I'M ON VACATION! (so I'll write about work)

This is my first week off in fifteen months. My bosses strongly encouraged me to take time off this summer so I wouldn't get burnt out. I'm surely that's partly because they need me to be able to work well when I'm there, but mostly, because they're nice and don't want me to get burnt out. In fact, when the intern who was supposed to cover Weds-Fri had a death in the family, I offered to put my vacation off a week. Lucie decided to close the office for those days and to take the voicemail and email herself. They don't ever close the office except on major holidays; one of the important things about having interns is to always have someone in the office. But they really wanted me to get away.

Today I actually got to spend some time with Judy, which doesn't much happen. Even though her office is right across from mine, she has a steady stream of patients and supervisees every day, and has to squeeze in the business of the institute into those little breaks. I often don't actually see her for days at a time. We do everything via email, so she can read and reply when she has a spare second; her time is very scarce. Lucie comes in on Monday and Friday afternoons. The rest of the week, she sees patients in her Brooklyn office. So she and I are constantly emailing, and usually meet for around fifteen minutes around 1:00 when she's in (she also sees patients in a room there, plus all of her committee meetings are on Fridays). I really look forward to her coming because I love working with her, plus we've gotten friendly and I really enjoy her. She has a great sense of humor.

Judy and Lucie usually meet on Mondays and Fridays from 3:00 to 4:00. But Lucie was visiting friends out of town today, so I got a hunk of that hour with Judy today. I don't know her as well, but she's quite marvelous, and endlessly competent and hard-working. She is also endlessly kind to me. She built the whole idea of a fundraising crafts fair around my being able to sell my jewelry (I will split the take with the institute). She brings bagels and lox every Friday - and when we have interns, she bring for the intern working that day. I think she's quite sorry that she can't pay me more, and always looks for ways to make my life a little easier.

I am appreciated at that job. Lucie began as Executive Director at the same time I started (she had been on faculty for quite a while), and the two of us fixed a lot of fuzzy rules and messy procedures; we spent most of last summer completely overhauling the handbook, which is a big, complicated document. It's not just that I'm appreciated because I'm keeping the office running smoothly, but also because I bring a lot of good ideas to the table, draft or edit almost every written word that goes out (I also do this for most of the committee chairs), and offer to help where it's not expected or required. It's a really, really good team.

My interns: I generally have two college interns in fall, spring and summer, and a high school intern in the spring. I realized recently that this is way more experience than I've ever had in interviewing, hiring, and supervising. I also realized that I'm doing it well, because my interns have performed beautifully and everyone likes them.

One thing I've done, another idea I've had, has widened the pool of internship candidates. In addition to our sometime-spotty yield from internships.com, where we run a notice all year, I decided to reach out to the undergrad psych departments of a half a dozen good colleges. Since we don't pay them, I figured it was a bonus for psych students to work at PPSC; plus a lot of the people we get from internships.com are  just looking for any internship they can get. And if I interview half a dozen people and none jumps out at me, I go back to resumes.

The interns generally come out at the end with good letters of reference, a substantial gift (usually an Amazon gift card for at least $100), a nice lunch out, and a lot of information about the difference between analysis and other forms of counseling and therapy. One of the spring interns came in wanting to take a doctorate in psych, and left wanting to get an MSW and train as an analyst after. She applied to Fordham School of Social work (where my mother got her MSW) and got in; I wrote one of her recommendations.

This summer, one of my spring interns is staying over two days a week; she's pleasant and conscientious and has good office skills; found her through John Jay, which has a good forensic psych program. (The school is John Jay College of Criminal Justice, so it's slanted to a lot of law-and-order studies.) But I had a problem getting a second intern. One of the intern issues is space; my office is so small that more than two people cannot work there at once. So I have to find interns who can work opposite times. (I still can't believe I managed to shoehorn the high school intern in at the last minute!) I started interviewing late for the summer, because I was very busy in April and May getting the school year over and setting up fall registration. It doesn't really calm down until the end of June. Someone from the first batch really impressed me, but he took another internship, and there wasn't a second-best in that group. I found someone really great in the second group, and she really wanted the internship and seemed like a perfect fit. I called her twice and emailed her three times to offer her the position, and I never heard back from her. Group number three: I saw someone I thought would work out well. I had one more person to see, and I think I had to cancel for some reason, and couldn't reschedule for some days. To much time was going by - this was a week ago - and I interviewed her over the phone and hired her on the spot. She just had the right personality. When I told the woman I thought would be OK that I'd hired someone else, but I would be glad to consider her for fall, she wrote back and said she couldn't do fall, but would be glad to work for me over winter break. Score! (The intern I had lunch with - the lunch I can't remember - had been an intern last summer and also offered to come back for this past winter break. Getting a winter break intern, for those few weeks between fall and spring, is really great.)

