photo by: hellembry

Yes: an affiliate marketing conference. Here’s where I discuss it in full.

Your thoughts, as always, most welcome.

Illustration: Dali's Melting Clocks

I have always been troubled by what my mother calls time management. I’m sure other people call it that, too, but I heard it first when I was twelve, trying to get ready for school but repeatedly getting sidetracked for reasons hair-related. “Boy, do you have a problem with managing time,” she would say. I had no idea what she meant, of course, because time, as I knew, could not be managed, only experienced, or – perhaps – tamed and ridden, like a horse, or a wave.

One of us was missing the point entirely.

My relationship with time has only gotten more intense over the years, although what suffers now is not my productivity – which is actually quite impressive given my life stats (although not necessarily in pecuniary terms) – but the amount of time I sleep, or do anything much outside of “have to.”

I am also usually either 10 minutes late or about to be running 20 minutes late, or doing something way too close to the deadline, or almost just past it, or doing what my father calls “shitting around,” which is basically self-explanatory. (Or else I’m giving a child a bath or tucking another one into bed. THAT, somehow, I manage to do right on time.)

It is not that I am at odds with structure, and actually find much satisfaction and competency in routine. I am, in fact, Queen of the List. Super Organized and Neat. Almost…A Jewish Bree Van de Kamp…Well, not really.

But still: RUSHED. Late. Preoccupied with what I’m not doing. Making new lists to compensate for what wasn’t done…..

I don’t want to disregard time. Really. I’m just 1. probably unrealistic as to how many hours a day has (what was the number again? ); 2. powerless, it would seem, to control time the way schedule-y people talk about doing.

It will blow on without my permission, manipulations, and illusions of punctuality. I’d simply like to be its friend, if it will have me. Harness it, and allow it to gallop freely, and hope I don’t fall off.

Because despite what the Clairol, Loreal, and Filofax people will tell you, time has a mind of its own, and we need to just be partners with it. Relatives will call to talk; special invitations pop-up unexpectedly; friends drop by to visit; a community or school function is at the worst time, but…; the need for kindness or hosting arises suddenly… in short: life happens. And saying no to some of these things on account of managing time really robs life of too much texture, too much love, too much opportunity.

Of course, saying yes to all of them is suicidal. My stay at home mom friends already know (after a few times of being actually kicked out by me when they showed up at my door…so sorry!!!) that I don’t do daytime chats, because despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m not REALLY home.

Also, the line between riding opportunity / diving into life and drowning completely in your own inefficiency or sleep deprivation or inability to say no is VERY thin. In my case I’d say, thin as a single hair. (Which no longer takes up any of my time, by the way. Ponytails and Headbands R Us.)

Those of us in creative fields are especially wary of this say YES! / say NO! dialectic, as web surfing / reading / social networking / blog commenting (all within reason) is not “shitting around” but actually part of creating and doing business. (Right?! Right?!)

Two of my colleagues, Marc and Sean, wrote excellent posts recently on their own blogs, variations on the theme of being a writer worthy of the title, managing to earn a living, gaining inspiration, and living with time, all in the same dimension. In fact, Marc wrote his in response to my distressed Twitter plea. Hats off, gentlemen.

But wristwatches: On.

1. Switching closets from winter to summer, seeing as I failed to do so before Passover;
2. Work for client X, due tomorrow; DONE
3. Work for client Y, due tomorrow;
4. Several technical and networking tasks involved in getting this site more spider-worthy, way overdue.

And yet. (This beloved two-word sentence is a Nicole Krauss-ism, which I have been widely borrowing, even in my everyday speech.) There is a familiar pit in my stomach that tells me I must put something down on paper. So to speak.

It’s a pit that reminds me of other pits, that makes me 16 again, and 26, all the years joined by a common physiological sense of being carried by an idea or a feeling, literally hungry for something to write. Medical science will tell you that the pit is the work of the vagus (yes, pronounced like the city in Nevada) nerve in my abdomen, which has translated the meandering chemicals of emotion from my brain into an ache of sorts.

This is all well and good but I think it’s more about the weather.

Today in Israel is what Winnie the Pooh would call a very, very blustery day. It is hot as an oven (not like a sauna) and cloudy in an overwhelming way, as if there’s a huge fire a few miles back, blowing in, or maybe a tornado. The weather is upon us. The electricity went out for a few minutes about an hour ago, and my neighbors called me from vacation to go remove whatever was blowing against their alarm sensors, which kept becoming alarmed. (I brought the pruning shears just in case I needed to fend off an actual intruder, but ended up trimming their errant roses.)

This, in short, is a desert storm (aka sandstorm), or Khamsin (Arabic); in Hebrew it’s called a Sharav, which is my favorite term for it. It is not at all uncommon to have one of these at the beginning of May, as spring turns to summer – - and I’m guessing there’s a meteorological explanation for that.

