Daily life: Looking back at the past
Feb. 1st, 2010 08:17 am![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
duskpeterson"I don't go around asking authors about their gender credentials to see whether they're straight women, in order to know whether I'm allowed to read their stuff."
--My gay male apprentice, an avid reader of gay romance, commenting on the controversy over whether m/m fiction is created solely by and for straight women.
"I wonder whether all those guys who are upset about m/m romance writers appropriating their culture are sitting around wearing pink triangle buttons? Because if they are, they've appropriated a symbol that means, 'Line me up for the gas chambers.'"
--My apprentice again.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 22 January 2010. Mentoring: Refining my conversation skills.
I've been going through my e-mails from 2002-2003 this week, seeking old letters I can use in my e-book bonus material. I'm happy to say that my reaction to reading my old e-mails hasn't been to say, "Oh, let me just go shoot myself and put the world out of its misery." My letters - as far as I can objectively evaluate them - show me to have behaved in a reasonably nice manner during those years.
But man, could I have used some brushing up of my conversation skills. Typically, what would happen is that someone would send me a single sentence that I happened to disagree with, and they'd get back from me a ten-thousand-world treatise on why they were wrong.
Well, tonight my apprentice and I were having an argument on an entirely unrelated topic, on whether young children should be trained to use the Internet. (I was taking the Luddite view that kids' exposure to the Internet could be delayed till they'd learned other life-skills that Internet usage might interfere with. My apprentice was arguing that certain aspects of Internet usage were best learned at a young age, in the same manner that foreign languages are best learned at a young age.) I was congratulating myself inwardly on staying calm and not getting heated up during the conversation and not interrupting my apprentice repeatedly when he tried to talk, the way I would have if I'd held this type of conversation a decade ago.
Then the conversation took another turn, and I discovered that I'd totally flubbed it in a previous conversation.
I'd sent my apprentice both volumes of Syd McGinley's Dr. Fell series for Christmas, because they're the best BDSM novels I've run across for a long time. My apprentice had called me up and said he'd liked them. I'd told him what I thought was one of the more interesting aspects of the novel - that the manner of the BDSM references showed the writer's research sources. Then I'd waited for my apprentice to give me his impressions about the novel . . . and he hadn't, which had disappointed me, because I'd wanted to hear about his favorite bits.
At least, that was my impression of how the conversation went. From his perspective, he'd tried to tell me what he liked about the novel, and I'd overridden him with a ten-thousand-word treatise on all the things that I objected to in the novels.
Oh, dear. I definitely need to work on my conversation skills.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Hurrah! I can easily produce e-books for Kindle now.
Not that it was terribly hard in the old days. I just had to go into the source code of my HTML file and make a few changes to the code. But when I changed over to the ePub format, I thought that would preclude my being able to submit more e-books to the Kindle bookstore, because I was now working with multiple HTML files to create one e-book. The ePub format allows one to do that, and it's the main reason I switched over to the ePub format - because it's easier for me to lay out multiple HTML files (since that's how the text ends up at my Website) than a single file.
But when I ran my ePub edition of "Night Shadow" through Calibre's handy-dandy converter, I was able to easily turn it into a .mobi file that I can upload to the Kindle bookstore. In fact, the conversion was a lot easier than the conversions I used to make with Mobipocket Creator, the software that's specifically designed for creating .mobi e-books.
Man, does this open up new vistas for me. Provided that Amazon doesn't bungle the translation from .mobi to the Kindle format, .azw - which, admittedly, is a possibility - then I'll be able to easily convert all of my ePub e-books into a format that I can upload to Amazon. Not that I earn much at Amazon, but if I sell all of my e-books there, I'll be earning a heck of a lot more than I am currently.
Now if I could just resolve my problems with ePub distribution.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Kindle e-book royalties soar to 70 percent . . . but there's a catch.
Of course there's a catch. There always is.
The media is saying that Amazon most likely made this move in order to be competitive with Google Editions, and also with Apple, which is expected to be courting publishers when it reveals its new We're Not Telling What It Is gadget this month. The timing of this certainly seems suspicious: right before the Apple announcement, and the royalty change will take place in the same month that Google Editions opens its doors.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2003.
I'm continuing to collect bonus material for my e-books, which requires me to read through (1) all of my private journal entries between 1995 and 2004, (2) all of my semi-private journal entries in 2004, (3) all of my posts between 2002 and 2004, and (4) all of my correspondence between 2002 and 2004.
Do you know how much wordage that is? Here's a hint: My posts for 2002 alone take up fourteen files. Two megabytes.
