Cuspers!

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I knew there was a word for us!

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I thought I belonged in a group that was post-Boomer and pre-Xer. (I also left out the WWII generation –oops. Apparently not the greatest to me…) I IM’d Kev, who’s always online when I’m composing my blog, but he quoted Wikipedia (“it could be true”) with the standard saw that Boomers were born 1946-1964 and Generation X is 1964-1984. Kev was my high school sweetheart and loyal cohort all these years. But I was sure I’d read something else that gave more insight.

And here it is. This article, written by Jocelyn Noveck, was picked up extensively by papers on the AP service. I randomly picked this posting of it. Besides, how often do YOU read the Texarkana Gazette? Not often, I’m thinking.

Cuspers. I feel like this is so us. Me and President Obama. He was born in ’61 and I was born in ’66. They call us practical idealists — something that resonates with me. In an essay I wrote ten years ago I said:

We grew up in a world already poisoned, species irrevocably lost. To us, to work for the environment means knowing how to keep things from getting worse, and trying to clean up what’s been sullied. We’ve been accused of being a cynical generation, and perhaps that’s accurate. People like Sean and me, we’re not the impassioned knights of the environment. This is our job — one we can believe in, invest in — not a crusade.

I feel so validated now.

I popped this article off to my Boomer mother as soon as I read it. Of course, she was frivolously off touring Egypt at the time, so I had to wait for her indignation. She picked Obama way back when Hillary was still queen of the campaign. In my practical idealist way, I thought Obama couldn’t win. I’m thrilled I was wrong. But if one of us gets to claim Obama as “her president,” it’s my mom, by right of precedence.

All of this parsing means little. How do you draw timelines on generations of people, after all? If we all had babies at the same time, that would be one thing. By the Gen X definition, I’m in the same generation as my stepson and stepdaughter — granted I mucked things up by not actually giving birth to them. Though I could have, if I’d been a teenage mom. Blended families, though, blur these lines as well.

I recognize myself as a Cusper though. My website description, written back in 2002 says this:

My stats make me a fence-sitter: Post-Baby-Boomer, Pre-Generation-X. I saw the first episode of Sesame Street when I was four, but live in a house without television. I grew up in a city in the West that is no longer considered part of the real West.

In college I participated in a pysch experiment where we had to take a personality test: I came out exactly betwen Type A and Type B. I was born on the Leo/Virgo cusp. My friend, who’s a brilliant writer and exactly my age, shy of a few weeks, complained that she received a rejection from and editor who suggested that she uses too many qualifiers. (Here’s a great example list: very, quite, rather, somewhat, more, most, less, least, too, so, just, enough, indeed, still, almost, fairly, really, pretty, even, a bit, a little, a (whole) lot, a good deal, a great deal, kind of, sort of.)

Do you see what I see? That’s right. Cusper words. Indeed, we’re all about the qualified grey area.

Pretty Please

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Email is a funny thing.

And can be an annoying thing, which is where all the rule-making comes from, I think. I belong to several online loops for writers. I’m even president of one–a deeply ironic development since I hadn’t belonged to the group all that long before I was elected. Every day I discover something else I didn’t know. Yesterday, in the course of conversations with our webmistress, who is trying to take our site from pitiful to adequate, we discovered that there are a whole bunch of standard emails being directed to people we’ve never talked to. Along the lines of secretary@ourwebsite.com — and it’s going to someone who isn’t the secretary and may not even be a member anymore.

The whole online-group thing has this impenetrable quality that way. It’s like this huge underwater octopus –only there’s something more like 300 tentacles–and you can only see fleeting glimpes of the eye or tips of the tentacles now and again. The surfacings are when people send email. I love it when I can IM with people because I have a better sense that I can grasp them. At least it’s a real-time interaction, more or less.

Anyway, I emailed one gal asking who she was and what was her niche in the group, which turned out to be this whole sub-group I didn’t know about (reference: every day = something I didn’t know). She wrote back — yay! not everybody actually answers — with a detailed, complete message. I was hammered under a day-job deadline, so I popped her email to the webmistress, fully intending to write the woman back later. As it should be, she and the webmistress engaged in email conversation on the mechanics of what each needed — and I got a reproving note to let her know when I cc or forward her emails.

Does this strike you as odd? It’s this whole loop etiquette thing. You’re not supposed to forward anything off-loop without permission. This wasn’t on-loop, but I did have a vague idea that many of these ladies expect that as a courtesy. They also have this deal about when and how to “clip” the original message, so the emails don’t get so long — it has to do with reading on digest. Now I use email all the time. I’m on email all day. I work in an office in Wyoming with people in Boston, New Hampshire, and Florida. Unless I’m on the road, all of my business interactions are virtual. And it’s interesting to me that the professional email rules are different than those developed by these social groups. My work email gets archived for three years and can be used as evidence in a court of law, for or against me.

