.
Now Gypsy leans back with one elbow on the sink, her head cocked just a little at her intruder. When she puts on this air of absolute aloofness, it doesn’t matter that she is in gray, ill-fitting underwear, with bony limbs and skin that peels off in patches. She looks cool, intimidating. Gypsy, a careless chain smoker, pulls a pungent stick of tobacco out from between her lips. Sue waits in reverence while the other girl snuffs the cigarette butt on her pockmarked forearm. After one last glance in the mirror, Gypsy speaks. Her voice now deeper, raspy, she says:
“Clean yourself up in some other sink, bitch, does it look like I don’t have enough blood on the tiles?”
Sue’s perpetual scowl twists, and she slouches her shoulders in an accidental display of inferiority. She runs the sink for a few seconds until the water turns clear.
“There’s no other sink to use; Sandy crashed in the tub near the other faucet. I didn’t want to wake her… you know she’s a real pain when she’s hung over.” Sue, of course, did not actually know where Sandy was sleeping. She brings her hands—still dusty, she noticed—to her blonde hair, and fluffs her lazy curls. Testing Gypsy’s patience, she deems it necessary to rifle the bathroom drawers for shampoo. “Anyway, hello. I’ve been out to see Lenny, if you care, and he had a new job for us. It was close by, so I offed the guy on the way home… some KKK son of a bitch no one’ll search for too hard. Fat bastard died easy, but he bled like hell, as you can see. I also picked up booze, it’s on the counter if you want some.”
Gypsy had gone back to the mirror, wholly uninterested in a routine murder. Her glass-stroking and heavy breathing was now far too sexual for comfort. Sue forsook the most stubborn of the blood stains and made a quick escape to the den. Fascinated but scared by the incomprehensible soliloquy Gypsy had now started, she stayed close to the bathroom but turned on the radio.
“You call that music? Turn that shit off, or get away from the bathroom.”
“Yes, Gypsy, I call this music. This is fucking Hendrix.”
“You think that means something to me? You can’t defend that garbage with a name. At best, that kind of music can pay tribute to the real stuff.” She continued on, her voice cracking and rising in volume.
“Music, music is not something you turn on and turn up. You can’t turn off real music, you can’t ignore it, it either keeps you sane or it kills you. What happened to the gnashing of teeth, what happened to sonatas on peyote lying dead behind cacti in Mexico? What happened to real music?
“Music, it’s change in the coffee cup of a beggar that died and looks asleep. It’s that beggar man’s snores, no, no, that’s the last breath in his throat. It’s the Sunday sermon when you’ve just found out why you’re alive.
“When music was alive and walked the streets, there was deus ex machina in every Bulgarian disco. God came from the machine, the machine being synthesizer keyboards, and if you weren’t too high you could see him. If you were too high, you saw something far better than God, and you called it by the same name. Song bridges didn’t change pitch, and they didn’t change melody; they changed reality. With just a few notes, the musician would slice open your stomach and gut you. Your reality turned over to the music, you find yourself hanging boneless on a meat hook while some ignored bassist tenderizes your flesh on a nearby table. Then the song ends, and you’re sitting in front of a mirror or whatever when you thought you were in a butcher shop window with an apple stuffed down your throat.”
Sue had walked away by now. Gypsy goes on, only half-aware of her absence.
“Are you listening? Hear me, hear me say this. When we die, we will die blind. Music is dead but it sees. It sees us, sees everything, everything we do in its streets. And it hates us with all of its love. Are you listening? Hear me say this.
“Music is what happens when the guitars stop and the lead singer chokes on her own vomit and keels over and still finishes the note.”
In backwoods Vermont farmland, a trailer-sized home stands in defiance. The tired white paint is tinged with yellow and clay-red around the corners and windowsills. A foot of insulation is exposed on the side, pink like burn scars and thick like muscle. Though grass around the property is scarce, weeds grow as they please, overshadowing the two concrete steps that precede the screen door. Inside the decrepit building are the only creatures for miles: four young women on an organized killing spree.
Sue pulled into the driveway just moments ago; the dirt road is still billowing up in breaths around the wheels of her car. She steps through the door, with brown paper bags gripped in both hands.
“I’m here.” No answer; Sandy and Mary would be asleep. Early morning naps never claimed Gypsy, though. Sue leaves the bags on the counter for whoever might want to claim them, and walks with haste to the bathroom door.