Here's another hint: In 2004 - just 2004 - I wrote 370 e-mails, many of them five to ten thousand words long.
To one friend. I was writing to nine friends that year. Plus my readers. Plus a zillion other individuals and organizations.
Good thing I'm a speed reader. What is frustrating is not knowing whether anyone will actually be interested in what I'm turning up. But this will at least ease my guilt over selling e-books of stories that are also available free online.
Here's the sort of stuff I've turned up, though this one I can't use in my bonus material, since it's not related to my writings. It's from an e-mail to Anne Blue of MAS-Zine during a period when the federal government was sending out warnings about the possibility of a biochemical attack on Washington, D.C., which I live next to.
o--o--o
Hazards of Everyday Life (9 September 2003)
Did I tell you that Doug's gone gaga over fruit? He hasn't quite become a fruitarian, but he's eating tons of fruit now. And of course he wanted to convert me, which was quite a job, because I've always hated eating fruit on its own. For one thing, I have a tendency to get mild rashes after eating fresh fruit; it must be some lingering allergy from childhood (when I was allergic to a lot of foods).
Then it occurred to me that, whenever I go to one of those stupid affairs where you have to stand up to eat, I always eat fruit rather than try to balance a drink along with my plate. I tried fruit with my meals, and ta da! it worked. And there was no rash afterwards - the other food must have counteracted whatever was giving me the mild allergy. (Of course, Doug then proceeded to tell me why it's nutritionally wrong to eat fruit with your meals.)
So tonight I thought I'd tackle a mango. I'd never eaten one, but I've drunk mango juice. Doug happened upon me as I was about to start and, in a very condescending voice, began to explain to me the laborious task of how to get rid of the mango stone.
"Why don't you just bite into a mango, like a peach?" I asked.
"Don't be silly," he said dismissively. "You don't eat mango skin."
"Why not?"
It turned out that this idea, like so many of his other ideas, was based purely on his certainty that You Just Don't Do It. I, being in favor of empiricism, bit into the mango. "Tastes fine to me," I said.
Doug gave up on me and went to his study. I decided to find the ultimate proof that he should convert to the empirical way of life; I started leafing through the books we have on The Joys of Eating Fruit. None of them mentioned eating mango skins, but none of them said it was wrong to do so.
Insatiably curious, I decided to check the Web. And there discovered that the mango is related to poison ivy.
"Ack!" I screamed, and began checking every Website I could to figure out what dire consequences come from eating mango skin. Here was one gentleman's report of what happened after he touched (rather than ate) mango skin:
"Every inch of my skin and scalp itched and my eyes felt puffy. I got out of bed and looked in my mirror. A red, deformed face stared back at me, with eyes so swollen that the lashes barely peeked out. Worse, an angry, red, itching rash, shining with tiny blisters, blanketed my skin from crown to toe. The worst of it covered my hands and wrists with an itch so intense that it drove me to my closet to comb my fingers down my hanging clothes for relief."
There's a passage in the Bible about this, isn't there? Something about pride going before the fall?
Anyway, my desperate search revealed that (1) eating or touching mango skin doesn't always cause a rash, and (2) you might be able to stop the rash from breaking out by washing the infected area with soap and water within the first ten minutes.
So I washed my lips with soap. And then I washed everything that I'd touched. My computer mouse objected to being washed, so I replaced it. I can't do a darn thing about my computer keys (which I am tapping away at right now); I'll just hope that my lips got the worst of it. Now I just have to wait 48-72 hours to see whether I break out.
And I was worried about biochemical hazards.
o--o--o
*** 24 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2004.
I've basically finished combing through my posts and journal entries, but am continuing to go through my old personal correspondence. I figured I might as well read it through to the end because - with the exception of a flurry of e-mails with my apprentice on non-literary matters in 2007, and the occasional short-term correspondence - my personal correspondence ended in 2006. (One friend stopped e-mailing me in 2002, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2003, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2004, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2005, and at that point I ran out of pen pals. Some people have a black thumb in growing plants; I have a black thumb in maintaining e-mail friendships.)
Anyway, here's a reprint of another e-mail, from February 2004.
o--o--o
After Doug had placed his usual mountain of food on the table, I started writing down what he was eating tonight. Here's the list:
Whole wheat pita bread
Whole wheat regular bread
Zucchini
Green peppers
Cauliflower
Garlic
Broccoli
Cherry tomatoes
Cucumber
Bean sprouts
Crunchy sprouts
Tofu
Unidentified greens
Kale
Collard greens
Onions
Savoy cabbage
I might add that (1) all of this was whole (Doug isn't into wasting time cutting green peppers or slicing tofu), and (2) all of it except for the last four items was uncooked (he just pops those raw garlics into his mouth).
