My friend Sara was up visiting the NY metro area this weekend, so she came into Manhattan yesterday morning and spent the majority of the day with me. We had tea, walked a bit, did some shopping, walked some more, took the dog I’m sitting for on a super long walk in the park, ate some yummie vegan-friendly foods and had more tea.

Throughout the day, we were both finding it difficult to think of the words we wanted to use - this resulted in made-up words (I’d call them neologisms - but I’m pretty sure they’re not real), saying the wrong words (but knowing what we meant) and just lots of “I know this!” moments/”tip of the tongue” syndrome (lethologica if you can’t remember the right word; anomia is a more severe version of this that comes with aphasia - impairment of speech due to brain damage). In both our cases, this was due to lack of quality restful sleep - and I find that’s the first manifestation of sleep deficit in my world. All this week I’ve been struggling to think of words - words like “attrition” and “tomb”, for example.

Today, I’ve been feeling gross and headachey, so aside from walking the dog, my activities have included watching movies, reading and doing NYT crossword puzzles. Between last night and now, I’ve watched “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (impressed), “Juno” (underwhelmed), “Hairspray” (surprised), “Bride and Prejudice” (Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice - Naveen Andrews line-dancing = strangely hot), and, randomly, the E! True Hollywood Story of the Kardashian family (because I thought to myself, “What the hell are they actually famous for? I’m still asking the same question…).

Aside from seeing Sara, these are all just empty diversions and I am aware of it. I spoke with my mother in Poland today; amidst everything else, she had forgotten it was Mother’s Day. The service for my grandfather is tomorrow, and I lost it a little when she told me about picking out the urn (he wanted to be cremated, so that was done on Friday) and going over home renovation plans with my grandmother to make sure that she’s safe now that she’s going to be alone (another hard realization).

She mentioned to me that she’s reminded of my grandfather everywhere she looks… when coming back from a cousin’s house last night, she looked up at the balcony of my grandparents’ home where my grandmother and grandfather would always stand and wait for us when we were arriving from the airport or from being out somewhere anytime we came to visit. We would pull up and they would be standing up there together, waving down at us and smiling. I can see them; it’s an extremely vivid memory. Now, she said, it was just my grandmother standing there waving to them - and I can’t write about that anymore.

And this is probably too personal for the direction I want to be heading here, too much information, and I think I shall end this post now.

I was doing a little organizing and re-shelving my books and found my copy of the Selected Poems of John Ashbery sitting in with the rest of the books. The only books I have separated out from the rest of my library are my poetry books, so this a small enough division that I can maintain it. I flipped through and the title of this poem caught my eye:

Saying It To Keep It From Happening

Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody
Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay—
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling.
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless. Yet in the end each of us
Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time
That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,
Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were
The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,
Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,
Yet would like an exacter share, something about time
That only a clock can tell you; how it feels, not what it means.
It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,
Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.
If it isn’t enough, take the idea
Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers
Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more
In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end
As though you cared. The even combined with
Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiser
Usages of age, but it’s both there
And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,
At the back of the mind, where we live now.

Since my personal library holdings recently crossed the 1,000 book threshold, I decided that it might be time to slow down the acquisition of new books and re-read some of the good ones that I haven’t touched in a while.*

I decided to start this re-reading with Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. I vividly remembered the beginning and had (as it turns out) a good grasp on the general story, though I’d forgotten some of the finer details. On the basis of this very positive recollection (and my enjoyment of Paul Auster’s work as a whole) I got it for a friend for Christmas since I thought he’d really enjoy it, too.

And having re-read it, two good things have happened. One, I enjoyed it tremendously this time around as well and, two, I’ll have it fresh in my mind if there is book discussion to be had. I even have Post-it® note flags marking certain sections of the book, two of which I will share here, with some set-up but not too much exposition.

The main character has found employment with a cranky, blind, paraplegic man; he works as his companion, reading to him, pushing his wheelchair around the Upper West Side of Manhattan, etc. One of his tasks is to describe their surroundings as accurately as possible while they walk. At this point in the story, he’s realized how difficult this task is:

Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself to look at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon.