Sue looks at Gypsy through a crack in the bathroom door, deliberating over whether or not bothering her is worth the attention. The girl sits on the porcelain vanity, staring into the mirror. Some schizophrenics lose track of their personalities; Gypsy, she never wanted to acknowledge them in the first place. She doesn’t keep separate names for her separate identities, but merely shifts shape in front of the mirror.
She is straddling the vanity lazily, one foot in each sink. Gypsy whispers to her reflection, softly, as if comforting a child. Single-word murmurs and sissified whines make up her speech. (Is it perverse to be impressed by such an utter lack of normality? In the house, Sue is not alone in her vague reverence. Any contempt towards Gypsy is a veiled attempt at imitation; the respect she receives is similar to masochistic flogging—or better yet, Sue thinks, clinging to a friend who you know hates you, and who, deep down, you hate too.) Sue opens the door gingerly and steps in.
Now Gypsy leans back with one elbow on the sink, her head cocked just a little at her intruder. When she puts on this air of absolute aloofness, it doesn’t matter that she is in gray, ill-fitting underwear, with bony limbs and skin that peels off in patches. She looks cool, intimidating. Gypsy, a careless chain smoker, pulls a pungent stick of tobacco out from between her lips. Sue waits in reverence while the other girl snuffs the cigarette butt on her pockmarked forearm. After one last glance in the mirror, Gypsy speaks. Her voice now deeper, raspy, she says:
“Clean yourself up in some other sink, bitch, does it look like I don’t have enough blood on the tiles?”
Sue’s perpetual scowl twists, and she slouches her shoulders in an accidental display of inferiority. She runs the sink for a few seconds until the water turns clear.
“There’s no other sink to use; Sandy crashed in the tub near the other faucet. I didn’t want to wake her… you know she’s a real pain when she’s hung over.” Sue, of course, did not actually know where Sandy was sleeping. She brings her hands—still dusty, she noticed—to her blonde hair, and fluffs her lazy curls. Testing Gypsy’s patience, she deems it necessary to rifle the bathroom drawers for shampoo. “Anyway, hello. I’ve been out to see Lenny, if you care, and he had a new job for us. It was close by, so I offed the guy on the way home… some KKK son of a bitch no one’ll search for too hard. Fat bastard died easy, but he bled like hell, as you can see. I also picked up booze, it’s on the counter if you want some.”
Gypsy had gone back to the mirror, wholly uninterested in a routine murder. Her glass-stroking and heavy breathing was now far too sexual for comfort. Sue forsook the most stubborn of the blood stains and made a quick escape to the den. Fascinated but scared by the incomprehensible soliloquy Gypsy had now started, she stayed close to the bathroom but turned on the radio.
“You call that music? Turn that shit off, or get away from the bathroom.”
“Yes, Gypsy, I call this music. This is fucking Hendrix.”
“You think that means something to me? You can’t defend that garbage with a name. At best, that kind of music can pay tribute to the real stuff.” She continued on, her voice cracking and rising in volume.
“Music, music is not something you turn on and turn up. You can’t turn off real music, you can’t ignore it, it either keeps you sane or it kills you. What happened to the gnashing of teeth, what happened to sonatas on peyote lying dead behind cacti in Mexico? What happened to real music?
“Music, it’s change in the coffee cup of a beggar that died and looks asleep. It’s that beggar man’s snores, no, no, that’s the last breath in his throat. It’s the Sunday sermon when you’ve just found out why you’re alive.
“When music was alive and walked the streets, there was deus ex machina in every Bulgarian disco. God came from the machine, the machine being synthesizer keyboards, and if you weren’t too high you could see him. If you were too high, you saw something far better than God, and you called it by the same name. Song bridges didn’t change pitch, and they didn’t change melody; they changed reality. With just a few notes, the musician would slice open your stomach and gut you. Your reality turned over to the music, you find yourself hanging boneless on a meat hook while some ignored bassist tenderizes your flesh on a nearby table. Then the song ends, and you’re sitting in front of a mirror or whatever when you thought you were in a butcher shop window with an apple stuffed down your throat.”
Sue had walked away by now. Gypsy goes on, only half-aware of her absence.
“Are you listening? Hear me, hear me say this. When we die, we will die blind. Music is dead but it sees. It sees us, sees everything, everything we do in its streets. And it hates us with all of its love. Are you listening? Hear me say this.