After I'd finished the list, he said, "I have less than usual tonight. Usually I sprinkle coleslaw over everything."
"What's that made up of?" I asked. (Doug makes his own coleslaw - it has veggies and nothing else.)
"Purple cabbage, green cabbage, carrots, celery, and radishes," he replied.
Suddenly my potato pancakes and ketchup seemed a little inadequate.
o--o--o
*** 30 January 2010. Writing: Yet again, my e-mail offers interesting reading.
"The Leather Archives & Museum hosts a thorough exploration of pornography, kink, consent, and fine lines: GRAPHIC SEXUAL HORROR . . . Presented by Clarisse Thorn and the Sex+++ Film Series at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum--"
At what?
"The public dance halls filled with frivolous and irresponsible young people in a feverish search for pleasure, are but a sorry substitute for the old dances on the village green in which all of the older people of the village participated. Chaperonage was not then a social duty but natural and inevitable, and the whole courtship period was guarded by the conventions and restraint which were taken as a matter of course and had developed through years of publicity and simple propriety." --Jane Addams: The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909).
Poor Miss Addams. She must be rolling in her grave.
*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Wrapping up a moderately awful month.
From most perspectives, it's been a good month. Some readers posted nice comments about my writing, I had interesting correspondence with a few people (*waves at![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
catana1*), I got the chance to be a guest blogger for the first time ever, some new folks Friended me, I published my first ePub e-book (though I'm still working on improving the formatting), I worked out some software problems, I got all of my Web tasks checked off my list, and if my inbox isn't in as good a shape as I'd hoped it would be, at least I got some long-delayed e-mail prepared to send.
Oh, and Bookshare.org is now offering full-text search. That's a major step, because it means I'll be able to do research using complete electronic texts of thousands of books that are in copyright (legally, I add, for the sake of those of you who haven't read my previous references to Bookshare.org). Of course, I've been able to do that before now in a limited way, but having full-text searching capabilities will allow me to track down a lot more texts.
But this month was dreadful from the point of view of Internet addiction. So far this month, I've been online for over a hundred hours, and I still have one big session left to do. By January 8th, I had written 24,960 words since the beginning of the month, yet I didn't get my 30,000-word quota done for this month. (An unintentionally humorous quotation I encountered from my 2008 blog: "I'm a bit nervous about whether I'll be able to get all my series done, thanks to my slowed-down rate of getting novels done - no more than two or three a year, even if I really work hard.") I didn't get any heavy editing done. I didn't get any housework done. And what was most awful from my point of view, I spent much of the month - as my poor apprentice can testify - in the Internet-addiction equivalent of being stoned. I had the attention span of a gnat. I was barely aware of my surroundings. If I don't have mobs coming after me for any of the messages I posted in haste during that time, I'll be very fortunate indeed. When I'm manic, I lose all perspective on what I'm saying.
Here's me corresponding with a friend in 2004 about addiction:
"It's not an issue of quantity but of controllability. If you routinely can't stop yourself from doing something, for however small or large a part of your life that may be, then it's {insert label here, but I call it an addiction}. For example, if I get up 30 days in a row, telling myself that I will not go onto the Internet, that I have other things to do that are much more important, and I go onto the Internet for every one of those 30 days, that's an addiction. (This is, alas, a real example.) If, on the other hand, I go onto the Internet for 300 days in a row because I'm a slash archivist and it's my duty and pleasure to be online that much, that's not an addiction."
So it's not just being in an Internet haze that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't stop myself from going online, and once I'm on, I can't get myself offline. I'll go online for what I intend to be a thirty-second visit, and six hours later I'll still be there, knowing I should get offline, but unable to do so.
Honestly, folks, it really is like being an alcoholic.
I did quite well in October and November in staying offline. That shows I can deal with this problem. It's simply clear, after what happened this month, that I need to take stronger measures against my Internet addiction.
*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Stronger measures against my Internet addiction (with an interlude on food).
In 1990, when Doug and I first met, my daily diet was as follows:
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread.
Tuna fish sandwiches on white bread.
High-fat canned soup.
Full-fat milk.
Juice.
Coke.
Oreo cookies and other chocolate desserts.
That was it. I ate that sort of thing practically ever day of the year.