Then there’s a sort of story within a story - a narrative that the protagonist hears from another character. He’s just mentioned that the circumstances of their respective stories are similar, and that he understands the other man better than he perhaps thought he could/would:

… my situation had been far less desperate than his. When a man feels he has come to the end of his rope, it is perfectly natural that he should want to scream. The air bunches in his lungs, and he cannot breathe unless he pushes it out of him, unless he howls it forth with all his strength. Otherwise, he will choke on his own breath, the very sky will smother him.

It’s always gratifying to me to come across words or thoughts in a book that I can truly understand. Both of these bits fit the bill. I have struggled with the inadequacy of words for describing certain things and thought about how our individual perceptions of objects or feelings can never be accurately communicated to another person; we’re only ever talking in approximations since your vision of “robin’s egg blue” is going to be different from what I see in my mind’s eye. Even if we’re both looking at the same exact color swatch, there’s no way to tell that we’re perceiving that color the same way. The same goes for getting the description back out to someone.

It’s frustrating but wonderful at the same time; it’s a bit of semiotics. We’d like to think we understand one another or the people with whom we “click” or consider to be close to us, but on the most fundamental level, we never truly can because words are only signs—broad representations of ideas and thoughts. We can only ever approximate. I think the effort, though, is what forges relationships - how much time and energy we are willing to put into the attempt to bridge that gap.

And the screaming thing? I get it. For me, if often comes down to the choice between a scream or hysterical crying. I usually opt for the latter (suburbia is not hot on primal scream therapy), but the sensation is the same. Yes, the air bunches in my lungs and I feel like I’ll choke on my own breath if I don’t get it the hell out of me.

So. A good book. I might officially be on a Paul Auster kick after this because I can re-read “Book of Illusions”, “Mr. Vertigo” or “The New York Trilogy.” Yippee!

_________________________________

* Mind you, that didn’t stop me from ordering a used copy of “Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon”. The book’s premise is that “television heroine Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, has been an unlikely source of language change. In his book [the author] tells how this unconventional teen challenged linguistic taboos and introduced new words and phrases in nearly every show.” Furthemore, on PBS’s “Do You Speak American?” website, they featured the following excerpt:

Buffy has introduced new slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode, many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new formative tendencies… Besides contributing items to the slang lexicon, slayer slang intensifies current formative practices in slang: it glories in them, certainly, but it also constitutes, by exaggerating them, a critique of those practices. For instance, the writers acknowledge that slang increasingly trades on references to popular culture by shifting proper names into other parts of speech, both verbs and adjectives. Thus Xander asks in Puppet Show (5 May 1997), “Does anyone feel like we’ve been Keyser Sozed?” after the character in The Usual Suspects when he means ‘tricked, manipulated’. Afraid that Halloween will get out of hand, Xander remarks in Halloween (27 October 1997), “Halloween quiet? I figured it would have been a big ole vamp Scareapolooza,” from the alternative rock festival Lollapalooza; similarly he argues in The Wish (8 December 1998), “Look, you wanna do Guiltapalooza, fine, but I’m done with that.”

For those who aren’t grammar and punctuation nerds (albeit a bit free-thinking when it comes to blogging), here’s a definition of the Oxford comma from Wikipedia:

“The serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma or Harvard comma) is the comma used immediately before a grammatical conjunction (nearly always and or or; sometimes nor) that precedes the last item in a list of three or more items. The phrase “Portugal, Spain, and France”, for example, is written with the serial comma, while “Portugal, Spain and France”, identical in meaning, is written without it. There is no consensus among writers or editors on the use of the serial comma. It is closer to being standard use in American English than it is in British English.”

I don’t generally use the Oxford comma in a list of items, but I do before a grammatical conjunction. I need to deal with this inconsistency. It’s simply unacceptable.

In the meantime, though, there’s a good song by Vampire Weekend called “Oxford Comma.”And really, I think the first line of the song speaks for most people and their stance on the Oxford comma issue.