I’m keenly aware of what I write in emails and make sure that if, say, my boss or ethics officer, were to show me a copy of one and ask me to defend the content, I can. The fact that any of my emails can be forwarded, cc’d or bcc’d is a given. Asking a client to notify me if any of my emails are forwarded or cc’d is beyond the realm of possibility.

What I’m coming to is, I suspect it’s a generational thing. The older generations — the Boomers and the Silents — have been understandably appalled at the informality of the internet and the consequent lack of universal etiquette. I think some of these writing loops were established by people like this, the presidents of their chapters, the esteemed leaders. There’s a bit of the ladies’ society, junior league aspect to the romance writers collectives. The thing is the Gen X’ers and my cohorts — I forget what group I’m in… something like the straddlers between the Boomers and the X’ers, have been using email for pretty much all of our working lives. It’s just another tool.

I understand why people want to try to tame this animal, to break it to the harness of polite society, but it will never be the embossed, hand-written thank-you note. (Yes–horribly mixed metaphor.) I’ve been having computer issues with my personal laptop, as you know. Turns out my hard-drive tanked (ten days after the warranty expired). What with one thing and another, it took a month to get it fixed. (See? and I never ranted about it!) I’d been viewing my personal email all that time on the work laptop, but when I fired up the personal laptop again, it finally pulled all my personal emails from the server. There were nearly 1,500 of them. This does not include junk mail or anything work-related.

It gives me good perspective on why I have no patience for “netiquette.” Give me an email with all of the back and forth retained, so I can save one copy of the entire correspondence. No, I’m not going to pause and think to let you know that I forwarded your information to the person who needed it. I can see where the laments come in here, how our fast-paced society has done away with the measured grace and manners of the past. But it has. The world turns and times change. I think it was a Boomer who said that.

Let Me Count the Ways

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“Do you love it?” they ask me.

Total strangers walk up to me in airports, at Starbucks, when they see me reading my Kindle. “Do you love it?” they all ask and I let them play with it.

Yeah, I do love it. My mom gave me a Kindle for Christmas, then was devastated that they couldn’t ship it until February 24. But it turns out that they were waiting to complete production and ship the Kindle 2, so it was fine by me. David gave me a Blackberry Storm for Christmas (this was my techno-Christmas, apparently) and I was still trying to learn that. The lament of my age group — we played Pong as kids; we used computers in high school, so it should NOT be this hard to keep up with technology. Everyone is fretting about twitter now. I tried to read a twitter page and nearly clawed my eyes out. One thing at a time, I figure.

Except the Kindle 2 was super-duper easy to get going. I had to read the user guide for a few things, but I found what I was looking for. I love that I can slip it in my purse, that I can pull it out, hit the slider and it opens to my page. Child of my era and my culture, I just love the instant gratification. I finished a book that left me craving more and instantly downloaded the next in the series. It’s light, easy to read, easy to turn the pages.

I found I had to adjust my page-turn timing. As a long-time reader, I have a rhythm of starting to turn the page while finishing the last couple of lines at the bottom. If I hit the next page button on the Kindle at the same rhythm, the page replaces before I finish the last line. But I adjusted pretty quickly to that. I do miss the feel of “having” the book, of seeing the cover image as a prelude to settling in. I read a book on the Kindle that I ended up really loving: Jeaniene Frost’s Halfway to the Grave. (It was her One Foot in the Grave that I immediately downloaded.) Reading her was like having paranormal romance steak after six months of nothing but Ho-Ho’s. (A side note for those interested in such things: they classify her as urban fantasy, see? that means there’s no happily ever after at the end.) Anyway, now that I feel all warm and fuzzy about Jeaniene’s books, I want to HAVE them. Even though I already do. But I don’t have the sexy cover and I didn’t know this was the “Night Huntress” series until I recommended it to someone else. That part I miss. Is it important? We’ll see. It looks like I’ll get to meet Jeaniene at the RT convention — I can hardly have her sign my Kindle. Something for Jeff Bezos to ponder.

So, if you see me in the airport or at Starbucks — Yes, I love it. And of course you can play with it.

Horseplay

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This morning, on our way out of the rec center, David and I passed one of the guys who works there. I commented that, typically, the guy didn’t look at or acknowlege me, though I’ve seen him pretty much every day at the same time for a year now. David compared him to an old acquaintance of ours. “He’s all about work being serious business,” he said, “no horseplay.”