Well, today I eat:
Whole-wheat couscous, home-cooked vegetables, and low-fat cheese.
Low-fat home-cooked soups.
Home-cooked broccoli sandwiches on wheat bread, with tomatoes.
Orange juice.
Apple sauce (only because I have TMJ at the moment; otherwise, it would be raw fruit).
Fat-free milk.
Cheerios with bananas and soy milk.
Flavored whole-wheat couscous for dessert.
Oh, and occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and very occasional chocolate.
One of the reasons that I can keep to this routine is that I don't go "browsing" for new types of food. I don't need to, because I know what I'm going to eat each week; it's the same thing I ate last week. What small variations occur - a new vegetable, a new type of soup - I leave mainly to Doug to decide. So when I shop, I'm not in the dangerous mode of thinking, "What new thing shall I buy that I haven't bought before?" I just head toward the food items I always buy, and I get out of the store as quickly as possible. (Well, okay, after I've read the newspaper headlines and skimmed the newsmagazines.)
Now, I'm not saying I don't occasionally fall into old patterns of eating. (*Hides evidence of hot dogs in the refrigerator.* Not my fault, honestly - Doug brought them home.) But what's remarkable to me is that my shift to a radically different eating routine was so painless. Every step of the way (for I didn't make every change at once), I told myself that I'd suffer horribly if I gave up X in exchange for Z. And every step of the way, I found that I preferred Z to X. I wouldn't want to go back to eating the way I did in 1995; what I'm eating now tastes so good and makes my body feel so much better.
I've been going through a similar discovery, as I make changes in my life to deal with my Internet addiction, that change isn't as hard as I'd thought.
I now spend at least two weeks a month at home, offline, with no human contact except with Doug and my apprentice. No problem.
I no longer attend real-life social events, except occasional meetings with family members and close friends, and sometimes one or two conventions a year. No sweat.
Until my recent Internet fall, I hadn't posted regularly on Internet forums for over a year, except for vital professional reasons. I barely remember now what it was like to spend at least half of each day posting at forums.
I thought that I would die wretchedly if I didn't go to the library at least once a week during the warm weather. I found that I could survive without those trips.
Because of the above, I'm reasonably confident I'll survive the next step, which involves surgery on the heart of the cancer that is eating at me.
The cancer isn't the Internet addiction. That's merely a symptom of my uncontrollable acquisitiveness. A glance at my study would tell visitors that my acquisitiveness can take any form and shape. (Yes, I still have the pen caps that I saved at age fourteen. The only reason I don't have the toilet paper rolls I saved at age nine is that my mother threw them out.) But texts are the major danger area for me. Since my elementary-school years, I've had a compulsive need, not only to read (which has definitely had its benefits), but to possess the texts I read. In my childhood, that mainly meant bringing home more books from the library than I could possible read before their due date - and indeed, reading them wasn't the main point. Acquiring them was the main point.
These days, while library books remain a danger area, the main problem is the Internet. For example, during the past two days, I've downloaded 700 files. (A pause to let you absorb that number.) I don't want to tell you how many gigabytes that is.
The reason I keep failing in my quest to limit my Internet activities - though I've definitely made important progress - is that I haven't stemmed matters at the source: namely, my compulsion to acquire new things. It is this compulsion which causes me to go online on days when I hadn't intended to. It is this compulsion which causes me to stay online when I know I should go offline. And it is this compulsion that I intend to stop feeding.
As of the moment I go offline today, I'm instituting a policy of "Don't Seek New Stuff, Don't Add New Stuff." I've put together a short list of the Internet activities and offline browsing activities that are absolutely necessary for my professional and personal lives (such as posting at this blog, responding to new correspondence, and reading the writings produced by my favorite authors). I've provided for emergency expections. And I've designated four holidays during the year on which I can do other types of online and offline browsing and acquiring, as a treat.
Other than that, though, I'm not letting anything new be downloaded onto my computer. I'm not letting anything new enter my house. I'm not going to go searching for new material, whether or not I keep that material. Instead, I'm going to devote my time to sorting and enjoying what I already have.
In other words, I'm planning to treat online and offline browsing and acquisition in the same way that I now treat chocolate: as a treat to have in small quantities on special occasions, not as something I routinely gorge myself on.
Most people wouldn't have to take these strong measures. But then, most people wouldn't have to become part-time hermits either; nor would they have to confine themselves to eating chocolate on holidays. The strong measures I've taken in the past to protect my mental and physical health have had such a positive effect on my life - and, hopefully, on the lives of other people around me, including my readers - that I'm reasonably confident that, a few months down the road, I'll be asking myself, "Why didn't I do this earlier? This is fun!"