Personality is a big part of it for me. My starting guidelines are usually an interest in psychology and some office or customer service experience. But a lot of the people I interviewed were just too shy and timid. I have to have someone who isn't scared and isn't at ease around me or the faculty or candidates.

However - my high school intern this past term started out exactly that way. Judy has an arrangement with a special city high school, where all of the seniors have to do internships, and I think we all forgot about it until the last minute. So Kenny was the only person I saw and he was kind of thrust on me. He was a tall, skinny young man from a very traditional Chinese family; I recognized that right away, because my friend L. has a very similar background. He had no office experience. I thought he was a little freaked-out by old-hippie me, but when I went to his school for a reception, I saw that a lot of his teachers were a lot like me. (When I heard about the internships some of his peers had had - at a folk club, with a filmmaker, with a state senator - I felt terrible that my internship was such a bore by comparison. But then I spoke with his college counselor - who could easily have been my sister - she said that he always told her how much he liked working there.)

Apart from the fact that he could reach high places and carry heavy things, it turned out he was extremely good with computers and all kinds of tech. Good at Excel. Good at internet research. Polite. Conscientious - like the second he finished something, he'd ask "Is there anything else you want me to do?" Most of my interns will spend a few minutes web-surfing or whatever when they've finished something, and I totally get that - I do it myself. In fact, if I was in the middle of something or didn't have something ready for Kenny to do, I'd say, "Give me a few minutes, take a little while and surf," only then would he do it. He would ask for permission to answer his cell phone. And slowly, he got comfortable and opened up, we chatted some and joked around, and by the end of the term, no one wanted to let him go. He had to work for money this summer, but is going to college locally in the fall, and I asked him to think about coming back then. It might happen. Everyone ended up loving Kenny to pieces. I would not have chosen someone so shy if I'd had the choice, but I was amazed at how well it turned out to have him there, and how much less shy he was at the end.

I couldn't make it work without my interns.

I have a very good job, and will now spend a week not thinking about it.

the insomniac ramble

It's almost one-thirty am. I went to bed at midnight. Cannot sleep. I had a lot of trouble with insomnia and sleep disturbances right after I got sober (nearly 26 years ago), but I've basically had it licked via (safe) prescribed meds. One of them, an antidepressant with the side effect of sleepiness, is the one that permits me to stay asleep through the night once I've fallen asleep. That's the lifesaver. If my mind is so busy that I will have trouble falling asleep, I add a (safe) prescribed anti-anxiety med. Nothing worked tonight,and I am following one of the anti-insomnia rules of getting out of bed.

I did have a busy mind, but the med did not put a dent in it. I sort of mentally narrate to myself some events of my life that I feel the need to revisit. I'm not sure if these narrations are writing (though some of the topics will subsequently turn up in this blog or something else I write) or imaginary therapy sessions (would that I could go more than once a week!).

Oh, hello, some of my newer friends...did I mention that I'm in therapy and suffer from depression and occasional anxiety? I wonder if the boom in treating mood disorders in the US isn't somehow related to the increasing complexity of life here. It's kind of what it's like when I spend a weekend in Pennsylvania and then come back to New York - it's a lot of effort to live here, pretty hard work. You always have that near-unconscious routine of noting suspicious or oddly acting people, handling cash discreetly when you're in public, and so on. It eats up quite a lot of energy, negotiating a crowded sidewalk. It's actually pretty calm where I live, but when I get off that train and them am launched into Penn Station (which is built under Madison Square Garden making things even more hectic), then a block of midtown street, then the subway. And a lot of people outside NYC have cars and their own houses, which also brings oodles of stress and bad financial surprises.

