Namaste, Jealousy

I know you're supposed to clear your mind while you're doing yoga, but yesterday in my yoga class, I got to thinking about competition. It's something I've posted about before, but it's certainly not something that hit the back burner once I regurgitated a few thoughts into my blog. The competitive instinct is ever-present in most writers (especially those of us who haven't yet "made it", or indeed, written much of anything).

This came up in yoga because I arrived a little early to secure a good floor spot and do a little decompressing. At most gyms near my office, the yoga class will in fact fill to capacity if it's in a central location at a central time. Even the 8 a.m. class I sometimes attend fills up. So I wasn't the only one who arrived a little early. There were a few other people there, also decompressing and warming up, only their decompression process was a little different from mine. Their warm-ups were about three or four notches past anything I can do, yoga-wise. I felt neither impressed nor threatened by their mad yoga skillz. I didn't even feel threatened when we started the class and we got to poses I couldn't hold. I was totally cool hanging out in Child's Pose or Downward Dog once we got to Crane Pose, and I didn't feel like I didn't belong, or like the showoffs who could spend five minutes in a headstand were out to show me up because I can't balance my entire body weight on my fingertips or something like that.

And it made me wonder why it is that when I'm around other writers, I often feel my hackles go up, but I never feel threatened when I'm in a class at my gym - any class. I've been boxing and kickboxing for three years and I never feel threatened by all the guys in my boxing classes who look like video game characters, either. Aren't sports supposed to be competitive? At my level of writerhood, there are way more visible milestones that someone has a certain level of expertise at a sport than there are at writing. Either you have the balance to stand solidly in Warrior III or you don't. Either your roundhouse will knock someone out or it won't. Your goals are pretty clear at the gym - get strong enough to stand on one leg while bending forward, do an unassisted dip, run an 8-minute mile, lose 10 pounds.

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the fact that you really can't quantify writing skills or writing success. One would think that if we're all in the same writing boat, the lot of us aspiring writers would be willing to send encouraging words, talk shop, support each other's efforts, the whole nine yards. But by and large, writers are not social, supportive creatures. We treat the Writing Boat like it's the subway in rush hour, and there are only a certain number of seats, and we have to scramble to sit down before someone else takes what's rightfully ours.

Despite the fact that I parrot the "if you're good you can't hide it forever" mantra, I still feel the scramble sometimes. I don't even send good vibes to my close friends as much as I should. I've actively sabotaged friendships with fellow aspiring writers, in fact, which I think partially originated from this same competitive impulse. We were perfectly lovely to each other until we started talking about our shared ambition to eventually write for a living, and then we both sort of ...shut down.

It is awfully tempting to end this post with some little bite-sized hunk of triteness, ala, "in yoga we are taught the word 'namaste' which means 'I worship the divine in you and all of us.' Perhaps we can apply this concept to our writing lives, and celebrate the talents and successes of our peers." But I won't. I posted my previous thoughts on competition and jealousy over a year ago and I don't think I've evolved much since then. It's not a mature or healthy thing to do, and it doesn't help me or them. But still I do it. Still many people do it. And I don't know the answer to what sort of processes it will take to get us all to stop cutting each other down and start building each other up.

Besides, I'm not all that good at yoga yet. Maybe I can speak with authority on namaste when I can hold that stupid Warrior III pose for longer than half a second.

A Very Special Blog Entry

Ninth-grade gym class was the bane of my existence. Throughout my middle-school and high-school experience, I was told over and over that my natural atheticism (or complete and utter lack thereof) didn't matter - grading was based on enthusiasm and sportsmanship. But gym had been okay in 7th and 8th grades because I felt like this was how it actually worked. Mrs. S. and I had our differences, and I certainly wasn't always the paragon of enthusiasm and sportsmanship, but if I tried, I was rewarded, and she understood that it took a lot more effort for me to pretend I was having a good time when I served the volleyball five feet short of the net for the tenth consecutive time than it would elsewhere in school - say, in the spelling bee.

