“Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. ”

-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return of the Jedi

When I was twelve, my family had been in America for seven years, and we could finally afford the American Dream. My parents sold our tiny, grimy duplex in exchange for a larger house in a much better school district.

But the deal on our dream house fell through because the sellers house wouldn’t budge the last $10,000 on the price.

We had walked through that house five to six times, had mentally started putting furniture in corners and planning parties and sleepovers, movie nights and weekend breakfasts. We were all devastated. But our old house still had a sold sign on it, so there was no way back. We also had no place to live.

We moved into an apartment complex located in my new school district while my parents kept saving money and kept searching.

Thanks to my parents’ hard work I had a fairly easy childhood, Polly Pocket aside. But, I grew up deep in the heart of flyover America, the part that hadn’t been exposed to anything foreign.

Growing up with weird foods, language, and cultural references to obscure Soviet rock bands no one had ever heard of, being an immigrant kid meant living in a default state of weird, where the closest thing to tvorog was cottage cheese that my mom hung in special surgery-grade cheesecloths, which dripped slowly into our kitchen sink over the course of several days before they hardened into a tvorog-like product.

If things weren’t bad enough with the vaguely medical-grade gauze constantly taking up our kitchen, I was an enormous introvert. Being an introvert when you’re a successful respected working adult married to another introvert adult who loves you is easy. Being a lonely glasses-wearing, braces-grinding, book-reading, immigrant-kid sixth-gade introvert with an extremely poor body image who is not sure if anyone will think she is an ok human being was hard.

I had made some friends at my old school who were used to how weird I was. Now I was alone in my strangeness again. And not only was I going to a new school, but I had to tell people that I had moved into an apartment from a  house.

After having the run of my old house and backyard, living in a space that was 20 feet from my parents’ bedroom, to the kitchen, to the living room felt strange and embarrassing.  As a kid in a middle class school district, it was mortifying to tell people you didn’t live in a house anymore. Only people who were getting divorced, went broke, or had some other serious freaky deviations from standard suburban life, lived in apartments, a fact that popular tv culture constantly reinforced by showing the embarrassed dad with the box o’stuff moving in his midlife crisis vehicle to some shady apartment across town.

Normal families lived in houses with 1.6 children, had golden retrievers and minivans, and ate pizza on Friday nights. I didn’t want to invite anyone over in the two tiny rooms, the narrow, windowless kitchen with that damned cheesecloth constantly dripping over the sink when the rest of my friends had backyards and swing sets and their own rooms with perfectly monogrammed towels from Land’s End hanging in their bathrooms.

Because of my constant insecurity and the newness of my school, the year we lived in Mountain View Village was the hardest of my pre-adolescence.

As a result, I spent a lot of 1997 at my local library.

I made my way through Judy Blume, then the Babysitters Club, and then after I ran out of books, I started browsing through the VHS rental stacks.

One day, I discovered the plastic packaging of the Star Wars trilogy on VHS, six tapes it was, I believe,  held together with thick rubber bands.

I liked the heroic portrayal of the faces on the jacket, surrounded by the vastness of open space.

The heft of the three VHS tapes was what impressed me the most, though. The movies just seemed so substantial, definitive. They looked like it might be a good, long story.

I watched A New Hope on the tiny VCR/tv combo in my bedroom. I think it was on a weekend that my parents were out house-hunting. They always came back from these trips exhausted and dejected, and I mostly stayed reading or writing in my room.

To say that Star Wars moved me is an understatement.

The movie absolutely blew my mind.

It was completely different from anything I had ever seen in my entire life.

The inside of George Lucas’s mind expanded my pathetically small universe.

I watched New Hope eleven times before I had to return it to the library the next week, savoring each detail, trying to will myself to hold back in watching the other two movies.

I desperately wanted to know what happened to Luke Skywalker, but I was also so afraid for  the high to end.