“Music is what happens when the guitars stop and the lead singer chokes on her own vomit and keels over and still finishes the note.”
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Is internet addiction hitting ludicrous new highs, or is the “net” such an ingrained part of our lives, that living without it is tantamount to starvation? A recent report shows that at the very least, people would forgo the pleasures of physical contact rather than temporarily lose access to the info-deluge. According to a recent Intel study, many people would rather give up sex for two weeks than stay off the internet for the same amount of time. The survey of over 2000 adults showed that 48 percent of women and 30 percent of men prefer the internet to sex.
From PSFK.
Personally, I don't see any difference between the two possible explanations mentioned in the first sentence! True, most of us organize our "real lives" through the internet, making a net addiction less a sign of trouble in Cyberland and more an understandable reaction to the convenience of the tubes. For example, my fiancé Stephen lives the "Google lifestyle"– his calendar, address book, and now even his to-do list are all available only through the google.com domain. When he suggested that I start to use the new Tasks function, I said that I preferred my free trial of the wonderful To-do list application Things.
"For example," I said, "I can use it offline."
"Why wouldn't you have the internet?" Steve asked. "That sounds apocalyptic."
I mentioned use in the car and at my dial-up-only lakehouse, but there's one situation that I didn't even account for at the time: an extended power outage.
Marlboro is notorious amongst its students for losing power at least annually, it being an isolated campus on a blustery hill in cold Vermont. The song "Marlboro College No Power No Water" is a campus favorite, and particularly the lyrics "Thirty-thousand dollars a yeeaaarrrrr!" which is now one-thousand dollars out of date to boot.
So, a couple of days after classes ended and a few days before finals started, Marlboro was hit by a killer ice storm and lost power. Luckily I live in the one dorm that has a strong generator, so I had plenty of heat and searing hot water. Still, I was without lights, electronics, and most notably the internet. The entire campus was without electricity.
It was amazing.
The first night, the power went out during Open Mic. We took it in stride (we'd been expecting that the frequent flickering of lights would eventually lead to the extended loss of power) and began to clean up the Campus Center and rearrange the tables and chairs. When every beer bottle was in the recycling bin, we left for our respective rooms. I noticed the lack of working internet on my laptop (which still had an hour of juice left at this point) and hoped that it everything would be restored soon.
The next day I woke early and lay in bed as I heard trees crashing outside under the weight of all the ice. Eventually I suited up for the cold and braved the walk to the dining hall in hopes that the toaster would somehow be working.
I walked to the restored barns I take my meals in and found it to be very nearly empty– not unusual for pre-7 AM. What was different is the lack of dining hall staff. The roads were too icy for anyone to drive to the hill without seriously risking their safety. But guess who was in the kitchen?
Ellen Lovell, the president of the entire fucking college, had braved the extremely dangerous roads to cook food for hungry students without electricity. Marlboro College is the most amazing school on the face of the earth.
I told her how amazing she was, a compliment which she of course deflected, and began to make pancakes with her. KP, the master electrician and love of everyone in the school, unlocked everything for us, and student dishwasher Joan told us where everything was. I chopped fruit and put out cereal. When people started to slowly funnel in, I greeted everyone by name and told them that pancakes and tea water were being kept warm for them in the kitchen.
I sang "Fever" for Ellen while she flipped pancakes (KP insisted that she make them from mix, not scratch) and played jazz songs with what was left of my laptop battery. I gave Joan my flashlight, which would become quite essential over the next few days, so she could make it to the freezer and prepare for lunch. Ellen, I will mention, stayed all day, several days, to help cook meals. We all gathered for each meal in the warm dining hall, shining our flashlights, playing board games, making music, having conversations.
No one needed the internet. We all kind of missed it, but none of us so much that we really wanted it back. Everyone found diverse ways of entertainment. We became more of a community. We spent more time together, we walked to people's dorms when we wanted to contact them, we spent time together instead of staying in our rooms lit up by the glow of a screen.
I left school after a few days of no electricity, at the same time that the school put everyone up in hotels that wanted to leave. I offered my room in Howland, the generator dorm, to anyone who wanted a space to sleep. In no other school would my room be taken up by my roommate of next semester (who moved in early to escape the cold), two of her friends, and two young fellows who lives on campus. Students sleeping in the same room as professors? I don't even know if that's allowed at other schools, never mind if students and teachers are close and kind enough to share quarters.
