The Creationist-ist, or; Our Bug-Eyed Descendants

June 14, 2013
Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids.

Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids.

Wowee, did you hear that in 100,000 years, we’re all going to have eyes the size of $6 gobstobbers?

I know, I know, as fast as these sensational pictures shot around the internet, the scientific intelligentsia of the world rained on our human evolution parade by pointing out that the pictures are mere conjectures, and fairly outrageous ones at that.

The news broke with a worldwide leader in cutting-edge scientific discourse: a webpage called “What’s Hot” on the “money saving magazine from MyVoucherCodes.co.uk.”

A contributor named Nickolay Lamm apparently teamed with Alan Kwan of Washington University, who used his PhD in Computational Genomics to predict the future of the human species.

Since then, everyone’s been pretending they know what the hell Computational Genomics is. And even worse, they’re showing once again that most of us have only the barest grasp of how evolution actually works.

For a long time I’ve secretly known that I’m a Creationist-ist. That is to say, I harbor shameful, untoward prejudice against people who deny the science of evolution. Because trust me, that debate is over—unless you’re one of the 46% of Americans who, according to a 2012 poll, ignore the fossil record and claim the earth was created in one week a couple thousand years ago.

I’m not sure why it’s such a touchy subject for me.  Maybe it’s like hearing that someone hates your favorite food (“What? How could you not like blueberry sorbet?!”). Maybe my work as a journalist has made me too much of a slave to the facts.  Maybe it’s my long-term discomfort with organized religion, especially when it tries to boss the public school science curriculum around.

And God said, Let there be no separation of church and state.

And God said, Let there be no separation of church and state.

This whole huge-eyeball thing reminded me of a conversation I had a few years back with a guy who claimed that in a few hundred years, we’d all have these really long, skinny, agile thumbs from generations of constant texting.

Because spending so much time texting will change the human hand eventually, right?

Not quite.

Kwan and Lamm seem a little unsure on the details of just what they’ve produced. Is it a predictor of evolution, or of advanced genetic engineering?

First, Kwan says the picture is a conjecture based on “zygotic genome engineering technology.”

But then, Kwan goes on to write as if he thinks these changes will occur through evolution, in a sort of space-age adaptive phase:

“Evolution in space is only beginning to be explored today,” Kwan writes. But his “guess” is that thousands of years of life in space colonies will “select for” features like large eyes (because space colonies are dark), darker skin (to protect against UV radiation outside Earth’s atmosphere) and “thicker eyelids or a more pronounced superciliary arch” (to help us maintain good vision in low or zero gravity).

Then he predicts that a “reintroduced plica semilunaris” would make us blink sideways instead of up and down, to shield us from “cosmic ray effects.”

Not unlike my friend who thought cell phones will give us new thumbs, Kwan also theorizes that the human head will grow larger over the generations because our “understanding of the universe” will increase. Because of the “rule of viable human biology,” we’re not talking bulbous alien heads with tiny faces. But in just 20,000 years, apparently we can expect to have slightly larger foreheads than we do today.

Don't worry, this won't be your great-grandchildren's look.

Don’t worry, this won’t be your great-grandchildren’s look.

So what’s going on in this scenario? Bio-engineered space babies? Or Survival of the Fittest, extra-terrestrial edition?

Even if Kwan isn’t confused, I think most of his readers are. They think evolution is sort of like the marinade of life: put an organism in a certain situation for long enough, and its descendants will adapt to that situation. Wear communication lenses right on your eyeballs for enough generations, and eventually we’ll grow bigger eyes.

Like my mom asked about her Spanish Water Dog puppies, who naturally have a shorter tail than their Portuguese Water Dog brethren: if you cut a certain dog breed’s tail short for many generations, will puppies of that breed be born with shorter tails over time?

Nope.

In this case, short tails through selective breeding, not surgery.

In this case, short tails through selective breeding, not surgery.

As far as we know, natural evolutionary changes (i.e., not changes of human-led selective breeding) begin with a totally random mutation of DNA. A few members of any given species might have a tiny variation in their genes that gives them an edge over others. If their success means that they can produce more offspring than an animal without that mutation does, and they pass that mutation on to their offspring, then over millions of years, that means a species gradually inherits new characteristics, as offspring with the helpful mutation begin to outnumber those without it.

So the question of whether or not any genetic characteristic contributes to a species’ evolution is pretty simple: does it give the individual a reproductive advantage?

If Kwan’s googly-eyed population were to emerge through natural selection, that would mean people who happen to have large eyes would have an advantage over people who had normal-sized eyes. Specifically, people with large eyes, on average, would tend to make more babies than people with normal eyes (maybe Big Eyes is more attractive to the opposite sex; maybe his eyes improve vision and help him avoid fatal accidents that plague normal-eyed people before they can manage to reproduce).

Is this America's Next Top Model contestant ahead of the evolutionary curve?

Is this America’s Next Top Model contestant ahead of the evolutionary curve?

Eventually, there would be more people in the gene pool with the big-eyes gene than people without. And our species as a whole would have changed.

Not all evolution takes millions of years. Evolution is happening all the time, right under our infected sinuses – you’re seeing it written on the bottle of antibiotics your doctor prescribes for your stuffy nose: take the entire dose, even if you feel better before the pills are gone.