Our parents kick us out of the nest as soon as possible, so we don't have the support of mother, siblings, grandmothers on a daily basis. I admire the way Indian families live. (The Chinese also keep the generations close.) My remaining parents (father and stepmother) are very remote, not welcoming and generous. My mother was the exact opposite, but she died when I was 22; and my stepfather had no intention of complying with her wishes, so there was no more emotional support, no "home" to go back to, and not even the security of a few extra dollars.

My father has been so adverse to spending an extra dime on my brother and me that he actually makes excuses when he and my stepmother do things like go to Bermuda for a week. I guess the idea is that if we know he has enough money for a vacation, HE SHOULD GIVE US SOME. So he'll say things like, "You know, we booked this three months ago and got a very good deal, and we haven't gotten away in a year, and some friends of ours are going to be there..." C'mon, just say "We're going on vacation." I promise not to ask you to buy me something or take me along.

Actually, I did sort of do it recently. They were going on a Caribbean cruise, and I asked them if they could pick me up some larimar stud earrings set in silver, if they were not insanely expensive. Larimar, which is a little whiter than turquoise and has chatoyance (cat's-eye quality), is only found in the Dominican Republic, and is hard to find and pricey over here. I really did stress that the cost might be too high and they should only get something very reasonable. (I was thinking about something dead simple, like studs in a 3 or 4mm round cab, or similarly small in an oval, in a plain silver bezel, period.) What they came back with were BIG heart-shaped studs, really substantial pieces of larimar, and a story. They found the earrings in the very last store on the very last island on the very last day; they had a hard time finding any anywhere. But this store didn't take credit, so they had to scrape every last cent out of their pockets to buy them. This was a rare act of real generosity, and I think Mary really drove it.

My relationship with Mary has improved immeasurably, believe it or not, because of the internet. She speaks in a kind of acerbic, non-warm ways; so when she makes a joke about something I've mentioned, it always seems as if she's making fun of me in a mean way. She just has that affect. But when she and I started emailing, she was extremely nice, and I started to see her as truly affectionate and sweet. I think I finally became 100 percent sure that she didn't dislike or resent me in some way, after 30-plus years.

And back to jewelry...I have two other pieces of larimar. One is a big old pendant, roughly pear-shaped, that was given to me by an old boyfriend who had family in the DR. The second is a silver wire bracelet with a small oval cab near the clasp (it's a design called the "Cruixian Hook," with a hook clasp worn on top). I bought that in St. Croix in 1995. I also have about 40 larimar beads (faceted rondells, 4mm I think), which I've been hoarding for years. (There are some beads I sit on for years, waiting until I think of a design that does them justice. Some beads just demand it.)

I actually started working on a pretty elaborate pair of earrings today, the first piece for the crafts fair in November, but I ran out of thin enough headpins. I had more headpins, but they were a thicker gauge and wouldn't go through the stones I was using. I almost never let this happen, and it's really frustrating.I'm going to have to go back to them and get myself to that same level of concentration and careful work. I'm capable of working fast, but these pieces will have pretty healthy price tags, and they've got to be just right and not sloppy in any way. The price of silver has become murderous, so I always dread running out of headpins, wire, clasps, earring hooks, and so on. (I've actually broken up some old pieces to reuse the clasp.)

One of these days, I will come up with some way to photograph my jewelry properly. Or have someone else do it.

I think I'm gonna try bed again. Good night, and thanks for keeping me company.

KANK revisited

I just watched this video again (for the zillionth time), and it got me to thinking about the impression Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna made the first time I watched it.

