Month: March 2022

On silliness

After a few sessions of writing anguished (or at least serious) material, my eyes rested on the plaque in the corner of my room opposite my computer desk, the one that says “Be silly sometimes.” I often think I need to move it closer to my line of sight when I’m writing.

Seriously: We all need to indulge our silly side more. If ever there were times when we don’t know whether to laugh or cry, we are surely living in times like that now.

We are living in a theater of the absurd, and we take it so seriously that we have to let loose our anger or cry in despair, but it might be healthier to go the other way. Some of what passes for serious these days veers so close to silliness it deserves to be met instead with a hearty belly laugh.

I think that’s why pictures of puppies and kittens pepper our social media feeds, because small animals do objectively silly things all the time, and it’s a relief from the antisocial barking that comprises so much of social media in these times.

That’s exactly why, the other day, I took a stab at using a viral video of a pickup truck buffeted by a tornado as the basis for a superhero origin story. I’m only moderately content with the result — it qualifies as an example of “bad first draft” — but it was a relief to be treading on the silly path after all this seriousness.

Oh, bother. Here I am talking seriously about being silly. What a terribly silly thing to do.

Who died now?

I saw that flags were flying a half-staff again the other day and confess my reaction was a somewhat exasperated, “Who died now?”

It feels like, of late, the flags have been at half staff more often than they have been allowed to rise to their rightful place against the sky.

A flag becomes a political symbol — kind of a shorthand meme — and to the extent that the U.S. flag is considered a symbol of freedom, it gets a little disheartening to see it constantly in a state of mourning. (Feel free to let your mind drift to the idea of constantly mourning for freedom — that was precisely my intention anyway.)

I don’t presume to suggest my status merits any consideration of what to do about flags upon my death, but should that happen to change between now and then, let the record show that I wish my passing to be commemorated by proudly flying whatever passes for a flag of freedom, way up there for everyone to see.

Like it or not

I am unduly influenced by the Like button. I suspect we all are. I notice when a blog post or Facebook link gets more Likes or fewer Likes or no Likes at all. It affects me, I think, when I consider writing, or at least posting, similar material.

This, even though I don’t trust analytics. How can I, for example, get 20 Facebook Likes for an essay that WordPress insists was only read nine times? If I cared a great deal, I would investigate phenomena like that and learn how to interpret analytics, but I don’t care a great deal.

I do care a little bit, though, and so I pause before I post stuff that has not been overly Liked in the past. And in the back of my mind, this nags me.

That’s because some of the UnLiked posts come from my deepest core, and what person easily shares stuff from her deepest core to begin with? In this way the Like button becomes a disincentive to authenticity — “Oh, my small cadre of readers doesn’t Like it when I try to be real, so …”

There is an easy/hard solution to this dilemma: Just post what feels real and don’t worry whether anyone Likes it. Get it out there and believe it will find its audience someday. After all, if I do take a moment to worry about Likes, I notice a recent small increase in Likes for posts that are weeks, months and even years old.

I have to write, and I’ve made a commitment to post something I’ve written daily. I try never to “phone one in,” but some posts do reflect the deepest heart of me more than others; that’s just how daily habits work. A nice little string of Likes is gratifying, but probably the most important advice is from a basketball coach I deeply admire, Dick Bennett, who warned players not to get too down about a loss or too giddy about a win, just go out and play the game your way every day. 

Like it or not, that’s what I aim to do.