That’s because bacteria are tricky little suckers. If you don’t finish the pills, you might leave a couple of the bacteria alive, and guess what—they’re just the bacteria that you don’t want. That’s right: when they survive to reproduce, instead of the bacteria killed off easily by the antibiotic, hey presto! A whole new generation of germs that’s less susceptible to the medicine. Ever since we discovered Penicillin, we’ve been racing bacteria at breakneck speed. Ever hear of MRSA? It’s evolution in action.

Another example of quick evolution has been in the news recently. Did you hear about the roaches who used to like sweets, and now…not so much?

A study of roaches in the US and Puerto Rico discovered that our trustiest roach baits aren’t working very well anymore. Like us, roaches love them some glucose, and for years, sweet poison bait hidden in cheap glucose killed roaches off like clockwork, because the bugs couldn’t resist that sweet flavor. 

But not anymore.

An entomologist at North Carolina State University discovered that a previously uncommon genetic mutation in roaches, altering the insects’ neural pathway for tasting so that glucose tastes bitter, had become much more common in several sampled roach populations.

That’s because over the years, the roaches who loved glucose died off from the poison baits, while those who avoided the glucose baits, because of the genetic mutation that made glucose taste bitter to them, survived to breed more glucose-shunning roaches.

It’s not a matter of baby roaches imitating their parents, or roaches just learning over the years, as a species, to avoid glucose baits. The species is changing because its environment now favors one previously rare gene over the other, and that gene is reproduced in a greater and greater number of roach babies.

Who knows – one day perhaps we’ll have to bait the roaches with something bitter—provided we can’t just figure out how to get along.

Just like I need to get along with the creationists.

There are a thousand ways to approach discussions of evolution and we’re learning new things all the time (like, holy shit, apparently your ancestors’ experiences affect the expression of genes in your brain that govern emotions and behavior). And if you’re an Actual Scientist, feel free to take me to school if I’ve got it all wrong.  

But next time some weird notion of the future of the human race goes viral, maybe we can take a deep breath and sprinkle a little science on it.

 

 

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Posted in Animals, Follies and Excrescences Involving Children | 12 Comments »

Introducing the Erick Erickson Scientific Family Foundation

June 7, 2013

The last few weeks have been busy ones for RedState.com editor Erick Erickson, following his controversial comments about working women on Lou Dobbs’ May 29th Fox Business News Program. But on Friday, Erickson announced one positive result of the radical left-wing response to his statements about the nuclear family’s best form.

This summer, he’s launching the non-profit Erick Erickson Scientific Family Foundation.

Erickson said that the new foundation’s mission is directly related to the important philosophy he outlined for Fox News viewers, in response to a troubling new Pew study discovering that women are the primary breadwinners in 4 out of 10 American households.

Agreeing with Dobbs and fellow guests Juan Williams and Daniel Schoen (who said that with “catastrophic” statistics like this, “something has gone terribly wrong in American society”), Erickson played liberals at their own game by invoking the natural world.

As one of a few contemporary commentators willing to tell the truth on this issue, Erickson explained, “Liberals who defend this and say it’s not a bad thing are being anti-science. Look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role.”

As he confirmed later, in a Red State piece strengthening his original point, the key to successful families and well-adjusted children is a heterosexual family unit in which the man pays the bills and the woman stays home to nurture the children.

Erickson withstood the small-minded attacks from people he aptly calls “feminists and emo-lefties,” who purposely misconstrue his comments to mean that he doesn’t think women can work at all.

He clarified that the key is separate, “complementary” roles for men and women, as is usually the case in the animal kingdom. Of course women can and should work if they must – Erickson himself admits that even married, heterosexual parents playing traditional breadwinner/nurturer gender roles can die or become “abusive ass[es],” forcing families into non-traditional earning structures – but the important point here is that, if society was functioning in a healthy, realistic and positive way, those women shouldn’t have to contribute so much to the household’s bottom line.

While it’s not politically correct to celebrate women’s proper role, as Erickson says, “it’s just a reality” that is in no way a negative judgment on those women who, because of our fractured society, do have to financially support their households.

Erickson hopes that his Scientific Family Foundation will be the first step forward back to how things used to be.

Dobbs, Williams, Schoen and Erickson did more than shatter politically-correct taboos about the social damage wrought by working moms: they also weren’t afraid to overcome the popular stereotype of stoic male courage.

By shouting phrases like “breakdown of the social order” and “watching society dissolve around us,” these conservative pioneers publicly, courageously admitted the terror that plagues all men, despite being muzzled by feminist czars and biology-busting liberals.

With your help, Erick Erickson can ensure that America never reaches the tragic threshold that would see half of our country’s households dependent on female workers.

Your donations will go to a variety of pilot programs, including confidential crisis counseling to help male professionals cope with the trauma of seeing women in the office.

The monies will also help to establish a Washington, D.C office for the Foundation, which will lobby Congress to dis-incentivize working women by repealing equal-pay laws and reducing government funding for early childhood education and daycare programs (which make it too easy for women to spend time outside the home), and enacting tax breaks for businesses that hire fathers.

In addition to this, the Foundation’s Home Faith Initiative Committee will lobby for a special amendment to state “personhood” bills, which would require any woman seeking an abortion to provide an affidavit swearing that she is not ending her pregnancy because of her career prospects.

The Foundation will also launch a 24-hour phone hotline for women who are considering lucrative career advancements. Any mother wrestling with this dilemma will be able to call 1-800-KIDS-1ST and discuss her family budget with a trained financial counselor who can recommend options like moving to a smaller home, keeping female children out of college, and not shopping at Whole Foods anymore, instead of seeking a paycheck larger than her husband’s.