It was the first Indian movie I ever saw. I particularly enjoyed this song, because it was exactly the kind of thing Americans identify as "Bollywood." I knew nothing about the actors at all: no idea I was watching father and son. Clueless about the beautiful woman in pink who was in no other part of the movie. Hadn't the vaguest notion of how well-known or popular any of the actors were...though I remember thinking that "the older guy" was probably very famous. There was just a certain ease and charisma about him that suggested a great deal of experience. I was very taken with Shah Rukh Khan, although I found his movie character shockingly obnoxious. I thought it was kind of cool the way this song mixed some English in with the Hindi. I thought the older woman was splendid, and loved her chemistry with the older guy. I couldn't believe how long the movie was. I'm not sure if I noticed that no one kissed on the lips. Since the movie didn't have American-style credits identifying the characters and the actors who played them, I'm not even sure how I learned Shah Rukh's name, although I believe his was the first actor's name I learned. I thought he was quite cute, and made a point of watching a few of his movies in the month or so after. Then I didn't watch another Indian movie for about two years.

Two years later, I remembered how novel KANK had seemed to me, and I watched it again. I  believe that was October 2011. I don't really remember how I went about researching and finding out who these actors were and what Indian films were all about. (I get so wrapped up in new passions so quickly and deeply that I often can't remember where they began; they fast seem to be things I've always done and known. I can't remember for the life of me how I started making jewelry, for instance.)

What happened the second time I watched the movie was that I was fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan. I had been right the first time I watched the movie: he was the real deal. I expect I learned his name through my film bible, the Internet Movie Database, and I simply began to follow him; I started watching his movies almost exclusively, and branched out from there. It took me about two weeks of tooling around on YouTube before I learned how to pronounce his name; I also had his name written on a piece of paper by my computer to aid my searches, since it took a while for me to get the spelling down.

My second start with Indian movies was the real one. I knew there was a lot in the movies I didn't get, and did exhaustive internet research to learn some of the social context. I started to some some of the major actors I enjoyed: Shah Rukh, of course, Abhishek Bachchan, Kajol, and so on. I started to learn about playback singers and item girls and some of the top producers and composers and directors; I found out that no one ever kisses on the lips. I discovered Amitabh's blog, and started to make some internet friends in India. (Most particularly Shiva, who kindly pointed people to my blog via Twitter, and translated an interesting Twitter conversation for me between Amitabh and Ram Gopal Varma; also Pankaj, who recommended Aamir Khan's films. Another friend dear to my heart is Moses, an Israeli who learned Hindi from watching 3,000 Indian movies, and proclaims daily, "I love Amitabh Bachchan!")

I have one friend of Facebook who always calls me "Aunty," which I hate, but I love him anyway.

And of course I met Rochelle, an Amitabh mega-fan - a Jewish woman one year my senior who lives two neighborhoods away. Never imagined that Indian movies would bring me a new in-person friend who shares a lot of my tastes and background.

Barry noted that I have had far less depressive moods since I began watching Indian films. I am deeply appreciative of being led to so much fascinating study. I probably know about 40 or 50 words in Hindi. I have discovered some amazing Indian musicians, film musicians or non. (And I am including Adnan Sami in that group, although he's not Indian - if I have it right, he is of Pakistani descent, born in Canada, raised in England, and now living and working in Mumbai.) I taught Shiva some Yiddish via email, and recommended American films to Pankaj.

It's been a pretty fruitful nine months.

I've also become active on Twitter during this time; I joined a year or more ago, but never really cared for it. I found the 160-character limit stifling. Now I adore it, way more than Facebook. Neat little jokes and messages and information fly through the ether, and I can reach out to people I would never have encountered before. And of course it's always thrilling to get a reply or retweet from someone I admire from afar. I've had replies from Amitabh himself (only one, but that's plenty), from Raghu Dixit, and often more than once a day from Adnan Sami (brilliant man with a great sense of humor). Some nice replies and retweets from one of my heroes, Dick Zigun, "the unofficial mayor of Coney Island." (I used my blog name as my handle, @northofconey, so I'm followed by a lot of Brooklyn-based people and organizations.) I've said hello to Dick here and there over the years when I've seen him around Coney, but last Friday night, when I introduced myself at the Mermaid Parade volunteers meeting, he knew exactly who I was. I've had some nice replies from the actor John Ortiz and former jockey/actor Gary Stevens. I've also had some Twitter exchanges with a couple of the "Deadliest Catch" captains. In fact, on that week's "After the Catch" (kind of the postgame show for "Deadliest Catch"), they put my live-tweet on the air! (Not having a smartphone or laptop, I had to run to my computer to live-tweet during the commercials, but it was well worth the fuss. It was a pretty major moment, seeing my tweet on TV.)