I watched Empire Strikes Back and then waited a whole three days before breaking down seeing Jedi.  When I found out Darth Vader was Luke’s father, I don’t remember how I felt, but I imagine my reaction was pretty similar to this:

This is why you shouldn’t show your kids the Star Wars saga in story order. Do release order. My daughter last night pic.twitter.com/J4LCxdHj1X

— Jon Miller (@HawkeyeNation) December 22, 2015

Once I finished Jedi, I was gutted. I had gone with Luke on the entirety of his journey. The train got off here. I could only watch each of the movies so many times (20, 8, and 4, respectively.) At some point,

That’s when I hit the internet. 1997 was still the dog days of dial-up, and, being that I was an only child and my parents were usually busy,  I was constantly on it, trying to max out the time before I got kicked off AOL to the phone ringing.

I discovered that there was a whole culture, an ecosystem associated with people trying to extend the Star Wars universe as much as I hadn’t wanted it to end. I discovered there were novels, fan fiction, whole sites dedicated to trivia. I printed reams and reams of paper references, jokes, fan photos with hundreds of pages of color ink. I taped them up all on my apartment walls with removable tape. Luke Skywalker was my favorite. I both had a huge crush on him and wanted to be him so bad my skin hurt sometimes.

I read all of the novels, the Kevin Anderson Jedi Academy, the Callista Trilogy (which was super weird and too dark for me), the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn (still my personal favorite. ) I couldn’t find one of the Zahn books at the library so I begged my parents to take me to the bookstore. I still remember the huge fight that ensued over purchasing a brand-new book (“You’ll only read it once! You don’t need it!”), but the minute I smelled the newness of the cover and realized there was more Star Wars and Luke in there, I knew it was worth it.

But I was like the evangelical convert. All of the kids I knew had already seen it when they were little, but there was no one in my extended Russian family that could have introduced me to it. I came into the Star Wars religion on my own and I wanted everyone to know about it.

I became what I see as now very obnoxious, bordering on aggressive. I tried to make my mom, no doubt exhausted from work, the house situation, and the dog I had begged her to buy,  watch it, but halfway through the part where the Jawas take R2-D2, she said, “I’m not into science fiction.”

“But it’s not science fiction,” I begged her, because to me, it wasn’t. Science fiction was boring and full of science and weapons. Star Wars was just an amazing story, simple as that.

I recruited my old friends to reshoot Star Wars on our home video camcorder, with a script improvised by yours truly.  That still exists somewhere.  I wrote a parody called Car Doors on our computer, featuring really bad late 1990s clip art.  I wrote words to the theme song and made my parents listen  as I played it with one finger on my electric piano.

I wrote this thing, which I still have, unfortunately:

At some point, I probably was single-handedly supporting George Lucas through merchandising and creating massive amounts of copyright infringement.

I loved everything about the movies, everything that everyone always loves.  But what I loved most was the idea of the Force and that someone, a single person, could manipulate it through hard work. I knew it wasn’t real, but the idea that the Force maybe at some point had existed out there comforted me, and I found myself, like everyone in my generation probably, seated at the dinner table, reaching out to the silverware drawer with my eyes closed, trying to will a stray fork into my hand from 30 feet away.

The idea of the Force out there  existing anchored me. Whenever I was having a shitty day at school, I would look up at the sky as I got off the school bus, and pretend that I was Luke Skywalker and I could kick ass if I wanted to. I pretended my X-wing was just past the open field behind the apartment complex and I could go to it any time I wanted to.

At night, if I felt like I was close to crying, I closed my eyes and visualized the second before a ship goes into light speed, the quiet anticipation, the pregnant pause before the adventure.

The thought of the moment before a starship takes off somehow was so serious to me that I calmed down and became serious myself, and fell asleep. I still use this technique today.

Star Wars saved my childhood. It made me who I am today.

But, like all childhood obsessions, it smoldered for a while before quietly beginning to pass.

The recent Disney movie Inside Out, about a girl, Riley, whose family moves to San Francisco, features a similar concept. Riley has an imaginary friend, Bing Bong, who she used to play with all the time when she was little. He’s part elephant and all fun.