Finally, Scientific Family Foundation rallies at college campuses across the country will promote early marriage, educate young women on the inevitable moral injury of balancing motherhood and career, and urge admissions staff to cap the rates of women admitted to top institutions, all of which will address the female breadwinner problem at its source.

To learn more and to donate, visit the Erick Erickson Scientific Family Foundation website.

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, The Joys of Marriage | 12 Comments »

The Sonogram Sadists

June 2, 2013

Sometimes I wonder about the job descriptions for the nurses and medical technicians in pelvic medicine: Training and certification? Attention to detail? A sadistic streak?

My friend Jaime was having a medical crisis and she put out a “story problem” on Facebook that went straight to my heart.

“If Jaime needs to drink 6 glasses of water stopping at 3:30pm and arrive at her destination at 4:30pm with a full bladder at what time should she either start drinking water or stop urinating?”

Ah, pelvic diagnostics.

They can send a man to the moon, but they can’t get a picture of the inside of your lady-pelvis unless the sound waves can bounce off of a bladder the size of a watermelon.

I tried to ease Jaime’s worries, explaining that if she just made sure to have something in the tank when she arrived for her appointment, it’d all be fine.

But uro-gynecological practitioners and ultrasound technicians are barbarians.

They made a special phone call to remind Jaime: six glasses – be sure now!

And so Jaime dutifully drank the water, and, not having a car, got on a train. And then took a long bus ride in the suburbs to her doctor’s office.

“Story of my goddamn life,” she thought.

I’m not that person who forwards you e-mails about cinnamon curing rheumatoid arthritis. But I felt well-qualified to advise Jaime, having been diagnosed with a little-known bladder disease ten years ago.

My first urologist was a small, crisp, curly-haired woman who gave me a questionnaire for some funny condition called “interstitial cystitis.”

At my next appointment, the torture chamber was ready.

Jaime understands. When she finally got off the bus, she rushed to the front desk and said, “Is it really necessary for me to hold all this urine?” She explained that the nice dry floors were in imminent danger.

The technicians consulted and ruled that she could go to the ladies’ room and empty just a bit.

The doctor's torture device.

The doctor’s torture device.

Perhaps these professionals are so blasé about our desperation because every fifteen minutes brings another wincing victim to the exam table. Yawn.

But doesn’t it ever occur to them that many of the people who must undergo pelvic diagnostics are doing so because they have faulty, painful plumbing? The physical calculus of how much water to drink and when to start holding it, figuring in travel, and then wait time while the technicians bustle indifferently, is sheer agony.

Back in the torture chamber, a brisk physician’s assistant with exactly half of her eyebrows ruthlessly plucked away catheterized me for the first time.

It hurt worse than the burning punch of a bee sting, if you can imagine a bee sting down there.

“Oh, it’s not pain, it’s just discomfort,” she said.

She hooked my catheter up to a big bag of saline, which began to pump into my panicky, pain-wracked pelvis, chilly water filling my bladder in reverse.

I had to bear as much saline as I possibly could, naked from the waist down, while a stranger with denuded eyebrows who did not believe in pain made notes on a clipboard.

In the years that followed, I learned that every urologist worth his or her salt can come up with a reason for you to have a bursting bladder on your way to the office.

"Mm-hm, full, it needs to be full."

“Mm-hm, full, it needs to be full.”

I’ve peed into specially-engineered metal devices that report the velocity of the flow. No-nonsense nurses peer at my bladder with their sonic wands before and after I go. And of course, every time the pain worsens, someone prescribes another ultrasound, to make sure it’s not a tumor.

I dread the tests so much I want to take my chances with a catastrophic illness.

And barring all that, everybody still needs a nice cupful to rule out a good old-fashioned UTI – but, in direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath, they make you wait in the exam room, naked from the waist down under a flimsy paper sheath. Then they take your medical history until that sterile plastic cup in the ladies’ room is the Promised Land.

Where have you been all my life??

Where have you been all my life??

My worst urologist was a skeptic who wouldn’t believe another doctor’s diagnosis until he got me into the hospital.

He kept me conscious for the catheterization and preliminary tests – it turns out that excruciating catheterizations are a hallmark of interstitial cystitis – and I have never been so grateful for darkness as when the anesthesia kicked in.

The doctor’s camera took a tour of the inside of my bladder.

As my eyes opened in the recovery ward, I saw him standing by the bed.

“You won’t remember anything I say to you right now,” he said. “I could see your bladder bleeding. You have interstitial cystitis.” He walked away.

A woman with interstitial cystitis, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association website. NOW you understand. Right?

A woman with interstitial cystitis, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association website. NOW you understand. Right?

Interstitial Cystitis is a strange little condition – a genetic autoimmune disorder, some doctors theorize. Basically, I have bleeding ulcers in my bladder and no-one in a white coat knows why or really cares that it hurts like a forest fire in my torso.

I hope Jaime can get some answers.

When the technician exclaimed over her bladder, Jaime asked if that meant something was wrong.

“No, it just means you’re good at following directions,” the tech replied. Then she told Jaime that practitioners don’t actually expect people to drink the amount of water their doctors tell them to in advance of the test – and they don’t bother to take into account the size or age of the patient or the reason for the exam when they say six glasses.

