Category: writing

good for the heart

With all the cheese I’ve been serving up this week, I can imagine that some of you might be getting concerned about the cholesterol levels. Well, this should help. Might I suggest that you get yourself a helping of this month’s round of Just Posts? One again, they’ve been served up tastefully by the fabulous folks of One Plus Two and Under the Mad Hat. Just click on the button with the purple bird, and you’ll be presented with plenty of links to whole lot of posts that speak to the same thing: making the world a better place. The Just Posts are good reading, good for what ails us, and certified to be 100% cholesterol-free.

justpostapril

And just in case that’s not enough enticement, please consider the following:

Clicking on those links says you care. (Sorry if that sounds cheesy.)

There’s so much going on in the world that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and overburdened. There are so many wrongs that need to be addressed. It’s all too much for any one person, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can’t do enough to help. You may not be able afford to give money, especially to every cause you think deserves it. You may not have time to volunteer, and there are so many groups anyhow. You may not have the energy or know-how to fight the system over the issues. But let me share a secret.

Clicking on those links actually helps.

Think about giving an impassioned speech to a nearly empty auditorium. Now think about how encouraging it is to be surrounded by people who care about what you have to say. Clicking on the links is like a virtual round of applause for the authors. Thouse clicks count.

Encouraging others to write about what they believe in, act on what they believe in, fight for what they believe in. That matters, my friend.

Read some of those words. Even if you don’t have time to read everything, you can still see what people have to say.

So click on some links.

Think of it as mouse-based activism.

more note-writing tips from Ms. Mismanners

Dearest kind readers,

It has been some time since I have offered you my advice in matters of etiquette. I believe that some of you may be shy about seeking advice in so public a forum, and have attempted to make your requests in subtle ways. For example, I recently received the following note:

we have mr barkworth pay or else await instructions

As I have not had the pleasure of being personally aquainted with the Mr. Barkworth referenced in the above communication, I must assume that either this note was sent to me in error, or that more probably, the note-writer was requesting advice about the proper wording of ransom notes. I am happy to oblige.

The first point I would like to address is on a matter of style rather than etiquette. While use of capitalization and punctuation is a often a matter of personal style, I would heartily recommend using at least some punctuation. I would like to point out that in such matters, it is particularly important to avoid ambiguity. In the note above, I presume that as the specifics of payment have not yet been made explicit, the writer is not actually suggesting the choice between the option of paying vs. waiting for instructions. I believe the author intended to communicate the coercive suggestion “Pay, or else” and the explicit directions “await instructions.”

Secondly, while brevity is certainly a trait to be admired, I fear that the intended recipient of your original note may have found your wording to be somewhat impolite. Might I suggest the following rewording:

    Dear Madam or Sir,

    I hope that this day finds you well, and that you are enjoying this fine spring weather. I have recently been admiring the lovely flowers that are now blooming in your garden, and I expect that they bring you much pleasure.

    It may have come to your attention that your beloved Mr. Barkworth was not in attendance this morning. Rest assured, he is unharmed, and I am certain you will be reunited with him soon.

    I am certain that you will wish avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness, especially out of consideration for the aforementioned Mr. Barkworth, and therefore I must suggest that you refrain from contacting any third parties. I will forward to you additional information about our upcoming transactions shortly. I eagerly anticipate continued communication with you in this matter.

    Warmly,
    A Friend

I hope that this information has been of some help to you, and I wish the best of luck to you in this endeavor.

Sincerely,

Ms. Mismanners

finding my voice

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in response to my viewing of the movie Shut Up and Sing, the documentary about the Dixie Chicks, and the fallout that came after their lead singer made an anti-war comment during a concert in March of 2003.

In that post, I made this comment:

Those were darker times, all too recently, when public expression of dissent was equated with treason. It was chilling to see how violently people reacted to a few fairly innocuous words. It was a time when many people, including me, were uncomfortable about speaking out in public about political issues, especially criticism of the president and objection to the war.

I’ve been wanting to write more about that, because as time passes, my memory clouds. Recently, the tides of public opinion have turned and the political climate is different. It almost seems ridiculous for me to say that I had been uncomfortable expressing dissent publicly. I mean, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad, right?

Well, it was and it wasn’t. And to some extent, this was geographically based. In Boston, talking to my like-minded friends, I could express my objections to the war, my disgust with the administration, without fear. My friends and I could express our dissent in public, though I feel like we did so in fairly hushed voices when out in public.