--My gay male apprentice, an avid reader of gay romance, commenting on the controversy over whether m/m fiction is created solely by and for straight women.
"I wonder whether all those guys who are upset about m/m romance writers appropriating their culture are sitting around wearing pink triangle buttons? Because if they are, they've appropriated a symbol that means, 'Line me up for the gas chambers.'"
--My apprentice again.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 22 January 2010. Mentoring: Refining my conversation skills.
I've been going through my e-mails from 2002-2003 this week, seeking old letters I can use in my e-book bonus material. I'm happy to say that my reaction to reading my old e-mails hasn't been to say, "Oh, let me just go shoot myself and put the world out of its misery." My letters - as far as I can objectively evaluate them - show me to have behaved in a reasonably nice manner during those years.
But man, could I have used some brushing up of my conversation skills. Typically, what would happen is that someone would send me a single sentence that I happened to disagree with, and they'd get back from me a ten-thousand-world treatise on why they were wrong.
Well, tonight my apprentice and I were having an argument on an entirely unrelated topic, on whether young children should be trained to use the Internet. (I was taking the Luddite view that kids' exposure to the Internet could be delayed till they'd learned other life-skills that Internet usage might interfere with. My apprentice was arguing that certain aspects of Internet usage were best learned at a young age, in the same manner that foreign languages are best learned at a young age.) I was congratulating myself inwardly on staying calm and not getting heated up during the conversation and not interrupting my apprentice repeatedly when he tried to talk, the way I would have if I'd held this type of conversation a decade ago.
Then the conversation took another turn, and I discovered that I'd totally flubbed it in a previous conversation.
I'd sent my apprentice both volumes of Syd McGinley's Dr. Fell series for Christmas, because they're the best BDSM novels I've run across for a long time. My apprentice had called me up and said he'd liked them. I'd told him what I thought was one of the more interesting aspects of the novel - that the manner of the BDSM references showed the writer's research sources. Then I'd waited for my apprentice to give me his impressions about the novel . . . and he hadn't, which had disappointed me, because I'd wanted to hear about his favorite bits.
At least, that was my impression of how the conversation went. From his perspective, he'd tried to tell me what he liked about the novel, and I'd overridden him with a ten-thousand-word treatise on all the things that I objected to in the novels.
Oh, dear. I definitely need to work on my conversation skills.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Hurrah! I can easily produce e-books for Kindle now.
Not that it was terribly hard in the old days. I just had to go into the source code of my HTML file and make a few changes to the code. But when I changed over to the ePub format, I thought that would preclude my being able to submit more e-books to the Kindle bookstore, because I was now working with multiple HTML files to create one e-book. The ePub format allows one to do that, and it's the main reason I switched over to the ePub format - because it's easier for me to lay out multiple HTML files (since that's how the text ends up at my Website) than a single file.
But when I ran my ePub edition of "Night Shadow" through Calibre's handy-dandy converter, I was able to easily turn it into a .mobi file that I can upload to the Kindle bookstore. In fact, the conversion was a lot easier than the conversions I used to make with Mobipocket Creator, the software that's specifically designed for creating .mobi e-books.
Man, does this open up new vistas for me. Provided that Amazon doesn't bungle the translation from .mobi to the Kindle format, .azw - which, admittedly, is a possibility - then I'll be able to easily convert all of my ePub e-books into a format that I can upload to Amazon. Not that I earn much at Amazon, but if I sell all of my e-books there, I'll be earning a heck of a lot more than I am currently.
Now if I could just resolve my problems with ePub distribution.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Kindle e-book royalties soar to 70 percent . . . but there's a catch.
Of course there's a catch. There always is.
The media is saying that Amazon most likely made this move in order to be competitive with Google Editions, and also with Apple, which is expected to be courting publishers when it reveals its new We're Not Telling What It Is gadget this month. The timing of this certainly seems suspicious: right before the Apple announcement, and the royalty change will take place in the same month that Google Editions opens its doors.
*** 22 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2003.
I'm continuing to collect bonus material for my e-books, which requires me to read through (1) all of my private journal entries between 1995 and 2004, (2) all of my semi-private journal entries in 2004, (3) all of my posts between 2002 and 2004, and (4) all of my correspondence between 2002 and 2004.
Do you know how much wordage that is? Here's a hint: My posts for 2002 alone take up fourteen files. Two megabytes.