See what I mean? Sadists.

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Posted in Medical Crisis, My Worst Fears | 8 Comments »

I alone admit it: the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO ruined my chubby little life.

May 29, 2013
Mike Jeffries, the epitome of cool.

Mike Jeffries, the epitome of all-American cool.

I’m a size 12-14 woman, and Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries has laid waste to my entire life with his comments.

In 2006, Jeffries said to Salon writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis that his preppy “all-American” college-kid clothing brand caters exclusively to slender, “attractive” people.

“A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely,” Denizet-Lewis quotes Jeffries, whose stores pointedly refuse to carry plus-size clothes for women.

Somehow, Jeffries’ comments lay relatively dormant for seven years – only to inflame the blogosphere earlier this month.

As I covered all the mirrors in my apartment, other women boycotted Abercrombie and published feminist screeds to shame Jeffries for his “bullying.”

According to Denizet-Lewis, Jeffries restricts his retail hires to “good-looking people,” because “good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people.”

In the nine-page article, I knew the three or four sentences that refer to people’s size were the ones I should obsess over. And as soon as I saw Denizet-Lewis’s condescension toward his source dripping off the page, I knew that such blatant journalistic bias could be met only with unswerving belief in the cultural import of the writer’s message.

I do have to admit, while Jeffries’ fear that a girl of my size might someday pollute an Abercrombie store shook me to my blubbery core, his comments did ease some confusion about exactly what he’s selling. For a long time, given the store windows and bags I wistfully glimpsed on my way to Sears, I was under the impression that Abercrombie sold muscular, naked Caucasian male torsos.

It's the PANTS they're selling. Now you know.

It’s the PANTS they’re selling. Now you know.

But as soon as Jeffries’ comments had sunk through my Old Navy jeans, off-brand t-shirt and New Balance sneakers, right into my heart, I called my husband to confess.

Defying all the laws of cool, I managed to get married before Jeffries weighed in.

Defying all the laws of cool, I managed to get married before Jeffries weighed in.

“Honey,” I sobbed, “do you remember that petite, pretty girl I told you about who used to roll her eyes at me in senior year English? Well…what would you say if I told you only one of us was wearing Abercrombie and Fitch?”

The conversation was short, and the divorce lawyer called at about the same time a cryptic e-mail arrived from my publisher.

She said that while I certainly had had a lot of unique ideas to contribute to the magazine, Mike Jeffries had finally given her the courage to say that I did not have the physique that would attract the kind of stories she wanted to tell. But she wishes me the best.

I logged onto Facebook to update my relationship status from married to single, but saw that there was almost no-one left to see: the only people who hadn’t un-friended me were my mom and my former co-worker’s dog, who somehow maintains his own page.

To try to make sense of it all, I went to the Willow Grove Mall and lingered outside the doors of Abercrombie & Fitch in my purple-rimmed spectacles and worn Timberland boots. A pair of size-two girls with long platinum ponytails walked out talking about the party at Stephanie’s after the big game. But they didn’t invite me, so I wiped my tears and slunk into Macy’s.

I had a lot of great experiences despite my terrifying size, but that's all behind me now.

I had a lot of great experiences despite my terrifying size, but that’s all behind me now.

Since Denizet-Lewis reports that in 2004 the retailer paid $40 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from minority applicants who claimed they were denied employment or forced to work in back rooms, I wonder if Abercrombie could at least set up a rack for me – perhaps the large sizes could be around back, in a separate but equal store.

But to be honest, the biggest philosophical question Jeffries raises isn’t whether or not I should throw my well-endowed form off a cliff (or whether he should throw himself off, for forcing me to feel that way), but a classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” Jeffries told Denizet-Lewis. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids,” which Jeffries defines as the “attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.”

Given Jeffries’ penchant for luring in “good-looking” shoppers by hiring “good-looking” staffers (to man what looks like a graduation party in Daddy’s wood-paneled study, all under a blasting alt pop soundtrack) I wonder if Abercrombie imparts the cool to its customers, or if it’s the other way around.

In other words, could I have changed the course of my life, finding love, friends and career, if I had marched into Abercrombie & Fitch a decade ago, as if I belonged there, and worn those talismans of cool to campus? Or would the fat-girl alarms have begun to wail as soon as I crossed the threshold, confirming that no brand of clothing will ever render me stylish?

This blogger's high school graduation dance (in purple). Should I have gone to to Abercrombie then? Or was I already too large?

This blogger’s high school graduation dance (in purple). Should I have gone to Abercrombie then? Or was I already too large? Do you think I’m sufficiently all-American?

To find out, I pulled on my burlap sack and knocked on the doors of the people who, eleven years ago, in their Abercrombie tees, would not have given me the time of day in the halls. But, as nurses, lawyers, baristas, administrative assistants, ministers, musicians, government workers or all-American wives with stellar Republican credentials and toddlers, they were all too busy to talk to me about it.

As the old saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. While sensitive Americans affirm their cool by boycotting Abercrombie & Fitch, my non-relationship with the brand has finally, albeit accidentally, resulted in my being in on a fashion trend.

So, in the midst of the storm, infer what you like about my lack of Abercrombie logos. Disregard the tears on my plump cheeks over the cruelty of a man in his late 60’s wearing distressed jeans and dyed-blond hair, whose face looks as if it was just blown up with a bicycle pump.  Because despite everything else CEO Mike Jeffries has stolen from me, he can’t take away the habit I have had since the 9th grade: walking right past his stores.