But closer to home, only 50 miles away towards more rural Massachusetts, it was a different story. In my town, virtually every house had their American flag flying. Virtually every car had a flag decal or a bumper sticker saying something like “these colors don’t run.” Many people went the step of flying actual flags from their cars, sometimes absurdly large ones. And while the symbolism may not have been the same for every person that displayed the Stars and Stripes, for most, for me, the flag was a symbol of not only “Patriotism,” but support of the President, support of the war. It was about self-righteousness. Anger. The desire for revenge over the events of September 11th. When I went grocery shopping in a neighboring town, I was startled to see that some particularly zealous flag-waver had gone the extra step of painting their pick-up truck with clumsily executed images of the twin towers, flags, and the words “Septemeber 11th” and “never forget, never forgive.”

Most Americans at that time actually believed that the war in Iraq was a response to the events of September 11th. That Iraq had been directly responsible for those attacks. And many felt, along with the president, that those who objected to the war were supporting terrorists. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

In the weeks leading up to the start of the war in Iraq, many around the country dissented. Voiced loud (and not so loud) objections. There were TV interviews, news stories. Dissenting bumper stickers a signs. Anti-war buttons and t-shirts. (But these were also times when you heard of people getting kicked out malls for wearing such things.)

There were also protests. I proudly attended a peace march in Boston in March 2003:

March 29, 2003
In Boston, Massachusetts 50,000 people attended the largest rally in the city since the end of the Vietnam War. Thousands of people blocked Boylston Street in a die-in along the Boston Common. A handful of arrests were made.

While the Wikipedia entry talks about the large size of this protest, it actually felt surpisingly small to me. But I was still buoyed by the group voicing of dissent.

Then, just a few days later, I got an email from a friend from a nearby town. While we hadn’t really talked about politics, I knew we had differing opinions. That we’d voted differently in the last election, if indeed she voted at all. I knew she was one who proudly displayed a flag on her car. But I hadn’t realized how differently we felt. This is what I got from her by email, written by someone out there in cyberspace and apparently making the rounds by email and on blogs:

With all of this talk of war, many of us encounter “Peace Activists” who try and convince us that we must refrain from retaliating against the ones who terrorized us all on September 11, 2001, and those who support terror. These activists may be alone or in a gathering…..most of us don’t know how to react to them. When you come upon one of these people, or one of their rallies, here are the proper rules of etiquette:

1. Listen politely while this person explains their views. Strike up a conversation if necessary and look very interested in their ideas. They will tell you how revenge is immoral, and that by attacking the people who did this to us, we will only bring on more violence. They will probably use many arguments, ranging from political to religious to humanitarian.
2. In the middle of their remarks, without any warning, punch them in the nose, hard.
3. When the person gets up off of the ground, they will be very angry and they may try to hit you, so be careful.
4. Very quickly and calmly remind the person that violence only brings about more violence and remind them of their stand on this matter. Tell them if they are really committed to a nonviolent approach to undeserved attacks, they will turn the other cheek and negotiate a solution. Tell them they must lead by example if they really believe what they are saying.
5. Most of them will think for a moment and then agree that you are correct.
6. As soon as they do that, hit them again. Only this time hit them much harder. Square in the nose.
7. Repeat steps 2-5 until the desired results are obtained and the idiot realizes how stupid of an argument he/she is making.

There is no difference in an individual attacking an unsuspecting victim or a group of terrorists attacking a nation of people. It is unacceptable and must be dealt with. Perhaps at a high cost. We owe our military a huge debt for what they are about to do for us and our children.

We must support them and our leaders at times like these. We have no choice.

We either strike back, VERY HARD, or we will keep getting hit in the nose.

Lesson over, class dismissed .

I got this email from my friend on April 2nd. She also sent it to others that we knew in common. I wanted to respond to my friend, tell her the other side of the story. I didn’t really fear that she’d actually hit me in the face. I’m sure she just found the “lesson” funny, and didn’t realize that I was one of those “peace activists,” a humanitarian “idiot.” But the email did effectively knock me over. I never found my voice. I just avoided her for a while, whether consciously or not. Didn’t go back to the activities we shared for a while. I was busy anyhow.