I would never choose the internet over sex for two weeks, nor would I give it up for romance, writing, reading books, singing or sitting close to friends and talking withe excited voices. The internet is wonderful, of course– why else would I be blogging right now?– but is it better than real, physical companionship? Not in my opinion.
From PSFK.
Personally, I don't see any difference between the two possible explanations mentioned in the first sentence! True, most of us organize our "real lives" through the internet, making a net addiction less a sign of trouble in Cyberland and more an understandable reaction to the convenience of the tubes. For example, my fiancé Stephen lives the "Google lifestyle"– his calendar, address book, and now even his to-do list are all available only through the google.com domain. When he suggested that I start to use the new Tasks function, I said that I preferred my free trial of the wonderful To-do list application Things.
"For example," I said, "I can use it offline."
"Why wouldn't you have the internet?" Steve asked. "That sounds apocalyptic."
I mentioned use in the car and at my dial-up-only lakehouse, but there's one situation that I didn't even account for at the time: an extended power outage.
Marlboro is notorious amongst its students for losing power at least annually, it being an isolated campus on a blustery hill in cold Vermont. The song "Marlboro College No Power No Water" is a campus favorite, and particularly the lyrics "Thirty-thousand dollars a yeeaaarrrrr!" which is now one-thousand dollars out of date to boot.
So, a couple of days after classes ended and a few days before finals started, Marlboro was hit by a killer ice storm and lost power. Luckily I live in the one dorm that has a strong generator, so I had plenty of heat and searing hot water. Still, I was without lights, electronics, and most notably the internet. The entire campus was without electricity.
It was amazing.
The first night, the power went out during Open Mic. We took it in stride (we'd been expecting that the frequent flickering of lights would eventually lead to the extended loss of power) and began to clean up the Campus Center and rearrange the tables and chairs. When every beer bottle was in the recycling bin, we left for our respective rooms. I noticed the lack of working internet on my laptop (which still had an hour of juice left at this point) and hoped that it everything would be restored soon.
The next day I woke early and lay in bed as I heard trees crashing outside under the weight of all the ice. Eventually I suited up for the cold and braved the walk to the dining hall in hopes that the toaster would somehow be working.
I walked to the restored barns I take my meals in and found it to be very nearly empty– not unusual for pre-7 AM. What was different is the lack of dining hall staff. The roads were too icy for anyone to drive to the hill without seriously risking their safety. But guess who was in the kitchen?
Ellen Lovell, the president of the entire fucking college, had braved the extremely dangerous roads to cook food for hungry students without electricity. Marlboro College is the most amazing school on the face of the earth.
I told her how amazing she was, a compliment which she of course deflected, and began to make pancakes with her. KP, the master electrician and love of everyone in the school, unlocked everything for us, and student dishwasher Joan told us where everything was. I chopped fruit and put out cereal. When people started to slowly funnel in, I greeted everyone by name and told them that pancakes and tea water were being kept warm for them in the kitchen.
I sang "Fever" for Ellen while she flipped pancakes (KP insisted that she make them from mix, not scratch) and played jazz songs with what was left of my laptop battery. I gave Joan my flashlight, which would become quite essential over the next few days, so she could make it to the freezer and prepare for lunch. Ellen, I will mention, stayed all day, several days, to help cook meals. We all gathered for each meal in the warm dining hall, shining our flashlights, playing board games, making music, having conversations.
No one needed the internet. We all kind of missed it, but none of us so much that we really wanted it back. Everyone found diverse ways of entertainment. We became more of a community. We spent more time together, we walked to people's dorms when we wanted to contact them, we spent time together instead of staying in our rooms lit up by the glow of a screen.
I left school after a few days of no electricity, at the same time that the school put everyone up in hotels that wanted to leave. I offered my room in Howland, the generator dorm, to anyone who wanted a space to sleep. In no other school would my room be taken up by my roommate of next semester (who moved in early to escape the cold), two of her friends, and two young fellows who lives on campus. Students sleeping in the same room as professors? I don't even know if that's allowed at other schools, never mind if students and teachers are close and kind enough to share quarters.
I would never choose the internet over sex for two weeks, nor would I give it up for romance, writing, reading books, singing or sitting close to friends and talking withe excited voices. The internet is wonderful, of course– why else would I be blogging right now?– but is it better than real, physical companionship? Not in my opinion.
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