{my topography}

First off, I very much loved reading about your media habits the past couple of days. I have continued keep a record of what I’ve been consuming media wise, and I think that it’s made me much more conscious and thoughtful about my choices… I’ve decided to keep the record going over at twitter. It seems like the perfect, if not slightly ironic venue for such things.

But before I do, I want to share with you some of my favorite links from the past couple of days:

Firstly, Elizabeth Strout’s essay “English Lesson” in the Washington Post this week is fantastic. She is such an amazing writer to me. Her characters are so real, nuanced, subtle. She deserves every ounce of praise for Olive Kitteridge, which was my favorite book I read last year.

Also, I am giddy with the discovery of the Washington Post’s Summer Reading Issues from years past. I am sure everyone else on the face of the earth has already devoured these stories, but until now they have somehow escaped me. Delight. I cannot wait to read all of them (I have not yet.)

Also, speaking of the Washington Post, if you don’t read Gene Weingarten you should. This piece made me sob when I first read it. This one made me nearly die laughing. Also, because things seem to work this way in my life, his piece this week explores the various glories and follies of tweeting. Ah-hem.

Now, without further ado, some family updates (a.k.a, my camera is fixed people. Prepare yourselves for some seriously photo-heavy posts to come!)

First off, have you met Bob, our rooster? Bob, Internets. Internets, Bob. He is named after this book.

Here is the new batch of girls who have finally figured out how to do the free-range thing, thus saving us more fruitless attempts to catch them whilst thrashing our legs on sharp pine boughs.

And here is newest member of the poultry bunch: the chick that the goose hatched. It’s name name is Twitter. Bean named it. I swear he knows nothing of my current media obsessions.

And because I cannot stop staring at my beautiful boys:

Also yesterday, because it was raining and we were bummed because we were supposed to go to this amazing parade to celebrate the umpteen hundred years of our city’s existence and instead had to stay home to avoid being drenched and bedraggled, we had a dumpling party instead. The four of us. Fancy frozen drinks for everyone and homemade dumplings using this recipe.

While we were frying up the dumplings we had pandora on, set to a Madonna quick mix (which turned out to be the best movin, groovin, bootie shaking tunes ever!) The storm was right overhead with lots of serious thunderclaps. For dessert we made chocolate pudding with fresh strawberries and watched the Tour together on the couch.

What have you been reading, doing, and eating this weekend?

Started off on media bistro this morning, and found my way here. Again apropos. I like how even here, in the seeming chaos and of the Internet, like attracts like, and patterns emerge.

Later my mother sent me a link to this fascinating review of Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt; a book I now very much want to read.

From there the day fragmented into lots of email, a little twitter, and thankfully a lot of writing. (Saw this post, via Twitter, and started wondering is conflict essential to all good fiction?

What do you think? I am very interested in hearing your ideas on this…

Also watched So You Think You Can Dance, which I adore, because as I’ve said here before: if I could have a talent bestowed upon me, it would be the ability to dance.

It was a roller coaster day though. Storm clouds, indecisive rain, sallow sun, moods getting tossed all around our house. One of those days where everything seemed annoying: Bean’s loud sing song voice, the way he is inclined to DASH everywhere lately, Sprout’s new inclination to spit up gallons of sour milk without any warning whatsoever, the never ending dampness that has become this summer, and one too many issues with the poultry (the chicks escaped again–and the same hoopla of chasing them around a very sharp pine tree in the rain, in the mud, that occurred two days ago, took place again today.)

It should also be noted, as somewhat of a highlight, that our goose hatched a baby chick today. Chick, as in chicken. Long story. I’m not sure if it will survive. Something in me isn’t quite sure she’ll know how to mama a baby that small and fluffy (I’ll post pictures tomorrow!) but when I checked on her this evening the little chick was tucked in on her back, at the nape of her neck, peeping away. She’s still sitting on two other eggs. Here’s to seriously hoping she’ll figure it out. I’ve kind of had enough poultry drama for a while.

Honestly it was one of those days where I kind of wished I lived somewhere utterly urban: full of angles and elbows, people wearing black, umbrellas, pointy shoes, bustling bodegas, sharp lines, bright lights. I’d happily settle willingly for anywhere sunny though. Then I could throw a garden party just like this (found via a friend on facebook.)

What were your media moments today?

Wednesday. When I type that word I think of fifth grade, of the yellow lined paper I used to practice spelling it on in loopy cursive, Wed-nes-day. I still say it that way in my head when I write it out.

Funny how certain things stick and others evaporate in a second. Just as I was writing this I thought of the premise for a perfect short story. By the time I’d pulled up a new sticky note on my desktop, it had slipped my mind and all I could remember was the fact that I need to email several friends and am very remiss in doing so. Maddening.

Memory. It’s such a loopy, lumpy thing, like an old floral couch with little spots burned in the fabric from where the sun struck it, shining through a vase on the windowsill just so.

I remember my childhood vividly and sporadically. From fifth grade I remember learning the entire Greek alphabet, all of the prepositions in alphabetical order, how to spell Wednesday, and how I kicked Zachary O’Day in the crotch with those slouchy pointy toed boots that were all the rage along with acid washed jeans in 1986.

I do not however, remember yesterday, unless I put some serious mental effort towards the task.

No. That isn’t true. I do remember the way last night we decided to go with a red metal bucket to pick raspberries down by the pond and a quarter of the way there ran into two stray dogs. One was a yellow lab with one of those pronged collars that look vaguely threatening, and the other was a black wisp of a dog with floppy ears and lanky legs and pale ghost blue eyes, part husky for sure. They weren’t from around here. Not any of the neighbor’s dogs, and when we went towards them they ran, away from us, up our hill, towards our house and our free range chickens.