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Posted in Feelin' Grumpy, Questionable Choices in Clothing | 15 Comments »

Happy Birthday, Honey! Now I know what it’s like to conduct an affair.

May 20, 2013

Last year, as we got ready to celebrate five years married and ten years together, I decided to throw my husband Lala a surprise party for his 30th birthday.

A big party is consuming enough to plan, but keeping it a secret from a spouse who is the guest of honor? Not only do you have to plan the venue, the theme, the food, the drinks and the guest list without any help from your partner – you have to do it without arousing the slightest suspicion that you’re going out of your mind trying to keep it all under wraps. And perhaps most important, you have to construct the perfect ruse to preserve the shock until your loved one steps in the door.

The whole thing needs more planning and accomplices than a casino heist.

Since our apartment is way too small for a birthday bash, I enlisted my cousins, who live in a large and beautiful row home in South Philly that we all call The Clubhouse.

I invited our mutual friends, but for my husband’s work buddies, I had to approach his boss.

That’s when I realized that this must be a little like having an affair. E-mail and social media accounts that I typically leave open on un-locked laptops at home could blow the whole thing, if my husband happened to borrow my computer for a moment and an errant RSVP popped up.

Is that what it feels like when married people surreptitiously frequent dating sites?

I became more secretive than Don Draper, logging out of everything every time I left the house, and keeping the screen pointed away from my husband when he was at home.

It was exhausting.

And I still had yet to spin the web of lies that would get him to the party unsuspecting.

I realized that the same thing city workaholics use to keep their suburban spouses from discovering an affair would also help me throw a surprise party.

When I told my husband that I had to work downtown all day on the Saturday before his birthday, he didn’t give it a second thought because in real life, that’s what I do anyway.  I said he should meet me downtown because I had a birthday dinner reservation for us.

You see the myriad holes in this plan, don’t you.

But here is where it got good.

My cousin Johanna Austin, who lives in The Clubhouse, is a professional photographer who just happened to be doing some work at the time for a publication I write for.

So I told my husband that one of my editors had happened to match Johanna and me up. And that we would be working on the piece together. At The Clubhouse.

But, you say, how did you know Lala wouldn’t just pull up and call my cell, forcing me to awkwardly wheedle him into the house while I kept friends away from the windows? Seriously, who wants to find street parking in South Philly at 7pm on a Saturday night when you think you’re about to drive to the restaurant, anyway?

Not to mention the fact that my husband knows I’m excellent at using public transportation. Why, he would think, could we not save time, gas, and a possible brawl with the Philadelphia Parking Authority and just meet at home or at the restaurant?

And this is where it got really good.

Before I left that morning to shop and prep the house for the party, I packed my party clothes in my purse without Lala noticing. And then I left a second outfit folded on our bed.

An hour or two before he was supposed to arrive, I called to say I had forgotten my dinner clothes and could he please be sure to bring them to The Clubhouse so while he waited I could get ready without having to go all the way home again.

And like a good husband, he did.

Here’s the video. Note how, because he is illegally parked, he tries to expedite the process by just reaching his arm inside the door with the clothes.  Proof positive that he had NO IDEA!!

The party was great but the lies wore me out. Tonight, we really are going out for dinner.

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Posted in Holidays, The Joys of Marriage | 6 Comments »

Anatomy of an Article

May 17, 2013
From "What I Am Not Supposed to Say About Literary Journals Until I Am Famous"

From “What I Am Not Supposed to Say About Literary Journals Until I Am Famous”

My only excuse for not writing a blog post for six weeks is that I’ve published almost 40 articles for a total of six editors at four publications in the last month and a half.

Sometimes I just don’t have anything left over.

But I have been getting a lot of questions lately.

People outside the field think that journalism is A) kind of glamorous or B) a bat-shit crazy career choice, and there are lots of things they want to know:

Do you come up with your own ideas or are they assigned?  Do you write something before a publication agrees to take it? How much time do you spend writing? Do you get paid? Don’t you want a real job?

But I also get a lot of questions from colleagues or people dabbling in the field:

How do you make freelancing pay? How do you manage that many assignments? What’s your work-flow? How do you approach your stories?

So before I get back on track with blog essays, I thought I would answer these questions with a walk-through of my work day.

Let’s take my typical local-news article: it will be about an event, issue, or person and will run online. It will have an arts or culture bent, be 700-1200 words long, and earn me $100-$200. Yeah, it’s the big time over here.

Articles begin one of two ways.

  • You find out about something you want to write about, and pitch it to one of the editors you work with, briefly explaining a) the idea b) why it is important or worthwhile to readers. Note: This means sorting through a steady stream of pitches from PR professionals as well as keeping your eyes and ears out ALL THE TIME.
  • An editor (who either knows you or got your e-mail from someone who knows you) writes with a story idea (it could be anything on God’s green earth) and you decide whether or not to accept it.

Work starts on the article long before you begin writing.

  • Once you have made a successful pitch, or accepted an editor’s pitch, you look at your calendar and figure out three things.

a)      What deadline can you commit to?

b)      When will you have time to do the interviews you’ll need?

c)       When will you sit down to write the thing?