Ooh, I thought, I want to blog about “horseplay” today. When I got home, I looked it up in my phrase & fable dictionary: nothing. My word & phrase origins dictionary goes right from “horse opera” to “horsepower.” I went to one of my all-time favorite sites, The Word Detective, to search his archives — a concession because I’d wanted to do my own research — and even the witty, all-knowing, all-word-powerful (omnietympotent?) Evan Morris doesn’t have it. I even resorted to Wikipedia (the same Evan Morris quips that Wikipedia’s motto should be “it could be true”). Article not found. I even tried a general google search. All I get is the completely unhelpful suggestion that “horseplay” is a combination of “horse” and “play.” Eureka! “Possibly from observing horses at play.”

Shoot me now.

I mean, my question is: why horses?? Why isn’t it kittenplay or bunnyplay? Okay, if we want the boisterous aspect, why not dogplay? The deer and antelope roam — apparently no playing there. If we presume we have to stick with domestic animals, I can see why cows weren’t picked. But goats? Goatplay involves all sorts of rowdy, sundress-eating types of activities. (Don’t ask — I was only five at the time.)

I can see David’s point, that the “no horseplay” attitude makes for the serious worker. The kind who doesn’t say good-morning. The rule-keepers. I wonder, too, about the pressure we all seem to be feeling. Like me, most everyone I know has the same amount of day-to-day money as they have ever had. Sure there are people getting laid off — we hear about them on the news — but I don’t know any of them. My mom and her husband, Dave, say they now have 50% of what they had, but their monthly income from pensions remains the same.

The loss is more or less theoretical. We worry that we might lose our jobs, or that our 401Ks will dissolve, but it’s theoretical pressure. It’s not now. Napoleon Hill, when he worked for Eisenhower, observed that the most profound effect of The Great Depression, was that peoples’ attitudes changed. The fear of loss made them think of themselves as poor, whether they’d lost already or not. The curse of the cerebral cortex is that we can worry about things that haven’t happened. The blessing of the animal brain is that it is only for the now, the immediate experience.

Give me a little horseplay.

With Your Faith and Your Peter Pan Advice

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David confessed yesterday that he’s feeling a lot of pressure. I said, of course he is.

In a few short months, we’ll totally uproot our lives and leave the small community we’ve lived in for over 20 years. David will leave the career he’s had most of his life to return to school to do what he really loves. We’re moving to a foreign country, with all of the attendant rules. Never mind that we’re pursuing a dream — it’s a huge effort.

Assembling my tax information for our accountant this weekend, I ended up thinking of 2008 as a lost year. I made a little over $100 on writing — the least I’ve made for five or six years. No wonder it felt weird to me going to Evanston on a gig for Wyo Trucks: I didn’t do any in 2008.

I wondered what I did do last year. Well, I made a lot more money at my day job, especially when I add in the moonlighting I did for another enviro consulting firm. The last six months of the year I went on a business trip every other week: everyone on my team lost huge chunks of their personal lives to this crushing pressure.

I finished my novel — the first full-length manuscript I’ve completed — and made progress on two others. Otherwise, I spent the year breaking into a new market. A couple of essays and a story were accepted or published. Oddly, the money on these came in right at the end of 2007 or now in 2009.

And we worked on the house. Beginning last March, we commenced work to bring our house to top sellable condition for this big move. We spent over $25,000. I’m not counting our time.

This sounds like it’s all about money, which it isn’t. Though our annual tithe+ to keep the country afloat brings these evaluations to mind. What it’s about is keeping your head above water. This article from the Washington Post talks about the multi-tasking pressure that results in tragedy. It’s a long article and well-worth the time to read through to the last word — even through the really horrifying parts. Fair warning: I wept several times while reading it.

The “fatal distraction” of the title is the kind that results in parents leaving the baby in the car to die. No, not trailer trash types who lock the kid in the car while they go hit the bars. Instead these are the conscientious parents. The ones who forget the child hasn’t been dropped off at day care. Who have no idea the child remains baking in the hot car all day. The article describes the kind of person who could do this. They’re the muli-taskers. The ones under a lot of pressure.
Sometimes we get so frantic, so focused on keeping all the balls in the air that something gets dropped. For these people, the thing forgotten isn’t a meeting or a cell phone. It’s the most awful thing possible.

But the point is, if someone can forget their beloved baby in the car, perhaps we can all forgive ourselves for the balls we do drop. Most of us go through our days with two men out and three men on.