Whiplash change of topic: it is now apparently considered old-fashioned, when writing, to put two spaces after a period or colon) instead of one. It feels weird. Makes me feel a little old (though not quite like being called "Aunty").

Yes, I had my first volunteer experience at the Mermaid Parade, and sad to say, it didn't go well. I was assigned to sell merchandise, went to the meeting the night before (Rochelle was there, too), signed in on Saturday morning, got my free tee shirt and a bottle of water, and was told to go to 21st Street. Met up there with two of the people who were also supposed to sell merch (we were told there would be three tents with four people each), but there was no one to tell us where to go or what to do. The three of us sat under a tent, where there was a cooler with bottled water and a porta-potty, and waited for an hour and a half. We kept asking staff people what was going on, and some of them radioed in, but we never got any information. A couple of times, one or the other said, "I think you're supposed to go to 22nd Street," or some other location, but no one at those locations knew anything, either. (I very much enjoyed meeting one of my co-merch-volunteers, a woman in her late eighties, who had sold merch in 2011 and had some very interesting stories to tell about her life.) We didn't get the lunch that was supposed to be provided. It was an extremely hot day. After and hour and a half, one of the staff said something about a problem with the merch set-up, and I walked the ten blocks back to the volunteer station. The woman there said that there wasn't going to be merch, apologized and gave me lunch and another bottle of water. (I have to say, they were very on top of having plenty of water.) She said I could carry a banner, but I knew that was beyond my stamina limit at that time. Barry and I found each other, but it was already a half-hour before the start of the parade and impossible to get a decent place to watched. We tried to watch a little, then went home.

I emailed the volunteer coordinators about my experience. The next day, they sent a group email to all of the volunteers, and apologized sincerely for any glitches. A day later, I got a very lovely personal email from one of the coordinators, apologizing again. So I kind of got to be part of the event; tried my best. At least I got the tee shirt. I think I'll give it another shot next year.

earworm and brainworm

Today's earworm is not really an earworm - it's that I taught the word to Adnan Sami today and Twitter. Cool beans.

The brainworm is not so cool. I am having some weird memory losses. This past Thursday, Susan Gerritt (from work) and I were supposed to take last summer's intern, Sarah, to lunch. I can't seem to remember the lunch. I can't remember seeing her at all. I'm pretty sure it happened, because I do remember paying for it (it was the first time I'd ever paid in a restaurant with the PPSC card - got permission from Judy, of course). But I can't remember anything else.

I'm also fishing, at times, for some older memories, and I am known for remembering things very well. I also have the short-term blips which are perfectly normal for someone my age. My typing has also gotten a notch worse. And I've noticed occasional tremors in my hands.

I guess the next thing to do is have my primary doctor recommend a neurologist, in a couple of weeks when I have the money. Something is less-than-right upstairs, I think. (The answer is yes, scared shitless.)

Love my new primary doctor. Most of the lab tests are done in his office, which is very efficient, and he spend a lot of time with me. Tweaked my meds a little and explained everything. And by the way, I dropped 13 pounds in a month. (Answer: salad, lean protein, Greek yogurt, a little fruit, and just plain eating smaller amounts.)

Volunteering at the Mermaid Parade was a bust. I was supposed to sell merchandise - there were going to be three booths with four people each. Was sent to an area to wait and waited for an hour and a half with two other merchandise volunteers. No one knew anything - staff members radioed in but got no answers. Finally, someone said they thought they weren't doing merchandise after all. This was after months of emails and a meeting on Friday night. So I walked the ten blocks back to the volunteer registration area, and they kind of said, oops, there was a problem, and that was it. Of course, by that time it was too late to get a good spot to watch the Parade. I tried to watch some, but was pretty beat after sitting in the heat all that time. Bummer.

earworm & a flirt

Current earworm:

I hope this is a decent version; can't listen where I am now.