The truth is, I didn’t have the energy to find my voice. To speak out about things I feel so strongly about. Not because I lacked conviction. But because I feared confrontation. Because I feared offending others, even when I felt deeply offended myself. And then I feared being ostracized, and making myself a target for attacks, even if only verbal ones. It sickened me to realize that my friend, and others who received that email, would take my silence as assent, agreement. But every time I tried to compose a response, plan a discussion with my friend, I would find excuses not to.

I’ve been working on speaking out about things that are important to me, writing about issues that I feel strongly about. I struggle with the fear of confrontation. I worry about the risk of offending others. Plus I struggle with the idea that others say things better than I can, so that I should leave the speaking to them. It’s hard for me to speak out so publicly, to open myself up for criticism. But I know that speaking out is an important step. That if we don’t exercise our right to free speech, we may lose it. We all need to add our voices to the discussion, or only the loudest will be heard.

If I want to play my part in making the world a better place, I need to learn to use my voice.

another late night when I should be sleeping

Ah, the same old story. It’s past midnight, and I should be sleeping. (My laptop says it’s past 3 a.m., since it’s still on east coast time, while I’m still out in California.) But I feel compelled to write. Once again, I have no time to write. But this time, I’m not feeling cranky. I’m feeling many things. For one, I am feeling both humbled and inspired by some posts I’ve been reading. KC at Where’s My Cape has written a brave, beautiful and gut-wrenching series of posts about dealing with eating disorders. Jen at One Plus Two has been writing soulfully about the value of treating others with kindness, especially when those others have fallen on the hardest of times:

Kindness matters. Taking a moment to look the person in the eye, to offer that inconsequential bit of spare change, to exchange a few words. It matters. It makes one feel human.

Imagine if everyone avoided you, all day every day. Imagine if you felt invisible. Alone. And on top of that, you slept in a doorway.

Which reminds me that I should share that I am thrilled to be a part of the February Just Posts, a collection of writings that speak to issues of social justice, with my post on language discrimination.

justpostfeb2007

Anyhow, I’m having a wonderful visit with my family. I am charmed by my beautiful new nephew Diego, and so happy to have time here with my sister, brother-in-law and mother. I’m so glad that John and Phoebe are also here with me, and it was worth the trials and tribulations of the journey. I feel warm and complete to be here with my family. (Yes, I am really a sap deep-down.)

midterm mayhem

I have a midterm tomorrow. Which just feels so incredibly wrong.

But aside from that, it means I absolutely should be spending my day (or whatever available moments I have during the day) studying, reviewing my notes, and pondering the meanings of various tidbits of sociolinguistics terminology. And it means I absolutely should not be sitting here at my laptop goofing off. Because that would be wrong.

Here are some things I absolutely should not be writing today:

  • a school-related list of movies
  • my personal adventures yesterday, and our first post-Phoebe “party”
  • a description of the state of our home post-party (is there such a thing as post-party depression?)
  • a discussion of the unexpected spike in my blog hits during a couple of hours yesterday
  • a treatise on the comparative merits of ducks in various types of dishwashers
  • an in-depth corpus-based analyis of squid discourse
  • an advice column about the etiquette of exchanging bananas
  • anything to do with pants
  • a list of things that I should not be writing about

    • Here’s some of what I should be writing about:

  • the nitty gritty of calling a language variety a dialect or language (you say it’s a language, I say it’s a dialect, let’s call the whole thing off)
  • the distinctions among a pidgin, a creole, a koiné, and contact jargons (and not the distinctions among pigeons, crayolas, coins and contact lenses)
  • Acrolects, Mesolects and Basolects (oh, my!)
  • the monogenesis theory, the polygenesis theory and the bioprogram hypothesis (which sound straight out of scifi, but really aren’t)
  • dialect continua, diglossia, decreolization and relexification (which sound almost sexy, but probably aren’t)
  • killer languages

    • mismanners

    I had a funny experience a couple of nights ago. I got a call from a woman in my graduate program that I hadn’t seen for several months. She said she had a question about thank you notes. I sputtered for a moment in confusion. Had she found out about my blog, where I’d recently posted about being several months behind in writing thank you notes? To confuse me more, this is someone who had given a present for Phoebe, and to whom I had not yet sent a thank you note. Was she asking about that? Hey, dude, where’s my note? (Not that she’d ask that way. She’s very polite. Also Japanese. Can’t picture her saying dude.) In a moment, I remembered that I’d gotten a message from her a couple of days before saying she was going to a job interview. Aha! She must mean thank you notes that she would be writing. Indeed, this was the case. She was calling to ask me about the etiquette of writing post-interview thank you notes. But let me repeat and rephrase, she was calling to ask me about the etiquette of writing thank you notes. Me. I laughed maniacally. Somewhat to her confusion.