Bing Bong used to be Riley’s favorite. They went to the moon every day on a rocket ship that was really Riley’s Radio Flyer.   When we meet him, Bing Bong  is still living inside Riley’s mind, but is no longer a part of her everyday thoughts.  Eventually, Riley forgets him entirely, and he fades into they gray soft oblivion where all dying memories live, evaporating in a colored cloud of imagination.

It’s a bittersweet moment, and until I watched Inside Out, I didn’t realize that that’s what happened to me, as well.  Our horrible apartment year ended, and we bought a beautiful new house. Slowly, I started to make friends, and, just as slowly, all of my Star Wars pictures started to come down from the walls. Luke Skywalker was the last to leave, replaced by an ever-growing number of Backstreet Boys posters.

But, like the banked memories in Inside Out, Star Wars didn’t leave entirely. A little part of it is constantly in the back of my mind.  It’s a set of fragile, beautiful glass stained glass orbs, wrapped in layers of thick old newspaper, kept safe by a miasma of nostalgia and a sprinkling of magic.

When Star Wars comes up these days in the media, which is pretty often,  it’s in the context of these memories, of what it meant to me as I looked at my ceiling in the dark when I was twelve and wished with all my might that I was a solitary, graceful hero in an X-wing flying far, far, far away from my awkward life.

All of this is to say, I was terrified to see The Force Awakens. I purposely didn’t read anything about the development of the movie, and I watched the trailer with a ginger hesitation, because J.J. Abrams was deliberately taking out every single piece of glass from that box in my mind, unwrapping it, touching it, squinting at it in the sunlight.

And I think he knew that. He certainly talked about being a fan with a great deal responsibility for a long time.  Which is why he tried to hard to capture the flavor of the original movies, and why so many other people, including many people that I personally know and whose opinion I trust, loved The Force Awakens. $1 billion on opening weekend can’t be wrong, right?

But the minute the scroll came up on the screen in those first opening minutes, I knew he had failed, because the Star Wars that JJ Abrams has made is a cardboard cutout of the luminous energy of the original.

The big ideas are the same. A rebel pilot is captured and tortured. The new Empire is after him. The pilot is delivering a droid that has plans in its system (doesn’t anyone text or send encrypted emails in the Star Wars of the future?). The droid lands on a desert planet. There it all was, again, only now, it was in CG: Jakku as Tattooine, Maz Kanata as Yoda,  Rey as Luke Skywalker, BB-8 as R2D2, Finn as, possibly the new Han. The villain in the mask, once again. The heroes in the orange jumpsuits, with the rebel insignia. Is there anything fresh, gasp-worthy?

Luke familiar? (HAAAAAA.)

It’s true that, with all great stories, nothing is new. After all, Lucas didn’t take the ideas from a vacuum, but from the monomyth, and from Kurosawa, and Flash Gordon, and Edgar Rice Burroughs before that.  But Star Wars took all of these key ideas about how human life plays out,  and combined them into something completely fresh. Great artists steal.

In this new version of Star Wars, though, the elements are not blended so much as photocopied at 400% resolution. The story is the same, mostly derivative, and the old characters are reliably trotted out, seemingly not to any purpose other than to mine nostalgia.

I had to look away during most scenes. The actors don’t look wiser or illuminated, as cameos are meant to make them appear. They just looked…tired. And ready to make some bank. Harrison Ford alone was reported to make $34 million. Carrie Fisher explicitly said it was about the money for her, and also because, essentially, no one else is hiring.

These retreads should have been familiar, comforting, like a warm blanket on a cold day, like dipping back into a familiar novel and finding all of your same favorite characters. Only, instead of re-entering the universe I knew and loved and was comforted by, I was now in into a Potemkin village, where the facade was all there, covering shoddy plot holes and flimsy characters who couldn’t be saved by novice actors not confident enough to take the reins.

In the original Star Wars, there is magnetism and humor, both intentional and not. The viewer is assumed to be competent from the beginning. What other movie today would be ballsy enough to put a scrolling block of text that viewers had to read and understand before jumping into a complicated mix of characters and events?

