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Keep going

We are all looking for meaning, for something to set us on fire and keep us lit, bright and hot and immune to the wind.

This is why we look for love, why we fall in love, and why we run from it when it comes too close. We are all searching for that hair’s width of perfection, the breath between running away and running towards.

I have a memory of a warm place, many years ago, where for one moment I was walking towards my life, and my life was walking towards me. It couldn’t last, but in that sweet, brief moment I was perfection. I held myself still beneath the sun, an excruciating balance of wanting and receiving, until my legs gave out and my heart lost the beat.

Sometimes now, when I should be sleeping, and when the world feels flat, I unfold that memory and hold it to my face, hoping it still holds the scent of sweet heartache I can inhale, and dreading the day that I might breathe in nothing but the past, dry and powdered and unchangeable.

We all keep trying, for what else is there to do? Keep going. It is on the wind and it is waiting for you. And there are sweet memories to be made today.

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America’s first female mapmaker

The Paris Review recently published an article on Emma Willard, America’s first female mapmaker and all-around badass.

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Emma Willard

From the article:

Willard is well-known to historians of the early republic as a pioneering educator, the founder of what is now called the Emma Willard School, in Troy, New York. But she was also a versatile writer, publisher and, yes, mapmaker. She used every tool available to teach young readers (and especially young women) how to see history in creative new ways. If the available textbooks were tedious (and they were), she would write better ones. If they lacked illustrations, she would provide them. If maps would help, so be it: she would fill in that gap as well. She worked with engravers and printers to get it done. She was finding her way forward in a male-dominated world, with no map to guide her. So she made one herself.

And yes, while still in her twenties, she opened a school for girls in her own home, so that young women could get an education comparable to that of their own brothers. From the school website (which is still in operation some 200 years later!):

She pioneered girls’ education, taking it from focusing on “the charms of youth and beauty” to intellectually stimulating and rigorous courses in mathematics, geography, history, science, and philosophy.

My favorite of her illustrations is this this “‘map of time’ [used] to convey to students the interdependence and totality of human history”:

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It feels like a 200-year precursor to Reebee Garofalo’s Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music chart, made recently famous (or recently re-famous?) by Edward Tufte:

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An excerpt of Genealogy of Pop/Rock music by Reebee Garofalo, seemingly an ode to Willard’s work.

The sheer depth of information she presents in her illustrations is astounding…

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There is nothing more satisfying and hopeful to me than someone striving for clarity and context and working hard to give it to those around her. And to help other women rise up with her along the way? What a lovely and inspiring life to lead.

– Jenna

 

 

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The magical worlds of Chris Van Allsburg

Yesterday I mentioned how much I love buying used books from Thriftbooks. One of the best things about the site is being able to search for old books that I loved as a child.

One of my favorite author-illustrators from childhood is Chris Van Allsburg. You probably remember some of his most famous books, Jumanji and The Polar Express. Many of his books have been adapted into movies (some successfully, some not). But the worlds that he builds in his gorgeous, dramatic and striking illustrations are breathtaking.

Part of the magic of Van Allsburg’s illustrations, which often include children, is the scale. He takes the reader right into the middle of a scene…

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from Jumanji

Or pulls so far back that we feel like we’re peeking into the world in miniature….

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from Jumanji

As a child these books fueled my imagination and my sense of wonder…

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from The Garden of Abdul Gasazi

And brought a feeling of extraordinary to the ordinary. They still do!

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from Zathura

Do you have a favorite author from childhood? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

– Jenna

 

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A giant helping of bite-sized reading

If you haven’t read Tamara Shopsin’s book Arbitrary Stupid Goal (published in 2017), stop everything and get a copy immediately. It’s a memoir about growing up in 1970’s Greenwich Village, and her family’s diner/market, known affectionately as “The Store.”

The book is structured as a rapid-fire avalanche of vignettes, some several pages, some only a few sentences: remembrances, retellings and nostalgia all mixed together with a giant dose of humor, a realistic amount of sadness and several celebrity cameos.

Although the stories involving John Belushi (a regular at the diner who had his own key) are the most poignant and sometimes heartbreaking, one story involving Jeff Goldblum was the standout bite of delicious cake for me. Goldblum was in the diner with Shopsin’s parents and another employee when a well-dressed armed robber bursts in, herds them to the bathroom and tells them to empty their pockets…

“The thief takes fifteen dollars from my mom, forty off of Tommy, twenty off my dad, and hands Jeff back his ten, saying ‘you need this more than me.’”

Arbitrary Stupid Goal is the kind of book that marketers love to mention you can “dip in and out” of in bite-sized pieces, but it’s so good you’ll want to devour it in one sitting.

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Don’t judge this book by its cover. Except, maybe you should because it perfectly captures the “what the $@&#?!” feel of reading it…in the best way possible.

And if you’re hungry for more, make sure to check out the famous eleven page EPIC menu of the original Shopsin’s, and patriarch Kenny Shopsin’s tribute in the New Yorker after his death in 2018.