  • Decide whom to interview/where to go for the story.
  • Make phone calls or send e-mails to request interviews and/or meetings/tours. Note: This can be quite a process. Often you have to go through a few contacts to get the person you want. Sometimes people will refuse to do the story. And other times, people will vigorously pitch an idea, only to completely flake out as soon as you say yes.

Interviewing.

  • Develop about six core questions in advance of the interview. Note: I used to always write them down, but as I’ve gotten more practice doing interviews, I sometimes skip the writing-down part as long as I’m mentally prepared.
  • Interviews can take many forms. Often, it’s a fifteen-minute phone conversation. Other times, they’re scheduled in-person meetings (from 30 minutes in the boardroom with a director to a walk in the woods with local activists to a four-hour dinner with a French chef).
  • I use a combination of rapid note-taking and iPod voice memos, transcribed later, to keep up with my sources.
  • With practice, note-taking becomes more effective as your brain learns to grab onto quotes as soon as your source is forming the words.
  • Never get so married to your question list that you can’t also pursue a new line of thought should your source provide it.
  • But learn how to keep a lid on a conversation so that you don’t end up spending an hour with someone and not getting what you need. You have to make your time pay.

Preparing to write.

  • Complete any research on information you couldn’t or didn’t get from your sources.
  • Once the interview(s) are done and you have a feel for the facts and the arc of the story, it’s time for what I call “nuts and bolts.”
  • Begin with a preliminary Word document. Type in any interview segments you want handy, either from hand-written notes or from audio, and copy and paste blocks of text – maybe from an informative website, maybe from a press release that confirms venues, dates and times, maybe from a previous article that gives context and keeps you oriented – and the name(s) and title(s) of the people you’re writing about.  Then, the Who, What, Where, When, Why and Why the Hell Do We Care are all waiting right there on the screen.

Time to write.

  • Check the news feed.
  • Go get a snack.
  • Watch the goldfish for awhile.
  • Check the news feed (limit Twitter wars with disgruntled readers).
  • Get a glass of cold water.
  • Refresh all e-mail accounts.
  • Ponder and/or answer new e-mails.
  • FB or G-chat with freelance colleague[s].
  • Post on timelines of all your FB friends with birthdays today.
  • Reach with right hand and massage perpetual knot above left scapula.
  • Go to the bathroom.

WRITE, dammit.

  • Open Pandora and select “Philip Glass Radio.”
  • Return to nuts and bolts document.
  • Write title of article (it can be anything, you editor will most likely replace it with some kind of bad pun).
  • Write “By Alaina Mabaso”
  • Activate knot in left shoulder and write for anywhere from one to four hours. Note: Even though typing the first line feels like the hardest part, the article is actually 80% done at that point. When I have consolidated relevant quotes and research (literally, waiting on the page below) and know how the story will flow as well as what my editor wants (sorry, there is no demonstrable template for that, it’s a matter of skill and practice), writing it is more like fitting a familiar puzzle together than anything else.

Success!

  • Stretch.
  • Frown; massage left shoulder.
  • Look in the mail for checks.
  • Do the math on your budget through the end of the month for the sixteenth time this week.
  • Scan newsfeeds and e-mail accounts.
  • Answer e-mails.
  • Eat a meal and call it “lunch,” whether it’s 10am, 1pm or 5pm.

Finish and file.

  • Copy and paste article draft from “nuts and bolts” page to its own fresh document.
  • Slowly read the article out loud. Listen for clunky/confusing sentences, repetitive phrases, bad punctuation, excessive passive voice and anything else that weighs down the piece.
  • Brutally cut at least 50-200 words.
  • E-mail the piece to the right editor.
  • Be ready to quickly and affirmatively address any questions/clarifications.

Congratulations – you’ve written an article for publication.

NB: this is my process for a particular type of article. Essays, commentary, reviews or full-length features are different. (So far I do not write fiction at all.)

Now, the question of whether or not you can pay the bills this way (remember: student loans and wholly out-of-pocket health insurance premiums, plus self-employment tax) is not so much a question of whether you can do your own variation of the steps above, but whether you can juggle them at multiple stages simultaneously every day, for an average of six or seven pieces a week, while taking off only 3-4 weekends a year with no paid sick days.

That’s my world, at least.

If you want to read recent examples of my articles, here are two:

An environmental education center launches a paid residency for artists whose installations will actually aid ecological restoration

A charity hosts an exhibition of artists with intellectual disabilities; art therapists describe the ways art helps people with disabilities redefine themselves to the public

This is for those who want to hear more about how to build your freelance network: Ten Non-Fatalistic, Real-Life Tips for Freelance Writers

And this is for those who want to hear more about the actual art of writing: Six Tips for Strong Writing That Have Nothing To Do With Word Choice

Any more questions?

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Writing | 8 Comments »

A Bystander’s Guide to the Five Things Pregnant Women Love Most

April 3, 2013

Let me start out by saying that I’ve never been pregnant, but that these foolproof tips are borne of years of observation and conversation. So give them a read and then go make a pregnant lady’s day.

1) Being touched by strangers

Did you resent learning to keep your hands to yourself in kindergarten? Well, you’re in luck. Look at that businessman on the train, wearing a suit and tie and frowning at his smartphone. Would he like it if you suddenly embraced him or caressed his tummy? No, of course he wouldn’t. But pregnant women are different.  As soon as the bulge of that fetus is visible to you and me, her body is fair game, from the bathroom to the boardroom to the bus. Hands on!