For some reason, when I try to upload a video to Blogger and select "My YouTube Videos," it says that I don't have any. Now, my Blogger sign-in is my Goggle sign-in, same as YouTube, so I don't understand at all why "My YouTube Videos" in Blogger doesn't bring up "My Favorites" or "Recently Watched" in YouTube. What's the point of connectivity if it doesn't connect?

I've been a mite flirty with someone lately, but it's online only and he's not in the US. I consider it about 90% not-wrong. He's either flirting back or just friendly; either is fine. It amounts to something like 4 or 5 tweet replies over about a week. It's his fault for being so magnetic.

reading and writing and publishing and publicity

Roger Ebert tweeted today with a link to a little piece on Ray Bradbury by Junot Diaz. It is well-known that I'm crazy about movies and music, but I think writers are my real rock stars. (And let's remember that my all time favorite rock musician, Elvis Costello, writes some of the finest lyrics on the planet.)

I come from a family of bookworms. My dad was a journalism major and aspired to be an old-school Broadway lyricist. My uncle Howard is easily the most serious bookworm among us. From when he was in college, he only ever worked in bookstores and libraries, and his last two jobs before he retired was as head librarian in a couple of nice, small New Jersey communities. When it became clear that I was also a mad reader and reading way above my grade level, Howard fed me books, even though he lived in Philadelphia. I would say that I was reading what is now called "young adult" books when I was six or seven (they were a little cleaner back then), and started reading adult books at eight or nine.

So get this: I'm around nine, in the school library, reading Black Boy by Richard Wright, which was a gift from Howard. I pretty much understood it, but there was a word I didn't know and could figure out. The drill was to ask the school librarian, who flatly refused to tell me what "whore" meant. (I pronounced the "w.")

Howard probably gave me my first Ray Bradbury book around that time. I adored him, and read his books over and over. I wasn't and didn't become a huge sci-fi fan; I had about half a dozen authors I liked and read extensively. I never read sci-fi outside that group until I was past 40; I had a very close friend (broke with her some years back) who was a publisher of sci-fi and (shudder!) fantasy.

I loathe fantasy; it's one of the genres I truly hate. Any book or movie, once there's magic or a wizard or an elf or any of that shit, that's it for me. I am proud to say that I saw "Lord of the Rings" in a theater and fell asleep.

However, after getting by for a few years with never reading any of my friend's books, she pressed me very gently. I had to. And the first thing she recommended very highly was a fantasy series of five thick books (I just checked two of them on Amazon: one was 600+ pages and the other was 900+). They were not too wizardy and awful, and the guy writes well, but after a while, it was more of a task than a pleasure. I read all five, and a few of her other authors who were more sci-fi.

So what I mostly loved about Bradbury was the way he wrote. I haven't reread him in many years, but I remember the feeling of welcome about his writing, a warmth and simplicity and clarity.

The other sci-fi-writers I enjoyed: Robert Silverberg, Robert Shockley, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven & Dave Pournell. Robert Heinlein.

And: when I was, I believe, in middle school, in 1971...and I don't tell this to a lot of people...I attended the first-ever Star Trek convention. I was devoted to the original series, and I went with a bunch of my friends. Back then, kiddies, it was a huge big deal to watch the uncut episodes on a big screen with no commercials, since mostly what we had all seen were the edited reruns on WPIX. But the really big deal was that I met Himself, Isaac Asimov, and he signed my copy of I, Robot. (No, I no longer have it, another fucking heartbreaking loss of a material possession.) He made all of the girls give him a kiss on the cheek before he would sign a book. I took a photo of him. (I may still have one of my Star Trek Con pictures, but the Asimov pictures are also no longer with me.)

When I worked at Penguin, it was very exciting to me to meet or even see some very famous and wonderful authors, and I acquired quite a few signed books and personally signed books. (Some I still have, some not.) I'm not much of one for autographs - Barry likes them much more than I do - but I love a signed book.)