In Disney’s Star Wars, as in many other movies today, the audience is assumed to be stupid. The constant winks to the old trilogy as not homages, but desperate attempts to make the new trilogy seem legitimate, desperate to make the bridge and make the money flow.  Finn’s overwrought mannerisms looks embarrassing compared to Han Solo’s original wry humor.

The dismantling of the heart of Star Wars by MBAs eager to cash in on the $4 billion merchandising machine that is, at its core, a genuine human story of fragile triumph, is a horrible thing to watch.  Because it is so antithetical to the original nature of what Lucas intended.

“I’ve never been that much of a money guy,” he says in an interview about the sale. “I’m more of a film guy, and most of the money I’ve made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.”

Granted, most of his creative choices are questionable. He rewrote the script to A New Hope at least four times and solicited help (much of which he ignored) for the dialogue, which he was terrible at. He messed with the resulting movies so much that the current editions for sale on the market are unwatchable and unrecognizable.

But it’s obvious that the original movies, are made, at their core, of passion, ingenuity, and love. That there is a dedication to the characters (especially from Harrison Ford, who rewrote most of his own lines,) and a respect for the rules of the universe, and especially the Force.

This current Star Wars is undoubtedly about mining that genuine trail of goodwill and simply turning it into money. There are Star Wars oranges, for God’s sake.

I walked out of the movie theater feeling like Abrams had failed.  And, like the prequels before him, he had left smudge prints all over my beautiful silverware, my vases, my Waterford crystal. Why wasn’t I consulted?

The more I think about the changing nature of the entertainment industry and the constant need for monetization and profits in the face of an industry that is leaking money as consumer choices open up, the more amazed I am that anything good gets made at all anymore.

Why can’t it be like in the good old days of 1977, I thought as I researched this article and people’s original reactions to the movies. But, as I read more and more, I became confused, and scared.

I’m scared that, if I had  seen the original movies at age 30, if I would not have liked them. The original, archival NPR review pegs the movie as fluff and wonderful entertainment that “kids can take their parents to.”  Multiple reviews allude to it as “corny.” I mean, just look at this original poster. Jesus.

I’m scared that maybe what had changed was not Star Wars, but me.  Maybe the problem was that, since I was 12, I’ve gotten cynical. I’ve been rejected from multiple jobs, kicked around in the real world, and found out how online advertising works and that the NSA exists. I understand motivations.  I understand money, and I understand that no one is doing this movie out of the goodness of their hearts. Almost nothing in this world is pure for me anymore.

So maybe, the terrifying part is that I am too old for unadulterated, unbridled joy and belief of the kind I felt when I watched Luke draw his lightsaber for the first time, and maybe it’s that this movie isn’t for me. Maybe,  behind all the machinations and Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy sitting anxiously on their piles of money, there is some idea that the old magic is back.

But, I did one last test for whether this movie is the real deal. I listened to the kids at the movie theater, for the same kind of reactions as the girl gasping with disbelief at Darth Vader being Annakin Skywalker, to shrieks of delight of the kind when Leia and Luke escaped the stormtroopers by swinging across that chasm, of kids making lightsaber noises.

And sadly, I heard nothing for Finn or Poe or Rey or any of the rest of the actors now tasked with carrying forward this enormous legacy into an endless, exhausting loop of theme park rides, voiceovers, magazine covers, and talk show appearances.

The loudest clapping I heard was when Chewie and Han Solo appeared, old and gray, tired of blasters and escapades, and the loudest shriek when Kylo Ren pierced Han through, destroying the last of the memories of our collective hero, Harrison Ford falling into the chasm of oblivion, checking out with his money, leaving the rest of the heroes screaming into the darkness, trying to fill the void of the greatness that was my first love.

Mr. B looks up from his computer. “So,” he shrugs, and goes back to watching an American excitedly narrating two Koreans killing each other’s Zerg and Protoss in London.

“Did you even hear what I said,” I demand.