Incidentally, just yesterday DH decided that our two month old chicks were old enough to go free range, without the enclosure we normally put them into. And by decided, I mean he took the path of least resistance, as they had escaped him when he was trying to transfer them from the large wooden box where they spend the night in the coop, to the enclosure on the lawn. They escaped and he decided to hell with them. So they were out under the pine all day and just fine except that now of course two feral and rather hungry looking dogs were heading right towards them.

We ran back up our hill, pushing the stroller with Sprout who indignantly began to wail and Bean, who dropped his bike and skittered up after us, his yellow helmet bobbing, his eyes on the sky where thunder had begun to rumble. “I saw lightening,” he said, his voice all quavery. “It might get us.”

Seriously, when it rains it pours around here.

And so there we were, trying to deter the dogs by yelling and throwing rocks in their general direction, and then trying to catch and re-coop the not so big and definitely not so smart chicks who would make a mad dash for the coop door and then at the very last minute would scatter frantically in all directions.

I remember this. Yes I do. But what I don’t remember—unless I stop now and really think of it—is what I read yesterday, what I learned, what media I consumed. And I’ve been thinking about that since my last post: how I am maybe suffering from information/networking overload and what to do about it.

And I came up with this: For the rest of the week I am going to try to keep notes here about my media habits and see where this gets me. Likely, I’ll be back with my first record this afternoon. You in?

In the back of my mind it registers that my stomach is hurting. It feels a little like listening to muzak, something invasive but distant, not quite distracting enough to justify attention, but enough pervasive enough to give me a vague sensation of angst. Everything is not as peachy as it could be maybe. So what. So this is Tuesday. I grab my laptop, pull up Mozilla and the day bifurcates: me here on the couch, and somewhere else, where information is an entity, enormous and endless.

Outside the sky is stippled with small clouds that are becoming larger ones, the blue rapidly disappearing, and rain will fall again, inevitably, as it has fallen every single day for the entire summer. The streams are fat. The ground is gorged with water and the garden paths are squishy with mud. The trees and ferns and meadow grasses almost lamentably green.

The weather has been flitting back and forth between almost seasonably warm, and a little too cold. I’m wearing jeans this morning, but am wishing already that I weren’t.

This is what I am like today: indecisive, distracted. Like a badminton birdy zipping back and forth, in one instant determined, in the next caught by an eddying breeze, and away I go, off track, especially online, where one thing leads to the next, and before you know it you’re down a rabbit warren of information and opportunity.

I’m like the hummocky meadows now: all puddles in the low places from the rain. I’ve reached maximum saturation. There is too much information, everything too available, relevant, pertinent, immediate, insistent, necessary, superficial.

Right this very second there are a hundred and one ideas out there being shared that are all probably brilliant and insightful: reviews, awards, news, stories, and I am missing all of them because I am no longer capable of processing the information. My delicious account is burgeoning. I bookmark like a fiend, but it doesn’t help.

Who do I think I am? Even as I click “Bookmark” I know the inevitable mathematics of that action in this moment: 24 hours divided into innumerable slivers.

The sun is shining for a handful of fleeting seconds. In the garden, a newly turned bed awaits carrot seeds. Worms creep. Without eyes they are attune only to the deep thrumming of the earth. On a trellis of branches, the peas need picking, and their tattered white blossoms flutter in the breeze. In my head, and sparsely on the page, words, chapters even. In this very minute Sprout is bouncing on my lap. He’s been stricken with a new phase of indigestion and projectile vomit. Growing pains. It’s made nights less sleep filled and when morning happens everything is at once blurry and sharp.

Truthfully, I’m feeling up to the gills with social media. I love the idea of networking (I want to belong just as much as the next person) but when it comes down to it I find I feel invariably submerged and nearly drowning when I jump into the stream of information rushing past.

Twitter. Facebook. BookGlutton. GoodReads. Flickr. So many ways to connect and yet I the end it’s all about distraction and dilution. I cannot help but wonder if all this social networking iterated infinitesimally down to 140 characters, nonstop, from iPhones and computers and Blackberries, while everyone is busily going about the business of their day doing other things at the very same time, is because we are a a nation of ADD adults raised on a diet of media. Hungry for connection and addicted to distraction. Maybe?

I know hours die this way. Bang! On the imaginary sidewalk of our lives, sixty minutes splattered in a puddle of sticky information.

Hours go other ways too.

But an hour outdoors on the dock down by the neighbor’s pond, my skin all goosebumpy, and the water rippling in green semicircles away from my moving limbs is a different way to use this precious life. Surely, an hour among the unwashed sheets, rubbing noses, fingers feeling heat, sharing breath while the boys nap is an hour well spent. Or saying grace, sharing food, hands turning dough, passing forks, eating strawberries by the pint full, spitting watermelon seeds.

And then there is also this tricky fact: every minute I spend devouring information, connecting, skimming, flitting online, I am not writing. I imagine Hemmingway or O’Connor today and giggle. But then I love every word that Paulo Coelho brings the world on his blog, thoughtfully, in many languages, as he goes about his days in Paris.

There is something so alluring about knowing everything is out there for the knowing.

I am a consumer. Information is the product. Tempting, distracting, necessary. It is all about division. Long division, endless division, division of the same small scraps of time. I won’t find my chapters here, spent the way I’ve spent them today, networking, synthesizing, learning, and becoming utterly inundated.

And yet likely I won’t stop.

***
How do you balance connecting with friends, networking and staying abreast of news within your field, with the daily reality of your life’s work and art?