I'm the same way about mysteries as I am about sci-fi: I'm not wild about the genre, but I have certain authors I like. I swallowed by timidity and barged in on the late, great Robert D. Parker, who was sitting in a conference room signing stock, turned into (as V. used to put it) a gushing fangirl, and asked him to sign a book to me. It was kind of uncool to bug another imprint's authors (he wrote for Putnam), although sometimes an imprint will set up an in-house signing. But I simply could not miss the chance to shake hands with Robert Parker. Putnam had a lot of those bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and John Sandford and Sue Grafton.

Other mystery writers I like: George S. Chesbro, Lawrence Block (he was very big with the AA set), Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, and a few others I'm not remembering. Elmore Leonard. Do not like British mysteries at all.

Other authors from whom I had personally signed books at Penguin: Paul Rusesbagina  (the "Hotel Rwanda" guy), Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper's Daughter). I spotted a few celebrity authors when I worked there and said hi: Lorraine Bracco (Doctor Bronx herself!), Ellen Burstyn, Morgan Spurlock, the Rev. T.D. Jakes.

And a couple of authors I represented; I've probably mentioned David Lynch a million times already, but there was also Daniel Pinchbeck, who wrote 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. This was really the first big 2012 book (non-fiction), and my first-ever author. (My boss actually passed him onto me when I was still a temp, although I was in the process of trying to get hired full-time for the job.) I have to say that Daniel's two biggest publicity hits were his own doing: The Colbert Report and Rolling Stone, but I knew exactly who and where his audience was, toured him the right cities, and the book did amazingly, unexpectedly well in the mind-body-spirit category (The Genre Formerly Known As New Age). It made the very bottom of the New York Times' extended bestseller list one week. (The extended portion, which I think is positions 20-35, is not published and your are not permitted to call the book "a New York Times bestseller. But still.) It charted in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle.

It made my imprint, Tarcher, very happy to have hired me. I was brought on by the wonderful editor and publicist and writer Ken Siman. Ken taught me and trusted me. I was the most junior of three publicists, and of course least likely to get the most important authors; but when I heard we were doing a book by David Lynch (I will stop dropping that name some day), I ran into his office and said "ooh, ooh ooh!" and he gave me the book. Ken figured out very early on that when I got excited about a book, I got right into the zone.

When he left and his successor came on, she didn't like me one bit, and kept all of the good-looking books for herself. Once I had one that was small but I was very excited about, and she horned in, put herself on the team with me, and flat-out wrecked it. She was the anti-Ken. At the time she started, the Lynch book was about to come out in paperback, and if a publicist had the hardcover, they had the paperback, period. It simply killed her that I had the Lynch book, especially since it was about TM (transcendental meditation), and she grew up TM in a TM family in Fairfield, Iowa, which is TM Central, where the TM university was. The best part was when she came with me to the first NYC Lynch event, and David came right over to me and kissed me on the mouth. (This was nothing flirty or improper; we had just had a really nice working relationship on the book.) I believe that this was when she knew that I absolutely could not be taken off the paperback, and probably nothing she could do to improve the publicity campaign.

Of course, David generated his own publicity, layering project over project. During the book publicity, he was also promoting the David Lynch Foundation (funding TM training for at-risk kids), his own brand of coffee, and his movie Inland Empire. David got publicity just for being David Lynch. All I really had to do was to point the book at the right audience.


If you twisted my arm for my all-time favorite fiction author, I would have to go with John Irving, with Marge Piercy close behind. Favorite non-fiction is probably the classic essays of E.B. White. When I studied writing in the early 80s, my favorite professor, Bill Decker, taught me how to write more simply and clearly by pointing me to White.


I'm a washout as a fiction writer; I am no damned good at writing outside my own experience. I wrote one good short story and a handful of shitty ones, a few of which were published in what they used to call "little-literary" magazines, which generally pay in copies. I had more success in similar publications with my poetry, but I don't think I've written one in 20 years now. (And I no longer have a copy of any sort of the best one I ever wrote, which was published in a little-literary, called palm sunday, coney island, which I wrote on the subway.) I've never written a theater or film script. But I can write.