Here's another hint: In 2004 - just 2004 - I wrote 370 e-mails, many of them five to ten thousand words long.
To one friend. I was writing to nine friends that year. Plus my readers. Plus a zillion other individuals and organizations.
Good thing I'm a speed reader. What is frustrating is not knowing whether anyone will actually be interested in what I'm turning up. But this will at least ease my guilt over selling e-books of stories that are also available free online.
Here's the sort of stuff I've turned up, though this one I can't use in my bonus material, since it's not related to my writings. It's from an e-mail to Anne Blue of MAS-Zine during a period when the federal government was sending out warnings about the possibility of a biochemical attack on Washington, D.C., which I live next to.
Hazards of Everyday Life (9 September 2003)
Did I tell you that Doug's gone gaga over fruit? He hasn't quite become a fruitarian, but he's eating tons of fruit now. And of course he wanted to convert me, which was quite a job, because I've always hated eating fruit on its own. For one thing, I have a tendency to get mild rashes after eating fresh fruit; it must be some lingering allergy from childhood (when I was allergic to a lot of foods).
Then it occurred to me that, whenever I go to one of those stupid affairs where you have to stand up to eat, I always eat fruit rather than try to balance a drink along with my plate. I tried fruit with my meals, and ta da! it worked. And there was no rash afterwards - the other food must have counteracted whatever was giving me the mild allergy. (Of course, Doug then proceeded to tell me why it's nutritionally wrong to eat fruit with your meals.)
So tonight I thought I'd tackle a mango. I'd never eaten one, but I've drunk mango juice. Doug happened upon me as I was about to start and, in a very condescending voice, began to explain to me the laborious task of how to get rid of the mango stone.
"Why don't you just bite into a mango, like a peach?" I asked.
"Don't be silly," he said dismissively. "You don't eat mango skin."
"Why not?"
It turned out that this idea, like so many of his other ideas, was based purely on his certainty that You Just Don't Do It. I, being in favor of empiricism, bit into the mango. "Tastes fine to me," I said.
Doug gave up on me and went to his study. I decided to find the ultimate proof that he should convert to the empirical way of life; I started leafing through the books we have on The Joys of Eating Fruit. None of them mentioned eating mango skins, but none of them said it was wrong to do so.
Insatiably curious, I decided to check the Web. And there discovered that the mango is related to poison ivy.
"Ack!" I screamed, and began checking every Website I could to figure out what dire consequences come from eating mango skin. Here was one gentleman's report of what happened after he touched (rather than ate) mango skin:
"Every inch of my skin and scalp itched and my eyes felt puffy. I got out of bed and looked in my mirror. A red, deformed face stared back at me, with eyes so swollen that the lashes barely peeked out. Worse, an angry, red, itching rash, shining with tiny blisters, blanketed my skin from crown to toe. The worst of it covered my hands and wrists with an itch so intense that it drove me to my closet to comb my fingers down my hanging clothes for relief."
There's a passage in the Bible about this, isn't there? Something about pride going before the fall?
Anyway, my desperate search revealed that (1) eating or touching mango skin doesn't always cause a rash, and (2) you might be able to stop the rash from breaking out by washing the infected area with soap and water within the first ten minutes.
So I washed my lips with soap. And then I washed everything that I'd touched. My computer mouse objected to being washed, so I replaced it. I can't do a darn thing about my computer keys (which I am tapping away at right now); I'll just hope that my lips got the worst of it. Now I just have to wait 48-72 hours to see whether I break out.
And I was worried about biochemical hazards.
*** 24 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2004.
I've basically finished combing through my posts and journal entries, but am continuing to go through my old personal correspondence. I figured I might as well read it through to the end because - with the exception of a flurry of e-mails with my apprentice on non-literary matters in 2007, and the occasional short-term correspondence - my personal correspondence ended in 2006. (One friend stopped e-mailing me in 2002, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2003, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2004, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2005, and at that point I ran out of pen pals. Some people have a black thumb in growing plants; I have a black thumb in maintaining e-mail friendships.)
Anyway, here's a reprint of another e-mail, from February 2004.
After Doug had placed his usual mountain of food on the table, I started writing down what he was eating tonight. Here's the list:
Whole wheat pita bread
Whole wheat regular bread
Zucchini
Green peppers
Cauliflower
Garlic
Broccoli
Cherry tomatoes
Cucumber
Bean sprouts
Crunchy sprouts
Tofu
Unidentified greens
Kale
Collard greens
Onions
Savoy cabbage
I might add that (1) all of this was whole (Doug isn't into wasting time cutting green peppers or slicing tofu), and (2) all of it except for the last four items was uncooked (he just pops those raw garlics into his mouth).