– Jenna

 

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BLOG IDEAS STORIES

The (successful) formula of the sick system

Every once in a while, I come across a piece of writing that describes an aspect of everyday life SO PERFECTLY that it stops me in my tracks. It names an emotion, a pattern or a situation that I (like most people) have never really thought about head on. But it clicks so easily into the web of our human experience that once it’s been identified, we can’t imagine a time before we knew about it. Lots of examples come to mind (gaslighting being one of them).

Are you ready for a new one?

A few years ago, I happened upon a link to an article by a blogger named issendai, which described the phenomenon of the Sick System, and how both individuals and organizations alike create sick systems to keep people tied to them indefinitely:

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn’t want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?

You create a sick system.

The sick system has four basic rules:

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn’t there. No energy, and your lover’s dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can’t turn off anyone’s thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it’s exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you’re golden.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved. Make them love you if you can, or if you’re a company, foster a company culture of extreme loyalty. Otherwise, tie their success to yours, so if you do well, they do well, and if you fail, they fail. If you’re working in an industry where failure isn’t a possibility (the government, utilities), establish a status system where workers do better or worse based on seniority. (This also works in bad relationships if you’re polyamorous.)

Also note that if you set up a system in which personal loyalty and devotion are proof of your lover’s worthiness as a person, you can make people love you. Or at least think they love you. In fact, any combination of intermittent rewards plus too much exhaustion to consider other alternatives will induce people to think they love you, even if they hate you as well.

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you’ll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you’ll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn’t, you’ll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there’s a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It’s the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people.

Is any of this sounding familiar to you? Have you experienced this kind of system? You may think that you are savvy enough to avoid this kind of relationship in your personal life. But in professional settings, it is INCREDIBLY easy to get caught up in a sick system and not realize it for years, especially when it is tied to your livelihood. They are everywhere.

The article goes on to explain how sick systems are so simple to sustain for the people behind them, and the tactics they use:

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you’re guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week’s production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you’ve mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.

But why wouldn’t people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you’ve explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.

Things will be better when... I get a new job. I’m mean to you now because I’m so stressed, but I’m sure that will go away when I’m not working at this awful place.

The production schedule is crazy because the client is nuts. We just need to get through this cycle, then we’ll have a new client, and they’ll be much better.

She has a bad temper because she just started with a new therapist. She’ll be better when she settles in.

Now, the first person isn’t actually looking for a job. (They’re too stressed to fill out applications.) The second industry always has another crazy client, because all the clients are crazy. (Or better yet, because the company is set up to destroy the workflow and make the client look crazy.) The third person has been with her “new” therapist for a year. (But not for three years! Or five!) But the explanation sounds plausible, and every now and then the person has a good day or a production cycle goes smoothly. Intermittent reinforcement + hope = “Someday it will always be like this.” Perpetual crises mean the person is too tired to notice that it has never been like this for long.

If you’re interested in diving deeper, I highly recommend checking out the Sick Systems article in its entirety.

But wait, there’s more! In a follow up article, issendai lists the personal qualities that can keep ANYONE in a sick system. And they’re not what you might think!

This is where I’m supposed to follow up with What to Do to Fix the World, but the answer is: nothing. You can’t fix a sick system from within unless you have power, and you can’t fix a sick system from outside, period. You can’t compel people to leave. You can convince them to leave, but the moment that convinces them is individual, like enlightenment striking a monk because his master made a joke about a spade. And when a stuck person chooses to leave, it will be long, long, long after they should have gotten out.

So instead I offer you a list:

Qualities That Keep You in a Sick System
  • Loyalty
  • Patience
  • A strong work ethic
  • Optimism
  • Self-sacrifice
  • A need to be useful to others
  • Forgiveness
  • Farsightedness
  • Trust
  • Hope

You don’t need to lose these qualities to get out. But if you’re stuck and trying to figure out what’s keeping you in, remember that people rarely get stuck because of their vices. They’re usually caught by their virtues.

That last part always hits me like a ton of bricks, how about you? And what lessons can we take from all of this? For me, the most important lessons are the simplest (but often the hardest to master):

  1. Trust your gut
  2. Trust your gut
  3. Trust your gut

 

– Jenna

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It’s important to like what you like

They feel like, “Oh, If I’m paying attention to something and no one else is talking about it, I guess it’s not important.” And the truth is totally the opposite. The things that you are noticing that other people are overlooking, those are the most important; those are the things that make you a person….the culture’s never gonna push that, you gotta push that yourself.

-Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing

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I’ll be glad when…

In my first full-time job out of college, I had a boss named Stanley. It was just the two of us in the office. I was still pretty wet behind the ears, and he was an old school entrepreneur in his mid-70s who didn’t like to take orders and could barely operate a computer. We were a great pair and I adored him.

When we had a particularly busy or crazy period at work, he’d always say, “I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’ll be glad when this week is over.”

Stanley is gone now; he passed away in 2010. And every time I catch myself saying something like “I’ll be glad when this is over,” I stop and think about Stanley.

– Jenna

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The Path (A Short Story)

The girl has walked the path to the river every day of her life. She cannot see the end of the path from the start (as she will one day learn is true of most good and interesting things in life).

But each day, the path changes its direction.