“Hmm,” he says.

“You’re so busy watching that game all the time that you don’t even care about my deep thoughts” I whine.

Mr. B closes the laptop and looks up expectantly at me. “I’m listening. What’s so important.”

“This woman had a baby and she is writing that childbirth is the best thing to ever happen to her,” I say in disbelief.

“Who is this person?”

“Someone who’s wrong on the internet. Childbirth is not beautiful, at least for the birth-er.  It is terrible and confusing and painful and very serious. It’s not a love-in. The first six weeks after you have a baby are the worst weeks of your life. Do you remember our first weeks? I would not wish them on my worst enemy. ”

“This is someone you know?”

“No…”

“This is someone you talk to?”

“Well, no, I just read her Twitter sometimes…”

“So…you’re getting worked up over someone you don’t know, someone who you creep on from time to time, who’s Wrong On The Internet?”

“Well…yes?”

“How is that different from watching Starcraft? If anything, it’s worse.”

When you put it that way, it is pretty shallow. Why do I care about this particular woman? Or why do I care that Kate Middleton looked perfect two days after having Charlotte?  Why do I care what other women say about childbirth and babies when it doesn’t impact my life?

I care because they reflect back on me through the lens of society.  If someone influential says they just had a baby and are over-the-moon happy, it means people who have not  had babies read that and expect that very soon after birth, you return to normal and can participate full-flung in your pre-baby life like nothing happened.  Or, if you’re planning on having a baby, you expect a sparkle-filled euphoria as soon as you’re handed your child, and you need to tell everyone on your feed that you are ecstatic. It’s along the lines of that old advice, “Enjoy every moment.”

But for me,  the first couple days after having a baby, it was like someone reached down my throat, pulled upward by my intestines, and turned me inside out until all of my organs were outside laying right there on the uncomfortable hospital bed, exposed to the elements. I could not sit or walk comfortably for weeks. I wore sweatpants for months.

My brain felt detached from my body, like a fragile balloon that could be redirected by the slightest wind. Not only was I easily distracted, I felt like a crazy woman who had no qualms about crying at the drop of a hat had taken the wheel, and it terrified me that I had lost my personality, which made me cry even harder.

Mr. B and I got absolutely no sleep. We were barely hanging on from the physical and mental exhaustion enveloping us like a scratchy wool blanket.

The first night home, we were alternately exhausted and terrified. The baby was up every two hours to eat, be changed, and go back to sleep, and so were we.  By the time the watery January sun rose, we were so exhausted that our eyelids were burning. And then, when the baby had finally gone through her change-eat-swaddle cycle and gone to sleep, we were terrified that she wasn’t breathing correctly, and so we couldn’t even collapse in an exhausted heap on our own bed.

There was no room for love-ins, just learning and survival.

From having talked to friends and read message boards, my experience is completely normal , because childbirth and the bleary weeks that follow it are not a walk in the park. It is a primordial, unforgiving process, no matter how you go through it.

It takes so much time and energy to care for someone learning to become a human, and it takes even more concerted effort to learn to become a family.  I don’t think this is obvious in our culture, which favors quick, happy endings.  All we hear about are how people had babies and are “over the moon” or “overjoyed.” I don’t think this is reflective of how most people feel when they’ve just had a baby, regardless of how happy they are, based on conversations I’ve had outside of Facebook and Instagram text boxes.

The process of getting to know a baby means practicing the art of the slog, and when it’s good, it’s amazing, but when it’s bad and hard, it is terrible and will test every bone in your body, for weeks on end. I remember my parents saying they would stay with the baby for a couple hours while we went to get lunch. “Take a break,” my mom said, encouraging me. How can I take a break, I thought to myself. I know she’ll need to be fed, changed, and swaddled to sleep again in three hours and three hours after that, and three hours after that, well into the night. It’s not a break if the days blur in a cycle of relentless three-hour increments that don’t stop on holidays or weekends.