After I'd finished the list, he said, "I have less than usual tonight. Usually I sprinkle coleslaw over everything."
"What's that made up of?" I asked. (Doug makes his own coleslaw - it has veggies and nothing else.)
"Purple cabbage, green cabbage, carrots, celery, and radishes," he replied.
Suddenly my potato pancakes and ketchup seemed a little inadequate.
*** 30 January 2010. Writing: Yet again, my e-mail offers interesting reading.
"The Leather Archives & Museum hosts a thorough exploration of pornography, kink, consent, and fine lines: GRAPHIC SEXUAL HORROR . . . Presented by Clarisse Thorn and the Sex+++ Film Series at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum--"
At what?
"The public dance halls filled with frivolous and irresponsible young people in a feverish search for pleasure, are but a sorry substitute for the old dances on the village green in which all of the older people of the village participated. Chaperonage was not then a social duty but natural and inevitable, and the whole courtship period was guarded by the conventions and restraint which were taken as a matter of course and had developed through years of publicity and simple propriety." --Jane Addams: The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909).
Poor Miss Addams. She must be rolling in her grave.
*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Wrapping up a moderately awful month.
From most perspectives, it's been a good month. Some readers posted nice comments about my writing, I had interesting correspondence with a few people (*waves at
catana1*), I got the chance to be a guest blogger for the first time ever, some new folks Friended me, I published my first ePub e-book (though I'm still working on improving the formatting), I worked out some software problems, I got all of my Web tasks checked off my list, and if my inbox isn't in as good a shape as I'd hoped it would be, at least I got some long-delayed e-mail prepared to send.Oh, and Bookshare.org is now offering full-text search. That's a major step, because it means I'll be able to do research using complete electronic texts of thousands of books that are in copyright (legally, I add, for the sake of those of you who haven't read my previous references to Bookshare.org). Of course, I've been able to do that before now in a limited way, but having full-text searching capabilities will allow me to track down a lot more texts.
But this month was dreadful from the point of view of Internet addiction. So far this month, I've been online for over a hundred hours, and I still have one big session left to do. By January 8th, I had written 24,960 words since the beginning of the month, yet I didn't get my 30,000-word quota done for this month. (An unintentionally humorous quotation I encountered from my 2008 blog: "I'm a bit nervous about whether I'll be able to get all my series done, thanks to my slowed-down rate of getting novels done - no more than two or three a year, even if I really work hard.") I didn't get any heavy editing done. I didn't get any housework done. And what was most awful from my point of view, I spent much of the month - as my poor apprentice can testify - in the Internet-addiction equivalent of being stoned. I had the attention span of a gnat. I was barely aware of my surroundings. If I don't have mobs coming after me for any of the messages I posted in haste during that time, I'll be very fortunate indeed. When I'm manic, I lose all perspective on what I'm saying.
Here's me corresponding with a friend in 2004 about addiction:
"It's not an issue of quantity but of controllability. If you routinely can't stop yourself from doing something, for however small or large a part of your life that may be, then it's {insert label here, but I call it an addiction}. For example, if I get up 30 days in a row, telling myself that I will not go onto the Internet, that I have other things to do that are much more important, and I go onto the Internet for every one of those 30 days, that's an addiction. (This is, alas, a real example.) If, on the other hand, I go onto the Internet for 300 days in a row because I'm a slash archivist and it's my duty and pleasure to be online that much, that's not an addiction."
So it's not just being in an Internet haze that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't stop myself from going online, and once I'm on, I can't get myself offline. I'll go online for what I intend to be a thirty-second visit, and six hours later I'll still be there, knowing I should get offline, but unable to do so.
Honestly, folks, it really is like being an alcoholic.
I did quite well in October and November in staying offline. That shows I can deal with this problem. It's simply clear, after what happened this month, that I need to take stronger measures against my Internet addiction.
*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Stronger measures against my Internet addiction (with an interlude on food).
In 1990, when Doug and I first met, my daily diet was as follows:
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread.
Tuna fish sandwiches on white bread.
High-fat canned soup.
Full-fat milk.
Juice.
Coke.
Oreo cookies and other chocolate desserts.
That was it. I ate that sort of thing practically ever day of the year.
Well, today I eat:
Whole-wheat couscous, home-cooked vegetables, and low-fat cheese.
Low-fat home-cooked soups.