2) Temporal judgments

A pregnant woman is particularly attuned to the passage of time – just listen to her obsess about the first, second and third trimesters. That means she’s also anxious to hear your unsolicited time-related verdicts. For example, feel free to ask her how old she is, and then follow up with any conclusions you may have on whether she is very young or rather old to be a mother. If you think she looks older or younger than she is, make sure she knows it. And remember, once you’ve spotted her belly, what month and day that baby is supposed to emerge is information that you are entitled to. The mother-to-be will also appreciate your comments on whether her current size matches the current duration of her pregnancy. Does she look rather slim for 7 months or “ready to pop” at 6 months? Make sure she knows it!

3) Personal questions

Imagine that man on the train again – his tasteful striped tie and black leather shoes. Would he want you to sit down next to him and ask him his age, whether he feels sick to his stomach, and whether he has children, whether they’re boys or girls, when their birthdays are and what their names are? No, he probably wouldn’t appreciate it, but here again is the magic of pregnancy: gestating women love answering your personal questions. Remember: the propagation of the human race is every person’s business, and that includes morning sickness, the baby’s sex, due date and name, birth plans, and anything else you can think of. Remember: when a woman can no longer conceal the fact that she’s carrying a fetus, she owes you these answers.

4) Horror stories of labor and delivery

That pregnant woman sitting next to you wants to bond with you. Once you’ve ascertained that her due date is just a few weeks away, the best way to cement your relationship is to tell her about your sister-in-law’s cousin’s 43-hour labor and episiotomy during the blizzard of ‘93.  Pregnant ladies enjoy these narratives, which fortify them for their own deliveries.

5) Your projected body image woes

Pregnant women are always ready to soothe your anxieties about their bodies. The last thing they want is for you to be stuck wondering if they’re pregnant or if they’re just packing some extra belly pounds, so feel free to ask them. If, because you were afraid they were simply fat, you’re relieved to find out that their rotund figure is due to an impending birth, make sure they know it. They love being reminded of their ungainly figures, and carrying a baby is the difference between hoping others mind their own business, and having an appreciation for being the subject of strangers’ bodily speculations.

Is there anything else pregnant women love? If I’ve missed something, please add it in the comments.

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Posted in Follies and Excrescences Involving Children | 20 Comments »

You, Me, and the Portman Effect: Like It Or Not, It’s Bringing Gay Rights

March 26, 2013
A save-the-date card for an event my friend calls her "big ole dyke marriage." "Yay! I declare victory!" she says.

A save-the-date card for an event my friend calls her “big ole dyke marriage.” “Yay! I declare victory!” she says. (Design credit Crystal Davis.)

This week I published an essay about friendship and marriage that included a few examples from my own life. My editor said he loved the insights in the piece, but he warned me to watch out.

Pointing to advice maven Ann Landers’s divorce, he said I should consider the future – I might be writing a personal essay now about my perspectives on a healthy marriage, but who knows? In ten years, I might be in the middle of a divorce, and then, a reader might dig up this article to mock me.

Could I handle that?

I told him that I preferred to live in the present, and if I end up getting divorced, I will deal with it when it happens, instead of letting that unpleasant hypothetical notion hinder what I publish now. I also said that while I strive to write in good taste and not bare anything that’s too personal, I feel that if readers give their attention to my essays, I should be willing to give them my honest self in relatable terms.

My editor listened and nodded and said that was wise. Then he chuckled and shook his head.

“It’d be funny, though, if it happened,” he said of my supposed future divorce.

I share all this with you now because, as the US Supreme Court hears landmark cases this week about marriage equality, I think my gay pals have been resting easy for far too long – it’s high time their unions were as legal as mine, so they can shoulder their share of rude comments like this.

Gay pals have been getting a lot of press recently, as this nugget from the Stephen Colbert show sums up pretty well:

Colbert and NPH

People are calling it the Portman Effect, after Republican Senator Rob Portman announced his support for gay marriage (following a long history of anti-gay legislative votes) because, as it turns out, his son is gay. After years of seeing gays as sub-par, faraway citizens who don’t deserve the right to marry their partners or adopt children, Portman looked at his own child and then wrote “All our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joys and stability of marriage.”

Some people lauded Portman for his courageous stance, given the current state of America’s Republican Party, and others scoffed that politicians should support equality because it’s the right thing to do, not because the issue suddenly becomes personal to you.

Many speculate that the Portman Effect will be at work in the Supreme Court chamber itself, because apparently a gay cousin of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts will attend the oral arguments.

In general, I sympathize with those who find the Portman Effect a lousy reason to support equality – one based on personal experience rather than a larger, more rational acceptance on principle. It reminds me of this fabulous article by Anne Theriault, who argues that a common piece of rape-combating rhetoric is “reductive as hell.”

Pundits and politicians often beg would-be harassers or attackers of women to imagine how they’d feel if their own mother, sister or daughter was battered this way.

Theriault lobs back that this “defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people.”

Rape isn’t wrong because women are wives, sisters and daughters. Women are people and rape is just wrong.

Maybe a man who would refrain from attacking women because he doesn’t like to think of his own family members being attacked is sort of like a politician who doesn’t support equality until he realizes that anti-gay laws affect a member of his own family.

But the plain truth is that humans are primarily emotional creatures. We can call for high-minded, objective, rational ideals, but things must touch us personally before we can process them.