And throughout all of this, you constantly feel alone, like you are the only two people on the planet who can be this tired and this miserable. Everyone else is busy being over the moon and excited and happy with their babies. I remember, once, being up at 3:47 in the morning, feeding her. Our house was the only one on the street with lights on, and I was sitting, silently hating my neighbors for daring to get a good night’s sleep, and clinging onto wakefulness with every ounce of strength I had left so I wouldn’t nod off with the baby in my arms. I felt like the only woman in the universe.

You never know how much you miss sleep until it is gone. Every bone in your body just constantly cries for it. When you’re hungry, you wonder if you should take time to eat, or try to settle into a nap. You think about sleep in the shower, when you’re trying to watch a show, when you’re with the baby all the time. As you are changing diapers and your eyes burn, you long for a bed and a cool pillow,  The idea of sleep consumes you, overtakes you like an obsession with a drug.

Exuberance and happiness  all come later. But when they do come, they overwhelm you with how large they are and how infinite your heart can feel. When your baby first smiles, when you can’t imagine a day where your baby doesn’t exist, when your baby shrieks with delight as you come home after months of not recognizing you — these are the times you just want to hold your baby to you forever because you are truly over the moon and exhilarated by the  feeling that has come to you – pure, unadulterated love.

And I guess I’m mad because any woman who has the attention of millions of people can choose to say all of this, rather than portraying the early days of babyhood as a walk in the park.  I’m not saying it’s necessary to go into gory detail. I think the truth is somewhere on a sliding scale between laying out your birth story contraction by contraction and saying you are “so in love with your baby.”

There is a reason that many cultures have and had a lying-in period. Because there is nothing easy about the first weeks, but it becomes even harder when society tells us that, in addition to learning or re-learning how to parent newborns, we need to be falling head over heels in love with them, posting starstruck pictures full of exclamation points, and generally taking to parenting in a breezy manner that indicates that  nothing has changed in our lives.

Even celebrities, though, soon realize that family life is hard, harder than it’s been sold to them.

But the other beautiful truth is that after the first bleary weeks and months, your life starts to shape itself to the new rhythm. You won’t notice it at first because you are busy changing diapers and reading about how to cut toenails and trying to take 20-minute naps and generally being deep-down miserable to the core of your existence.

But slowly, your baby will start to sleep three hours, then four, then five, then, miraculously, you will put your head down and wake up six hours later and panic, thinking that something was wrong. But really, your baby is no longer a newborn, and is sleeping through the night.  And it’s then that you really get nostalgic about infanthood and how small and quiet your baby used to be.

The truth is, that the truth is hard.  It is not all absolutes. It is possible to have an extremely hard time adjusting to parenthood, as has been the case for millennia, and still be a good parent. It is possible to be completely disoriented and loopy the first time you are handed this package, your son or daughter, and not know what to do. It is possible not to feel like a mother or father until well after you leave the hospital and have saved the bracelet for your scrapbook (or not! you don’t need to have a scrapbook to be a good parent). Don’t let society tell you otherwise.

The truth is a slow, building crescendo of appreciation and love for your baby. You don’t learn to parent the minute your baby is born and you don’t have to make proclamations out of the gate. This thing, this growing of love and protection, is something that can only happen through days and hours of crying, of learning, of actively and constantly being there and helping your baby make sense of the world.

What you feel and exclaim the first couple days is an important experience, but removed from the whole – you are running on fumes, and a strange kind of high that you won’t be able to understand until much later.  You learn the real process of connecting to another human not the first time you meet your baby, with the Facebook announcement post or the tweet, but minute by minute and hour by hour, diaper by diaper, bottle by bottle. You have the right to be deliriously happy.

But if you’re just overwhelmed by the enormity of the experience that you’ve gone through and need a couple months to process the terrifying fact that you are now responsible for a life that you love unconditionally, that’s fine, too.

First, I cannot even convey how lucky we are to have found our nanny. When I leave the house, I don’t have to worry about the baby at all. I know she is in good hands, because she smiles the largest smile when the nanny comes. Next, my mom  lives nearby, so on Mondays after the nanny leaves and Mr. B comes home, she is with the baby. Finally, Mr. B takes over  on Wednesdays and days when I have to do MBA assignments after work.