Home-cooked broccoli sandwiches on wheat bread, with tomatoes.
Orange juice.
Apple sauce (only because I have TMJ at the moment; otherwise, it would be raw fruit).
Fat-free milk.
Cheerios with bananas and soy milk.
Flavored whole-wheat couscous for dessert.
Oh, and occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and very occasional chocolate.
One of the reasons that I can keep to this routine is that I don't go "browsing" for new types of food. I don't need to, because I know what I'm going to eat each week; it's the same thing I ate last week. What small variations occur - a new vegetable, a new type of soup - I leave mainly to Doug to decide. So when I shop, I'm not in the dangerous mode of thinking, "What new thing shall I buy that I haven't bought before?" I just head toward the food items I always buy, and I get out of the store as quickly as possible. (Well, okay, after I've read the newspaper headlines and skimmed the newsmagazines.)
Now, I'm not saying I don't occasionally fall into old patterns of eating. (*Hides evidence of hot dogs in the refrigerator.* Not my fault, honestly - Doug brought them home.) But what's remarkable to me is that my shift to a radically different eating routine was so painless. Every step of the way (for I didn't make every change at once), I told myself that I'd suffer horribly if I gave up X in exchange for Z. And every step of the way, I found that I preferred Z to X. I wouldn't want to go back to eating the way I did in 1995; what I'm eating now tastes so good and makes my body feel so much better.
I've been going through a similar discovery, as I make changes in my life to deal with my Internet addiction, that change isn't as hard as I'd thought.
I now spend at least two weeks a month at home, offline, with no human contact except with Doug and my apprentice. No problem.
I no longer attend real-life social events, except occasional meetings with family members and close friends, and sometimes one or two conventions a year. No sweat.
Until my recent Internet fall, I hadn't posted regularly on Internet forums for over a year, except for vital professional reasons. I barely remember now what it was like to spend at least half of each day posting at forums.
I thought that I would die wretchedly if I didn't go to the library at least once a week during the warm weather. I found that I could survive without those trips.
Because of the above, I'm reasonably confident I'll survive the next step, which involves surgery on the heart of the cancer that is eating at me.
The cancer isn't the Internet addiction. That's merely a symptom of my uncontrollable acquisitiveness. A glance at my study would tell visitors that my acquisitiveness can take any form and shape. (Yes, I still have the pen caps that I saved at age fourteen. The only reason I don't have the toilet paper rolls I saved at age nine is that my mother threw them out.) But texts are the major danger area for me. Since my elementary-school years, I've had a compulsive need, not only to read (which has definitely had its benefits), but to possess the texts I read. In my childhood, that mainly meant bringing home more books from the library than I could possible read before their due date - and indeed, reading them wasn't the main point. Acquiring them was the main point.
These days, while library books remain a danger area, the main problem is the Internet. For example, during the past two days, I've downloaded 700 files. (A pause to let you absorb that number.) I don't want to tell you how many gigabytes that is.
The reason I keep failing in my quest to limit my Internet activities - though I've definitely made important progress - is that I haven't stemmed matters at the source: namely, my compulsion to acquire new things. It is this compulsion which causes me to go online on days when I hadn't intended to. It is this compulsion which causes me to stay online when I know I should go offline. And it is this compulsion that I intend to stop feeding.
As of the moment I go offline today, I'm instituting a policy of "Don't Seek New Stuff, Don't Add New Stuff." I've put together a short list of the Internet activities and offline browsing activities that are absolutely necessary for my professional and personal lives (such as posting at this blog, responding to new correspondence, and reading the writings produced by my favorite authors). I've provided for emergency expections. And I've designated four holidays during the year on which I can do other types of online and offline browsing and acquiring, as a treat.
Other than that, though, I'm not letting anything new be downloaded onto my computer. I'm not letting anything new enter my house. I'm not going to go searching for new material, whether or not I keep that material. Instead, I'm going to devote my time to sorting and enjoying what I already have.
In other words, I'm planning to treat online and offline browsing and acquisition in the same way that I now treat chocolate: as a treat to have in small quantities on special occasions, not as something I routinely gorge myself on.
Most people wouldn't have to take these strong measures. But then, most people wouldn't have to become part-time hermits either; nor would they have to confine themselves to eating chocolate on holidays. The strong measures I've taken in the past to protect my mental and physical health have had such a positive effect on my life - and, hopefully, on the lives of other people around me, including my readers - that I'm reasonably confident that, a few months down the road, I'll be asking myself, "Why didn't I do this earlier? This is fun!"