Of course we feel the pressure.

Going Home Again

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So, it turns out that it’s really Dee’s Boutique and Books. (Reference yesterday’s post, if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) That’s what the hand-painted sign over the store entrance says.

Alongside new and used books, Carol Dee sells hand-knit sweaters from the Wind Rivers and funky “popcorn” shirts that are 9 inches long on the shelf and magically expand on the body. $24.95 and comes with a cardboard popcorn box.

I met in the afternoon with the Evanston Social Club — ladies who meet every-other Friday afternoon since 1930. Many of them went to grade-school together. Carol is a newcomer to town, having arrived only 30 years ago. Sometimes they play bridge; sometimes they have guests. I arrived as they finished their business meeting, making plans to visit one of their group who’s growing oddly reclusive. I read to them my grandmother’s story, Appliances, and we talked about my writing and my day job. I felt like I was having tea with my grandmother’s friends, gently grilled about my life choices.

Having a couple of hours to kill before the evening signing, I drove down to the riverwalk and sat in the parking area to enjoy the sun and read. Lots of snow over in Evanston. They have a kind of lodge there and a natural skating pond. A guy scooted around it, scuffling up snow with his feet. I couldn’t tell if he had skates on or not. He studied my car, as if he though he might have to trudge up and rent me skates, so I drove around to the other side and parked in the “clearly not interested in the skating pond” area to the back. Two other cars drove by as I sat. Both times, the driver and passenger hung out the windows as they curved past me, staring intently.

David says it’s the small town thing: suspicious of my county 5 plates and why they don’t know me, sitting in their park.

God bless ’em though, they have a Starbucks. Which was good, since I felt in need of reviving. A couple of Utah twenty-somethings stopped in, too, ski and camping gear strapped to their car. They stopped and asked me about the Kindle I was reading. Not from thereabouts either.

The six o’clock reading, signing and free spaghetti dinner was a bust. Nobody came. This was Carol’s third signing that no one came to. Including the guy from the town (whose name she didn’t recall) who had published his first sci fi book. “You’d think he’d have at least some friends,” she said.

Actually, there were six of us: Carol and her husband, along with Tammy, the seamstress who is sharing Carol’s space while she gets her business back on its feet, Tammy’s husband and his brother, who wore a Vietnam vet’s hat and spoke little. Actually, both Tammy’s husband and his brother wore ball caps until partway through our spaghetti dinner, when Tammy’s husband remarked that he heard his father’s voice telling them to take their hats off while they ate. The brother, too, obediently tucked his hat in his lap.

They — Tammy’s three-person family — are living with a friend right now. She told me she’d like to buy my book, but can’t afford to. I wanted to give her one from the box in the trunk of my car, but didn’t want to in front of Carol. She’d had a good alterations business in Evanston until the three of them decided to head out to Oregon, lured by their status as a state with the third-lowest unemployment rating. But people there were mean to them. None of the shops would let her put flyers in their windows or cards on the counter. No work was to be had for Tammy’s husband. It wasn’t clear if the brother tried for work also — but he shook his head in sad solidarity. They began to run out of money and came back to Evanston, where you find the nicest people in the world.

I might send her some things to alter for me.

Genre Schizophrenia

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I’m beginning to feel a bit between worlds, as a writer.

Today I head to Evanston, at the behest of Carol Dee at Dee’s Bookstore (& Boutique). I’m meeting with some kind of ladies group at 2 o’clock, to read from and discuss Wyo Trucks. Then there’s a spaghetti dinner at 6, to encourage more folks to come visit with me. You now know pretty much everything I do. The funny thing is, Carol emailed me about this gig a couple of months ago — when I’d initially emailed her back in 2004, when the book came out. I’d contacted most of the Wyoming bookstores and visited many of them for various events. She was going through old emails and found my note. And here we are today.

When the Evanston newspaper called to interview me yesterday, the reporter was surprised that this isn’t a new book. I told her I didn’t know why now. But that the Georgia Review published a review of it in 2006. Things move slowly after publication sometimes, too. I’m expecting Oprah to call in 2012.

It’s funny to me, because I’m doing less and less for Wyo Trucks these days, which is natural, since the book is now five years old. I’ve been doing fiction since, cloistered away writing novels. Then less-cloistered trying to sell at least the first one. Worse, I’m writing genre-fiction — whether you consider it romance or sci-fi/fantasy, so I’m feeling like a bit of a pariah from my erstwhile literary community. I used to be on the university’s Creative Writing MFA email list, but have been dropped. Sometimes I was invited to speak to university classes on writing, but no longer. A lot of this is because people have moved on and times change. But some is also because I’m no longer really investing in the literary nonfiction world. It’s not where the lion’s share of my attention is focused. Instead of hanging with the MFA types, I’ve been going to meetings of the Colorado Romance Writers, the Romance Writers of America national convention, and interacting online with the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal writers.