Vampire Weekend - “Oxford Comma”

Almost two years ago now (it may be closer to a year and a half, but I’m not keeping track), I deleted my accounts at all the social networking sites I belonged to. At that time, Facebook was still only open to college students and corporations (that changed all the way back in Sept. 2006). Friendster was beginning to die its slow painful death, and MySpace was teh hawtness (if I may use a two-year old -or more- slang phrase).

Yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, one of their contributors talked about abandoning Facebook altogether and how she feels like a Luddite. You can listen to the piece here (it’s only 2 min. long). Granted, she’s 23, so the six-year gap between us probably makes enough of a difference that it’s a much bigger deal for her to be absent from Facebook than it is/was for me. She probably is considered a Luddite by some of her friends (though I daresay they might not be familiar with the word).

Most of my friends continue to plug away at Facebook (and there are a few MySpace hangers on) and communicating with friends that way: e.g. “I’ll just Facebook [name] and see if she is going to be around,” or “I left a message for [name] on Facebook asking him to pick that up for me.”

I don’t operate that way. It seems like a terribly inefficient way to communicate with friends. For quick things like that - send a text message. Your friends always have their cell phones with them. For longer things, send an email (or actually call, if it’s urgent). Leaving a message on Facebook requires your friend to be sitting at their computer/laptop somewhere, logged in (and chances are they’re probably on there all the time, so I have to allow for this difference between myself and 58 million other people) and deal with anything else that might’ve popped up: someone’s annoying post about how drunk they were this weekend or much they love their boyfriend, embedded YouTube video of the newest annoying viral phenomenon, perhaps some invitations to get together at a bar with only 40 or 50 of a person’s other closest friends - and “pokes” (We are how old? Oh, wait, this was created with a slightly younger set in mind).

There’s all this periphery and noise - the ads, the streams of irrelevant info being generated by people you feel compelled to befriend but really don’t need/want to know about beyond their pre-established role in your life… a veritable buffet of empty and useless distraction parading around under the guise of social networking.

“Social” = friendly (and who wants to be seen as unfriendly?) “Networking” = is supposed to provide both the technological element and some aspect of legitimacy? Every high school and college student hears about how important networking is to his/her future. Look! We’ve made it fun (or at least made the buzzwords)! “Social networking.”

While Facebook hasn’t become a complete and utter visual vomitorium like MySpace (which is one nice thing), the framework is the same. Users will want more and more control and the powers that be will slowly grant it - little things, but enough to make people feel like they have some control and prevent them from deserting the site which I feel would happen if they had too much/little control. See also: MySpace. It’s the country club effect, I suppose. Some restrictions give it a sense of exclusivity - “Well, if we can’t limit membership, then at least the standards of dress are being upheld!”

But look at the little fish flakes of freedom - removing the verb from your status update so you’re free to write WHATEVER YOU WANT! This actually made national news under the headline “Facebook users given grammatical freedom.”

I was just getting fed up with all of it (and apparently continue to be) and had a sort of “Burn it all down! Make it clean! PURGE!” moment. It’s just too much clutter - too much info I don’t need, too much involvement with people encroaching upon my personal time, too much time wasted (since it does become a major time suck - I see this in my younger target-age siblings… hours and hours) that could be spent pursuing something that makes you a better, happier, smarter, healthier person. Or sleeping. Sleep is a good use of time, too.

Full disclosure: I should mention I belong to one real social network - LinkedIn, which I sardonically refer to as “networking for networking’s sake”, repeating something a friend wrote when he sent me an invitation. But no one’s posting invitations to parties on that site… yet. I also belong to Last.fm, but do not participate in community features. I only wanted this fun music widget on the right.

I love the technology. What are you reading? Yeah. I stay abreast of social networking for work and general awareness, but I guess I’m just not the target audience for the medium of social networking. I don’t want more involvement with people. I’m a quiet person (believe it or not) who values time alone. I don’t want shallow connections with lots of people. I prefer deeper real connections with fewer people. I vastly prefer a small dinner party with three people and good conversation over a large gathering where the conversation is limited to surface discussions of TV shows, celebrity gossip and who is playing beer pong - and where everything else gets lost in the noise.

And having spent all this time sitting in front of the computer, I’m going to balance it out with an hour of running - which has been doing an OK job of making me a better, happier and healthier person.