My 9th grade gym teacher, though, was different. Mrs P. spouted the same party line that all the others had - good attitude counted more than being good at sports - but she sure didn't practice it, as far as I could tell. Day after day, I painted the grin on my face, cheered for my teammates, bounced through the folk-dancing steps with all the energy I could muster, crammed my head full of court dimensions and rules to ace the written tests...and I was still pulling in a solid B. If I didn't suddenly morph into Wonder Woman for the badminton unit, I'd be camped out in 3.8 land for the quarter.

I was optimistic, though, because we were playing a mixed-doubles tournament, which Mrs. P. thought would give a good introduction to seeding and tournament structure. She would pair us off and attempt to balance our ability levels to make the playing field a little more even. Obviously, this meant I'd be paired with a boy who could actually hit the birdie from time to time, and maybe he could make up for the fact that I hopelessly lacked hand-eye coordination. Maybe we'd win some games and place in the tournament. The top three were getting bonus points on their grades, I knew that much.

On the first day of the tournament, Mrs. P. sat us all down and read off the pairings. Sure enough, the stronger girls were being paired with the weaker boys, and vice versa. My name kept not getting called. I started to get worried as all of the better athletes were paired with people other than me. I didn't hear my name until she called out the very last pair on the list.

Jessica and...Laura?

Wait, wasn't this mixed doubles?

I looked around and noted that there were two more girls than boys. Okay, so that made some sense that one pair would be all female. But Laura? That made no sense at all.

Laura was in special education. I don't think anybody ever knew what exactly was wrong with her - there was nothing obvious beyond a vague simplicity to her language and a stocky, lumbering body - but she was different enough that we noticed something was not quite there. Despite a pretty good showing at the Special Olympics every year, Laura still couldn't compete with the rest of the class, athletically speaking, and, well, I wasn't much better. (In fact, I might have been worse.)

But I had no problems with Laura. We were going to get shut out on every single game, this much was evident, but at least she was nice.

Sure enough, our first day on the court, we were 0-3, although at least one of the games wasn't a total shut-out. Our losing streak continued for the next several days, until finally, convinced it was part of Mrs. P.'s secret conspiracy to wreck my GPA, I confronted her.

"You know I'm not very good at sports," I said. "I thought you wanted to make the teams evenly balanced. So why did you put me with Laura? We haven't won a single game yet. We're lucky to have scored points."

"It's not about you," Mrs. P. said. "It's more about Laura. You're one of the only people in the class who's ever nice to her. I wanted to make sure she was paired with someone who wouldn't get upset if she didn't play well."

It was flattering enough to shut me up - did I really come off as that nice? I had never been best friends with Laura, but I'd tried to avoid making fun of her. It made me a little sad to think that not going out of my way to mock her constituted being one of the nicer kids in the class. I think, looking back, that Mrs. P. might have been blowing a minimal amount of smoke up my ass on that one, but it did have the desired effect. I liked the idea that I was seen as nice, and I resolved to live up to it.

So I got back out on the court, and, armed with the knowledge that this really was an exercise in sportsmanship and attitude, I actually relaxed and had fun. Laura and I both started getting better at the game. We even had a couple of very close matches. When she was absent one day and I had to play with Billy B., whose partner was also absent, I found that I wasn't a huge embarrassment - I actually outscored Billy.

I'm pretty sure we placed last in the tournament, but it was a hell of a lot more fun than playing with any of the athletic boys would have been. Laura, being a generally sweet-tempered girl, never once commented on my playing except to tell me I shouldn't get angry at myself for missing a shot. And while I probably started out patronizing her a little bit, near the end, we were genuinely excited to root for each other whenever one of us scored a point.

Lest you think I'm getting totally glurgey and rose-colored-glasses-y, I will point out that I did ultimately wind up in last place with no bonus points in the tournament, a B for the semester, and renewed disgust for public school physical education and its GPA-wrecking message of brawn over brains, but for about three weeks, I felt like P.E. actually taught me something important. I'm giving half the credit to Mrs. P. on this one and the rest to Laura.