I learned to write by keeping a journal (and later, of course, blogs) since I was eight, and reading voraciously for my entire life. Being self-taught, I took my first writing class when I was about 25 because I had absolutely no idea if I wrote well or not. I had zero training in the rules of grammar, punctuation and the like; I pretty much had it all right, but never knew the names for any of it. (This is what happens when you go to a progressive, avant-garde, experimental school for gifted children: you read Moliere in French at 12, BUT YOU NEVER LEARN THE RULES OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR.) Bill shaped and directed me a bit (one course in writing, one in editing, and an independent study), and this is where I ended up. I'm very, very happy with my level of writing and editing skills, and they help me immensely every day of my life.


OK, after the long way around, we're coming home.

My cubicle at Tarcher was right in front of Ken's office, which was right next to the office of a publicist for the literary imprint Riverhead. A bookcase of our books was right next to the Riverhead publicist's office. One day, a damned good-looking young dude was waiting to see the Riverhead publicist, looking at our books, a grinning. I said, "Are you laughing at our mind-body-spirit books?" And he said, "No, I just had no idea there were books about some of this stuff."

The next time I saw the handsome guy, I kow-towed, because I had read his book, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the handsome guy was Junot Diaz.

That's Junot bein' handsome. Not shown: that he is one of the finest, most amazing authors of our time, genius. And he loved Ray Bradbury too.

bad fingers and Bol Bachchan

Amitabh shows how it's done, in the title song from Bol Bachchan. The young man with the mustache is Ajay Devyn and the cleanshaven young man is Junior Bachchan, Abhishek.

I have a bad trigger finger and a not-so-bad trigger finger, and it's back to Dr. Patel for me on Monday. If you weren't around for last year's trigger finger here's what it's all about. So it's either going to be a shot of cortisone. or what I had done last year:

"Percutaneous trigger finger release:  Trigger finger release can be performed in the office under local anesthesia using a percutaneous technique.  Numbing medicine is injected in the hand near the base of the finger.  A larger needle is then placed through the numb area and is used to divide the pulley that is causing the triggering.  Advantages of this procedure include that it can be done in the office and does not require an incision.  The main disadvantage is that the surgeon cannot see the pulley or nearby nerve and there is a possible higher risk of injury to the nerves or an incomplete release.  While these complications are unlikely, patient should take them into account when choosing to have a procedure."

It's gonna hurt like hell if he has to do this again, especially on two fingers. I remember being in howling pain the day after. The bad one is the right-hand pinkie, and PTFR is usually done one the middle three fingers. The not-yet-as-bad one is the left-hand ring finger, so it may be a wait-and-see, or a PTFR. And if I have the surgery, there's physical therapy after, for maybe six weeks.

So I may be very limited as far as using the computer, although of course I'll have to at work.  Send good thoughts for a nice needle full of cortisone.

Recent reading: The Leftovers by Tom Perotta. Surburban folks try to get along after a Rapture-like event. Love the way he writes, and the post-Cheever look at surburbia. See also, his Little Children.

Somehow, I hopped into another post-apocalyptic novel right after, Stephen King's Cell. Just started it, and it's pretty much as un-put-down-able as most King books. I am an unabashed fan.

Too much to write about with hurting fingers: out in Yardley with Jannah last weekend, Saturday night party on her boat (six boats all tied up together), and then slept on the boat. The whole deal was kind of like camping but less grubby. Relaxing by the pool on Sunday, parade on Monday. I dearly love the Memorial Day parade in Yardley...I hate to use the word "quaint," which it isn't, quite, hut it very old-fashioned and I look forward to it every day - I've been going there for Memorial Day the past 4-5 years.

Very hard, busy season at work, what with classes ending, getting evaluations from teacher, updating transcripts, trying to get a second summer intern, overseeing registration, orienting new faculty, etc. If I must say so myself, I've been coming through like a champ, but I'm seriously exhausted. Part of me (no lie) is kind of hoping to spend Tuesday in bed, on painkillers.

I'm having a really good time on Twitter, especially when I get replies from (can't deny it) well-known people. This past week: Raghu Dixit and Adnan Sami. Both good dudes, and Raghu is supposed to come to the US in the fall. I also have a little joke-topping thing with @Disalmanic, who is a damn funny guy.