So, this feels like a distraction, doing this today. And more than a little schizophrenic. Which surprises me, since I made a deliberate decision to publish my speculative fiction under the same name as my essays, believing that all my writing is really of one piece. Clearly I see a split, since my website poses the fundamental dichotomy up front.

Apparently it’s up to me to hold the pieces together.

Death and Saguaros

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I have been remiss, it appears.

Following my last post, a couple of my faithful readers wrote to ask what the hell a “wickerman” is. I got too carried away with the poetics to provide the full context. A good lesson for me. On so many levels. That, and that El Patron margaritas don’t make you nearly so profound as you think. I was tempted to go back and revise, but in the interests of preserving the record, I’ll leave it be and try again.
With another shot of the saguaro wickerman. RoseMarie got it with her comment before — it’s about looking for God. Or maybe just for design, intelligent or otherwise. The pre-Christian Celts built giant figures made of straw and sticks. Essentially huge baskets. Sometimes in the shape of animals, sometimes in the shape of humans. Often these “wickermen” were filled with animals or people and then burned. Sacrifice to the unknown designers.
As the saguaro’s watery flesh dries up and blows away, the wickerman of the desert remains. Sacrifice in reverse. Perhaps that’s what we all end up doing in our lives, using up the flesh in living, leaving a network of bones behind.
Somehow the desert brings this into sharp contrast. Maybe the desert just shows the process at an accelerated pace, visible to the pedantic eye. All of the snowbirds flock to the desert sun, to warm their aging bones, as if to the elephants’ graveyard.
My desert wickerman seemed to stand sentinel to that.

Wickerman of the Desert

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Saguaro are the typical, tall cactus, you know. Green and slim, with the whimsical arms. When they die, they leave their skeletons in place. Clusters of long vascular tubes stand in place while the vegetable matter sloughs away, like a loose suit of clothes.

The commonalities of design are obvious. While the bones of other mammals litter the desert in scattered designs, these bones remain upright for a time, eerily holding the shape of the creatures the saguaro once were. Their skeletons are tubes that carried and stored water. Then incidentally provided structure. The white bones of animals echo the same structure, now equally waterless, dry as the empty arroyos.

The lush groves of prickly pear leave nothing so dramatic. Their corpses are nothing more than collapsed balloons, dessicated amoebae awaiting the return of the inland oceans.
Wickerman waves good-bye.

The Hilton Bosque

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It’s lovely being here in Tucson.

So lovely, that I become lax on everything. I haven’t been posting to the blog (as you’ve undoubtedly noticed). I only answer some emails (a BIG stretch for me, compulsive email-checker that I am). I haven’t even been reading much.

I’ve been watching quail. Gambel’s quail, for those not in the know. At my folks’ place in Tucson, the quail come streaming along — they’ve got this amazing run where their legs move in a blur, but their bodies and heads remain still, so they move like ballerinas across the stage — spilling over the low wall into the patio. They drop like so many pieces of ripe fruit, cherry head-feathers bobbing. Lemon-drop finches cluster on the thistle-sock. A flicker sings a piercing whistle and hits the heavy seed feeder. The air is redolent with orange blossoms, which are in turn heavy with the hive-buzz of bees. They look identical to us, characteristic of commercial bees, and my stepfather threatens to have them followed, to exact his share of their product.

We visited Catalina State Park, and dutifully read the signs on the birding trail. Three habitats: riparian, desert scrub and mesquite bosque. The last is pronounced BOS-kay, from the Spanish for forest. We learned that our neighborhood flicker is an gila woodpecker (I linked it, just so you can see how pretty he is). The mesquite bosque surprised us with long, lush grass beneath the denuded shrubs. The sun heated my skin, welcome fire after the cold of winter.

This morning, we walked through the neighborhood. Past the patio homes surrounding Hilton’s El Conquistador resort. Here, off the roads, off the paved golf-cart paths and in my folks’ golf course-boardering patio home, we see all the birds and more. Vermillion flycatchers. A cactus wren or three. A roadrunner poised on a hillside fencepost. Bunnies and javelinas. David dubs it the fourth habitat: the Hilton bosque. Thoureau said travel was unnecessary; that everything could be witnessed in one’s own backyard.

So, I lie in the lounge chair on the patio. Watching the world come to me.