Count me in on the Portman Effect club – I grew up in an insular Christian atmosphere that didn’t exactly heap bile on gays, but did make it clear that theirs was a sad and disordered lifestyle. Gay schoolmates were well and truly closeted and I didn’t know any better than to oppose gay marriage, declaring I had nothing against gays themselves (should I ever meet any), but I didn’t think they had a legal right to marry.

That lasted about as long as it took me to make some friends who were gay, as soon as I hit college and moved outside the sphere of my family’s church.

The personal is the last bastion between acceptance and prejudice. A family member who opposes gay rights once asked me, in a tone that was meant to end the argument, once and for all,

“Well, how would you feel if someone gay was your children’s teacher?”

The answer I think she expected was that of course, in that case, I would be opposed. However, by that time I had already had a gay teacher and turned out just fine. I bet my future kids would, too.

I admit my own investment in equality probably has as much to do with my own personal universe as it does my civic principles. My own marriage would’ve been illegal just a few decades ago – back when people were arguing that Jesus wouldn’t want the races to mix. I imagine what it would feel like if people were protesting my relationship with signs like “God hates interracial couples” and “Marriage = two people of the same race.”

Imagine how stupid you are going to look

I think the Portman affect applies to racial attitudes as well. I remember sitting around a holiday table with someone who referred to African-American people collectively as “the blacks.”

But in subsequent years, my African husband joined the table, and I was interested to note this dinner guest change her tune ever so slightly the next time she shared an anecdote about an African-American person.

“He was a black…person,” the speaker faltered, eyes dodging ever so slightly – or did I imagine it? – at my husband.

In an ideal world, we’d all sit up and cast out our prejudices on principle, before they looked us in the eye and made us sweat.

Until then, we legally married heterosexual people are just going to have to bear the brunt of other people’s odd comments about our marriages – but I sure hope gay people can get their share soon.

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Posted in Pompous Philosophizing | 15 Comments »

The Big Dead Goldfish Dilemma, Part 2: Princess at Rest

March 18, 2013
A girl and her fish.

A girl and her fish.

About a month ago, I was surprised by the response to a post I wrote about my Big Dead Goldfish Dilemma. My extra-large goldfish, Princess, had died very suddenly late last year, and unable to decide what to do with the body, I put her in my kitchen freezer.

I got a range of suggestions from concerned readers in the comments and via social media. They said I could fling Princess into the ocean, cremate her, feed her to a cat, or take her to the woods, cover her body with rocks, pray and burn some sage. I appreciated every response.

But one answer in particular caught my eye. My neighborhood pal Michaelann, who lives just a few blocks away, said I should bury the fish in her garden. I don’t know if Michaelann was serious, but after thinking it over for a few weeks, I messaged her.

Michaelann and Jerome

Jerome and Michaelann in their front yard farm.

And so, on a warm Saturday afternoon in early March, I wrapped Princess in a towel and strolled up the street, where Michaelann and her partner Jerome were waiting.

With an extensive garden, a beehive and a chicken coop, Jerome and Michaelann are serious about urban farming (check out Michaelann’s blog, Elkins Park Front Yard Farm). I met them last year, when I was working on a magazine story about backyard bee- and chicken-keeping.

When I arrived, there was already a foot-deep hole waiting, cushioned with straw.

Michaelann explained that it was the perfect place for the burial: this spring, the grave will be the site of a Native American-style Three Sisters Garden.

A Three Sisters Garden is a trio of corn, beans and squash all in one hill of soil. The beans add necessary nitrogen to the soil while using the cornstalk as a pole, and the squash’s leaves shade the ground, preventing too many weeds and naturally deterring pests. And apparently, Native Americans of the Atlantic Northeast buried an eel or a fish under each hill, to help fertilize the plants.

I unwrapped Princess and laid her in the hole.

Michaelann covered the orange scales with another handful of straw, to ensure successful composting, and we pushed the dirt back in with our hands.

Michaelann puts dirt

The grave left a small mound, which we covered with straw and then a weighted screen, to deter digging animals.

I wiped my hands on a towel and we stood around the grave.

“You were a good fish, Princess,” I said.

Jerome asked if we shouldn’t have some kind of song.

We fell silent for a moment, wondering if there were any hymns about fish.

“Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads…” Michaelann murmured at last.

I know Princess will rest in peace.

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Posted in Animals, The Goldfish Fry Saga | 11 Comments »

The FDA Will Dupe You Til the Cows Come Home

March 7, 2013

milk2

milk5

It’s true.

In their recent application to the Food and Drug Administration, “Flavored Milk: Petition to Amend the Standard of Identity for Milk and 17 Additional Dairy Products,” the International Dairy Foods Association and the National Milk Producers Federation ask for the ability to produce and market products containing aspartame without any notice on the carton (except for the fine print ingredients) to inform customers of that fact. Here’s a brief NPR story on the controversy.

It is as if Coca-Cola decided it wanted to begin putting its aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke and its corn syrup-sweetened Coke in identical cans – all in the name of helping their customers.

From the petition:

“Petitioners state that milk flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners [like aspartame] should be labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can more easily identify its overall nutritional value.”

In other words, the less you know about what’s really in your food, the better you’ll be able to make good choices about what to eat.

You have until May 21st, 2013 to visit the public petition online and register your comment about the proposed change to the “Standard Identity” of milk.

 

 

 

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Posted in Animals, Food | 12 Comments »

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