Orbiting the Literary Planet

New stuff is afoot.

My new change in appearance: I took the plunge and got the rest of my hair chopped short, ala Jean Seberg in Breathless. I've never had enough cheekbones (i.e. been thin enough) to pull this off before. So far, I love it. I don't even have to comb my hair when I get out of the shower. I just sort of mess it up a little and it looks more professional than ever.

But you didn't come here for vanity updates. You probably came to find out if I dropped off the face of the literary planet entirely after I stopped doing Barbes.

Well, sort of. Not entirely.

My new project of late: I'm taking a writing class.

I'm itching to blog about the details of the class, the types of people in it, what we've done so far, what the teacher is like...but I know all too well that the first time someone in the class decides to google their classmates, I'd be in big trouble of Harriet the Spy proportions. Even if I said nice things, I'd be afraid of this happening. Hell, I'm already afraid that merely by having a website where I pretend to be a writer, I'm asking for trouble.

But I will tell you that so far, it's going okay. I've even volunteered to have my current project workshopped in the next couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to getting feedback. Hopefully I will not be damned with faint praise. (One of the most crushing moments of my adult writing life happened after my first reading at Barbes. When I met the relatively well-known author who'd "headlined" the reading, she shook my hand and said to me, in a tone that could not be any more disinterested, "you're a good writer." I'm sure she meant to be gracious and polite, but I never wanted to throw in the towel, and never write another word, more than when I received the lamest, blandest compliment possible. Maybe this is why Salinger doesn't write anymore. Perhaps, like, Truman Capote or Nabokov or someone told him his books were "nice.")

My other new project of late: I'm doing some freelance book reviewing.

That's right. A rather large and high-profile publication is actually sending me books in the mail, which I'm to read and write a small review, after which point they'll publish my review in their publication and then they will send me money. It's not enough to quit my day job yet, obviously, but someone is paying me to read books. I'm ridiculously excited about this. My first book arrived yesterday. I have already finished reading it. I'm like a little kid who's just started a new grade in school (and hasn't yet been jaded by the concept of school in general). Did I mention I get to keep the books when I'm done? Whose idea was this? It's like being paid to ride roller coasters and eat ice cream.

All of this reading and writing at the behest of others makes me deeply regret not having taken more English classes when I was in school. Hell, I wish I'd double-majored. But English, at the time, seemed like such a pedestrian thing to study in college, and I didn't want to put any actual, serious stock in the notion that I could actually do something fiction-writey for a living. (Honestly, I didn't think much about the "real world" in general when I was in college. That's liberal arts for you.)

Partially, I think I was afraid of becoming one of those space cadets with an MFA who's capable of doing nothing but churning out directionless, flowery prose and nattering on about their "art" in a smug, superior tone to anybody who'll listen (fellow guests at cocktail parties, bored relatives, perhaps the captive audience of a community college class if I got really lucky). (Forgetting all the while, of course, that I may occasionally be directionless, but rarely am I flowery.) I needed real world experience and real life events and skills. Mostly, though, I was scared. Scared and lazy.

Truth is, I'm not actually all that bad when I put my mind to writing and my fingers to keyboard, and I know this. And the only way to improve on "not actually all that bad" is to keep doing it, whether freelancing or working for a class.

Quacks in the Digital Veneer

(ed. note - yes, this is a re-post...but I liked it. Not quite a "greatest hit" per se, but it's not a bad idea to save in here the more interesting things that come out of other places I've been known to blog, especially when I have phases of extensive trouble coming up with blog topics in either forum...but original content SHOULD be coming to Bitty Soda soon, I think.)

A few weeks back, I was introduced to the wondrous wonderfulness that is Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey by Something Awful, via friends on LiveJournal. JMPP is ever so wonderful - she's slim and young and gorgeous and well-traveled and owns her own business and men everywhere want to date her! Just ask her and she'll tell you all about it. She claims to be an Objectivist, but for a Randroid, she seems a little excessively caught up in how favorably she compares to the rest of the world, and how much better she is than your average girl.