    I guess I know a fair amount about etiquette somehow or another, and have reasonably polished manners. (I mean, when eating in a fancy restaurant, I know which is the proper fork to use when skewering the last piece of potato off your companion’s plate when he’s looking the other way.) But it strikes me as funny that someone would ask me for advice on etiquette on a matter where I’ve been so terribly delinquent.

    Anyhow, if anyone out there has some etiquette questions for me, lay ’em on. I’m thinking of writing a column. (And by the way, no, I haven’t yet finished the damn thank you notes I owe. So don’t ask. That would be rude.)

    actions speak louder through words

    Since I may not have time to post much myself, I just wanted to send a pointer to some cool posting that’s going on elsewhere. There are a couple of bloggers who are organizing an ongoing project of collecting posts from their blogging community written about social causes. On the 10th of each month, the anniversary of a group wedding of minds, they have promised to post links to other posts written during the previous month. This month’s list can be found now on their respective blogs.

    I’ve only had a chance to read a few of the posts so far, but the ones I’ve looked at treat a diverse range of issues including universal healthcare, climate change/global warming, racism, and excessive consumerism.

    I’m hoping to be inspired and motivated to, at least periodically, post something of redeeming social value. But I can at least resolve to read what others have written. And reading counts. Awareness matters.

    blogbrain

    Here it is. January 1, 2007. After 11:00 p.m. And I really should be going to bed. But the compulsion…compels. It’s this damn blog a-callin’ to me. Now I’ve discovered a new toy I need to get for it: a real site meter. (I’m apparently missing out on all sorts of fun potential for…knowledge.) Plus I’ve got several posts in progress that I’d like to finish, some of them in my kick-ass women project. I even have more to say on the subject of pants. And then the idea has come up a couple of times that this is a time of year when people write resolutions. Hey, I could write resolutions. (That sounds like a list, and I love lists.)

    But I’ve told myself I shouldn’t work on this blog until I’ve finished a particular task. Namely, to finish writing those thank you notes. “Wow,” you may be thinking. “She’s so organized to be already almost finished with her thank you notes.” But I’m not talking about thank you notes from this past big holiday. I’m talking about thank you notes for presents people gave for Phoebe’s birth. Um. That was more than 10 months ago. I’m not sure what the etiquette is in this matter. It’s a question I’d rather not find the answer to. But I’ve made up an answer: finish the notes in the same calendar year as her birth. As of yesterday, I had 25 notes left to go. I’ve managed to get through 10 of them. And I’ve decided to flub the date on the last few, as long as I can get them mailed by tomorrow. Which strikes a bit like a retroactive resolution. I think perhaps this type of resolution may be easier to achieve than the ones for the future. Perhaps that is what I’ll do instead of a list of 2007 resolutions. I’ll make a list of resolutions for 2006. Carefully selected to make me feel like I’ve accomplished some goals.

    Okay. I really must get back to those letters. 15 left to go. (Does it count if I just write the date on the top of each of them?) I told myself I wouldn’t post until I finished writing them. (This one doesn’t count, does it?)

    ready to go back home

    We’re down at my in-laws for a few days. We came down Tuesday night. It’s Thursday night now. And somehow I keep feeling like we’ve been down here a week or more.

    It’s not so terrible to be here. It’s just that I have even less time to myself than I’ve lately had at home. Phoebe wakes up earlier, won’t nap well and then stays up later. And then I feel the need to socialize with my mother-in-law (and do things like eat dinner) once Phoebe’s gone to bed. John is occupied with other things. This all leaves me almost nil time to do things like work on this damn blog. (And here I thought maybe I could even try reading a book while I was down here…but let’s face it. If it’s not a board book, I’m probably not going to read it right now.)

    I finally broke free to do a bit of writing and find that, even though I’d been on a writing roll and absolutely itching to get back to it, now that I have few minutes to spare, I haven’t been able to get a complete sentence out on the posts I’ve been planning to write. I’m back to the annoying habit of writing part of a sentence, rethinking what I wrote, and going back to reword and revise it before I ever get to the punctuation mark at the end. So here. We’re leaving that aside for now, and moving on to general ranting. Not much substance. Not much content. Not much of interest. But look at all the punctuation marks!