Respecting Your Elders

I have literary things to discuss, but for now, a quick story:

Last Saturday I went to the post office and got in line behind a gentleman who appeared to be in his 60s. He turned to me and, without provocation, said, "Do you know what the problem with the younger generation is?"

I looked at him.

"The problem with the younger generation is," he told me, "they don't want to work."

Really. "I hold multiple jobs," I told him.

"Well then, you're the exception," he said. "Young people don't like working."

There are other days when I would have been nicer, when I would have humored his dumb-old-fart routine. Not that day, not after a week of all my friends either getting laid off, or being overworked as a result of other people getting laid off, or working their rear ends off because of a fear of getting laid off, or generally just working their rear ends off because the price of things is soooo much high than when Mr. Baby Boomer turned 30 years old.

Not that day.

"I don't want to talk about this," I told him. "Go have that conversation with someone else."

And the crazy thing? He kept talking! It took a few more sentences of him talking about the younger generation without me answering before he got the point that I wasn't going to participate.

Seriously, Boomers. Can you please just stop?

Deadline Thoughts

The Wii is a lot more fun than finishing the two articles I have due tomorrow.

Blogs are for procrastination, aren't they?

Strunk & White Goes Down

You know you're a grammar nerd when you hear something like this and you laugh so hard you miss your exit.

It's a miffed celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. If nothing else, it's also the best use of the word "arachnophobic" ever.

Bylines: Dramatics

A busy month that has brought exciting things so far!

My short play "Villainy!" which premiered at the 2007 Out of Ink Showcase (produced by Austin Script Works) appears in the March 2009 issue of Dramatics magazine. Order a copy and see for yourself: it's a short play that combines theater with silent film, a hybrid stageplay/screenplay. "Villainy!" is a blast to stage and even more fun to watch.

Thanks to the original team who produced the play and filmed the film, especially Lowell Bartholomee of Bayou Radio who directed and edited the project.

Book Report: One Perfect Day

Good little bookworm that I am, in the process of planning my wedding I have also been reading about weddings. Not so much the Martha Stewart library (although you may have seen me sneaking guilty reads at the grocery store magazine rack), but a more academic review of the American wedding industry in Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. (By the way, as of today it's on sale at Amazon for a crazy-good discount.)

Mead writes for the New Yorker, and her prose is just as entertaining and readable as most that appears in that publication. She evaluates, perhaps even attacks the wedding industry, on several angles: the dress, the planner, the videographer, and so on. Throughout, it's clear that those working in the industry are out to make as much money as they possibly can off of women who are made vulnerable by their uncertainty and excitement over a point of passage in their lives.

Well, duh.

One trip to David's Bridal will leave you feeling exactly the same way, as the saleswomen are told to bedeck you with veil and purse whether you want them or not, and it's up to the individual shopping there, or pretty much at any wedding retailer, to keep her sanity intact and not let loose in the face of a $125 Swarovski crystal tiara.

And what are Swarovski crystals, anyway? Wikipedia (so check me on this) says they're cut-glass. With lead.

Anyway, Mead is right. The wedding industry is trying to snooker women into spending as much as possible. That's business. It is interesting, though, to read her history of the development of weddings throughout the last few centuries, such as how common was that supposedly indispensable diamond ring in your grandmother's day, anyway?

There's something Mead left out, however. I've begun noticing lately that any woman I speak to who decided to have a small, no-frills wedding (as in, few to no guests, probably at the courthouse, no big meal for anybody, etc.) seems barely able to hold herself back from shaking me by the arms in an effort to make me have a wedding just like hers.

The details of mine, as they're shaping up, aren't for posting here, but I will say that our budget is below the 2008 average of about $21,000. A friend is making the cake. We're hardly doing anything to decorate the chapel or reception space. There will be no garter or bouquet toss. A friend/colleague is cutting us a deal on photography. We have a few areas that we've chosen to splurge on, and we've been very deliberate about what those will be.

And according to many women, I'm still way far over the top. I'm wasting money, time, and effort for one day. I'm putting too much energy into something that people don't care about. That I should just look like myself on my wedding day, not dressed up to any extreme. And so on.

But what these women, and what Mead herself, are missing, is that it is in fact possible to have a meaningful event that is centered around not presenting the bride as the perfect female specimen, but around celebrating the beginning of a marriage and the joining of two families.

Of brides and grooms who choose a destination wedding package, Mead writes,

It was the same wedding package sold to every American bride and groom by the American wedding industry, which provides not just the goods and services for weddings, but the compelling fantasies on which their use is grounded. This husband and wife were saying "I do" to the long white gown and the tiered cake and the wreaths of flowers - the trappings of the traditionalesque... They were saying "I do" to the sentimental murmurings of a minister-for-hire, an official with whom they had no past and no future; "I do" to being, for a fleeting moment, the center of attention, and to having the moment ritually preserved by the flashing of cameras. They were saying "I do" to their celebration as individuals whose own tastes and desires were paramount, trumping the practices of the past and the oversight of religious institutions and familial authorities; and "I do" to their consecration as a world unto themselves, there in romantic isolation at the water's edge, about to invent their future together. And they were saying "I do" to the wedding industry's own assumption of nuptial authority, administered through bridal magazines, bridal stores, department-store wedding registries, and all the other venues in which romance and commerce have become inextricably entwined.

But is one not allowed to be a consumer in this part of life as well, picking and choosing from the vast array of goods and services to decide which ones will be suitable and which ones will not? It's true, many people will make bad, over-the-top choices or tacky decisions. Those are the ladies and gentlemen whose antics are made huge through shows like Bridezilla, and though Mead doesn't focus on these ladies exclusively, she does seem to treat them with a sort of outsider's exasperation.

But there are also people who have tasteful weddings, large and small. There are even those who, in spite of immense commercial pressures, find a way to make meaningful moments to mark the passing from one social identity to another without eschewing altogether the trappings of ceremony.

It can be done.

Bylines: PieceWork

It's been a long time coming that a query letter I've written with no personal introduction or close connection resulted in a "yes." (To be fair, I probably wrote some pretty silly queries in the early days.) Finally, I've built my own new bridge.

Mum's the word on the exact subject, but in a year (they have a generous lead-time) you can see one of my articles appear in PieceWork, published by Interweave Press. I'm super-dandy excited and can't wait to get to work.

Type-A Flu: the writer's race against time

You know that feeling when you wake up and you just know that by the end of the day you're going to be delirious with a fever?

And you know that feeling when you wake up knowing that if you bust your bum, you'll be able to make that big deadline you have waiting for you?

Now combine those feelings.

Today turned into a race against time as I whipped through my interview material to finish an article for next week's Chronicle, before the fever set in and I started writing haikus about my bedroom ceiling.

The article is about how small local theater companies are, surprisingly, doing quite well despite the current recession. It is of course possible that instead of attaching my article, in my feverish state I instead sent my editor my grocery list or my personal diary from 11th grade. Would hate for it to be one of the two latter. Does Austin really need to know all about my organic blueberry jam?

Now it's off to the couch to watch the second disc of Pride and Prejudice. When I left, Lizzie had just received a letter from Jane while on holiday... (This is the part where everybody else on the planet who's seen this adaptation goes, "Ooohhhhh!")