But annoying conceited people are everywhere. That's not an Internet-unique phenomenon. The Internet-unique phenomenon is the "exteriorally reformed geek." By geek here, I don't mean savvy, technically adept, Elvis Costello-listening, Wired-reading chicness. I mean geek in the other sense. No, not the chicken-head-biting sense either. The OTHER other sense. The sense of the social outcast with the shyness problem and the awkwardness problem and perhaps a touch of the hygiene problem.

A lot of us girls grew up smarter-than-average and chubby and picked-on. We had a harder time making friends and settling into a rung on the high-school pecking order. Our arch-nemeses, either real or imagined, were the flocks of catty popular girls who were pretty and thin and got all the boyfriends. In the usual progression of things, we'd grow older, grow into our bodies (or at least grow comfortable with them), leave the catty popular girls behind, and generally live our lives having evolved past the ugly duckling phase. Not everyone sheds the weight and gets a makeover, and not everyone loses that insecurity (in fact, nobody ever loses it completely)...but one way or another the awkward phase lifts and adulthood settles in. We let go of the desire to compete in those arenas. We learn more easily that the kind of validation those girls got isn't the only currency in the world. The transition is rough, but swanhood awaits.

But people my age hit adolescence around the same time something else hit the world - the ability to talk to strangers without meeting them face-to-face. With that ability also came the ability to connect to smaller and smaller subsets of people based on a common interest or similar intelligence level. It also heralded the ability to find romance, or at least suitors, with a few IM sessions and the swapping of your most flattering photo.

You would think, given all that, that the Internet makes it easier to get out of Ugly Duckling mode. It doesn't. If anything, it's harder. You never have to seek validation from within if you can get it from 50-100 sad men writing to your personal ad or posting comments in your blog. Awkward teen girls the world over have found, in the Internet, a land where there is a reasonable facsimile of popularity to those who want it. And so they have learned to crave the same attention online that their more popular peers received in real life.

And that's when you get your Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passeys - the catty, attention-whoring, hypercompetitive hybrids that incorporate all the insecurities of the ugly-duckling geeky teen girls and all of the cattiness of the beautiful popular teen girls that got all the boyfriends...and virtually nothing of a mature adult.

The insecurities that she carries over from her "overweight and ugly" phase still come through loud and clear. She may be comparing herself favorably to all of humanity in this blog post, but she's really comparing herself favorably to the pretty popular girls who got all the boyfriends when she was 16. She's still stuck in THAT comparison, and she is very anxious to prove to everyone that she grew up and became much better than they will ever hope to be. As Sharon put it, "she wants to be the most popular girl in school so she can reject all the boys that rejected her."

And so do most of her readers. Note that of her comments, about two-thirds of them are women trying to one-up her - "I'm thinner than you, my IQ is higher than yours, I get 1000 responses to my personal ad, I would have done X where you did Y, I have a boyfriend and you don't, and I don't need to go trumpeting about it in my blog in front of God and everyone." If they're not saying that literally, then they're implying it with their weak attempts to psychoanalyze her (much like my own weak attempt here). And the final third is made up generally of men who think they've found a reformed-geek kindred spirit and hit on her, thus further fueling her posts about how men unworthy of her won't leave her alone.

Sure, the Internet has helped a lot of people. I would venture to say that this same desire for validation coaxed yours truly out of her shell somewhat. I'm not even saying I'm immune to the disease that Ms. Passey has. Hell, look at me - I'm subtly trying to come off as more evolved here. Okay, it's not subtle at all. And I don't actually even think I am more evolved. But I don't need you all to pat me on the back for being more attractive than I was in college and occasionally being attractive to men. I figure this was something I was supposed to do - self-betterment and all.

You can learn one of two things from being an ugly duckling. You can learn how to grow up to be a swan, or you can make yourself into a pretty duck. I'm seeing many fewer swans out there in internets land, and many more pretty ducks, with much louder voices. And the worst types are the pretty ducks who think they're swans.