But what I know is that later on the skies will be yellowish-orange (or bright, eerie, end-of-days white) as the sun sets, as if the world was finally imploding from the economic crisis and the swine flu (Happy Windsday, Piglet!) and the Iranian menace; as if the pit in my stomach was finally expanding to envelop all of you.

I also know that I had better keep all of the windows closed if I don’t want a fine layer of orange dust all over the beds and sinks and floors.

I know that I feel longing and upheaval although it is not clear for what. And that what happens in vagus stays in vagus.

Check out a poem I wrote back in my roaring 20’s. (Suburbia still hasn’t managed to kill it for us):

Sharav (Desert Storm)

Can you show me beauty?
Nights so thick
the air suspends
the future in its teeth
ripping fleshy suburbs
from the bones of lazy poets
lovers kissing extra,
with their noses – -
slow hands;
an urgency in it
the stars are hazy fuzzy
drunken dots of fate so far away
they bear no witness
to the rhythmic frenzy
on neighborhood streets
Just tonight:
the stodgy oaks are palm trees
and boxy sidewalks turn to sand.

- SKE, March 1998

PS -By the time my host came back up in time to load this post, written yesterday, the skies have partially cleared, the wind has calmed, and the air is cool. Such is the nature of storms, I guess.

photo by: la_febbra

…I wrote the following back in early 2000 as part of a (unpublished) novel about a writer. I tell you this because: a. the essay includes no mention of social media and I didn’t want you to think, God forbid, that I was living in a cave; and b. I’m trying to brag, in subtle fashion, that I observed this whole intimacy with strangers dynamic looooong ago, before everyone else was writing about this stuff… also that I wrote a novel at 27; and c. I’m kind of sad that it never got published so I plan on chopping it up and publishing on here. Just saying…

Today there are no signatures. I sign all my e-mails “S”, and it seems to be good enough. I have corresponded for months with people whose voices I have never heard. I do not know if they have a quick East Coast way of catching your sentences before you say them, or if they’re Midwesterners who listen until you’re well past done, and you’re waiting and waiting for them to say something.

I do not know these things because all the lines and words and sentences come out the same in my inbox, with no spaces or pauses or interrupted syllables, no heavy smoker’s timbre, no just-out-of-grad-school deliberateness. I cannot hear or feel. I know only what passes through the spell check.

Now it’s all in the imagining, and in the censorship. The ability to be anyone we chose to be, very carefully, and to be with anyone we can conjecture. In fact, it doesn’t matter who the “letter” is from, just who we think it could be from, and what we think they think of us.

*****************

In cyberspace, there is nothing as personal as, for example, finding someone’s hair on your jacket when you come home from meeting with him or her over lunch. You cannot smell anyone’s cologne hastily dashed on; you cannot feel their foot accidentally knock yours under the table. It is hospital sterile in here.

And at the same time, it is violently intimate.

In cyberspace, there is nothing as mundane, as subtle, as finding someone else’s hair on your jacket. The conversation is somehow more open, more daring, more immediately personal, even with people you know in real life. Sometimes I wonder what happens to people online, what chemical changes are taking place as the modem comes alive. We type in things we would never say. We confide and advise and allude and become a sort of ghost accomplice, a sudden Times New Roman best friend.

When we meet again, in person, we often do not speak of the e-mail. We must start over. No-fair cyber, we’d say, if we wanted to talk about it.

But we don’t. In fact, in person, there is often very little to talk about.

*****************

We seem to be living in a post-human time, one degree away from life. Seeking some self-knowledge by machinated expressions, by echo – - like Narcissus, by reflection.

This, too, is a pool we can fall into as we look, but the drowning feels much better than we’d imagined.

photo by: Jason Nicholls

Meditations on Early Writing:
….On Camp Letters

(…an excerpt from an unpublished novel, about a writer…but that’s another story…)

Back in the day, before we were virtual, we used to keep postcards and letters in shoeboxes. The girls would write on stationery, cool yellow sheets about the size of a paperback. Sometimes cute white dots would frame the page, matching in a profound way the very round, bubbly handwriting of the girls whose notes you copied.

The boys scribbled and drew cartoons right in the middle of sentences. They were Vonnegut-style letters, before any of us had ever read Vonnegut, disjointed and scrawled and somehow fitting together into a personality, if not a coherent series of thoughts.

We sent these to each other during the summer, when one of us was away at camp, the other bored to death at home. We equaled roughly the sum of the letters we received, how many people missed us enough to write us doodle-y notes about nothing.

And we kept them. In shoeboxes that some of us are just now collecting from our mothers, who are unexpectedly sick of playing hostess to our childhoods. We sometimes read these letters now and we are shocked, not at how far away it all seems, but at how close, how similar.

We are sweetly familiar to ourselves, and it dawns on us that perhaps we always have been.

…And now, the letters somehow mean something more than the friend or more-than-friend ever did; the admirer who saw fit to imagine us once is today the same as the ink. Incubating in those shoeboxes are echoes of us, chaotic scraps of becoming something.