It takes a whole team of people putting my time ahead of theirs in order for me to be able to do all the things I do, and don’t let any other working parent tell you that it happens any other way. For every Marissa Mayer, “taking limited time” for maternity leave to recover from  pregnancy, cranking out investor PowerPoints at 8 pm in the office,  there is someone at home, quietly giving her babies a bath and singing them songs.

There are always trade-offs. From the outside in, it may look like I have the perfect balance: some of work, some school, the rest with baby. But on one of the days I wasn’t home with the baby last week, she picked up a cracker with her hands (instead of being fed from a spoon) and ate it for the first time, something I’d been trying to get her to do unsuccessfully for a week. And, as I work, I am giving up thousands of dollars in salary  to stay at home. Then, when I was at home later last week, I got an email that meant I had to scoop the baby up into her jumper for 15 minutes while I worked. On the home front, I am giving up seeing some of my baby’s firsts. When I am in class, I come home after sunset.  I am neither with my baby or spending time on my own professional development  or even just myself.  None of these are good or bad on their own. They are just the trade-offs I am making every day, minute by minute, to make the choices I feel are right for myself and my family.

But, I am not doing it all, and most definitely not every day. I don’t go to any cool tech meetups or conferences anymore because I want to be with my child, especially during this first critical year. I miss out on things that happen at work on Thursdays and Fridays, and I missed out on Baby B’s bathtime last week because I was on an MBA call.  By the time I was done, Baby B was already asleep. Right now, I can’t be the best ninja-hacker-rockstar in my industry while my baby is small, but I also can’t be the best Pinterest-level mom while I am working to maintain my career, and so here I am, in the middle of all of it.

We all make choices and we all make trade-offs because the laws of physics say you cannot create more time. But what I think is interesting is that this is not the message society gives us, because we never see what other people are giving up. There is the previously-mentioned case of Marissa Mayer. All we see is the narrative of both how successful she is at work and how successful she is in also having a family. We do not hear about how exhausted she is (this, in spite of having full-time help), what the impact of all of this on her marriage is, or how she managed the physical after-effects of pregnancy being back in the office two weeks after work. But those parts are the important parts, because those are the pieces of advice professional women want to know.  I certainly do.

There are other cases where we are not getting the full story.  For example, there is the case of Adam Levine.

If you’ve listened to any pop radio over the past 5 years, you’ve heard Maroon 5, the band that Levine is the front-man of. Their songs are always super-catchy and immediately relatable, the kind you can’t get out of your head, the kind that will likely be playing in  TGIFriday’s for years to come.

They also always go straight to the top of the pop charts. Between 2010 and today, they’ve had over 10 songs in the Top 10. Just their last record alone has had three: “Maps” (No. 6 peak on Aug. 9, 2014), “Animals” (No. 3; Nov. 11, 2014) and “Sugar” (No. 2; March 28, 2015).

Every time I am in my car, going home from MBA classes at 8:45 on Monday nights and “Sugar” comes on, I think about Adam Levine.

It takes at least a week to produce a song, months to produce an album, months to pull a team needed to produce an album together, plus travel to the studio.

Even if he is only focused on producing Top-10 hits alone, Levine should be busy.

But here is a list of  the other things he does (all from his Wikipedia article):

• Writes, or at least co-writes, the songs he sings
•  Launched his own fragrance line
• Collaborated with Kmart for a menswear collection
• Served as a coach on The Voice
• Starred in American Horror Story: Asylum
• Collaborates with other artists on singles
•  Hosted Saturday Night Live
•  Stripped naked for testicular cancer (yes)
• Founded his own record label
• Went on multiple tours with Maroon 5
• Made a cameo appearance in Pitch Perfect
• Started his own Vodka brand
• Is involved with CoverGirl cosmetics

Oh, he also married a supermodel in 2014.

Every time I hear “Sugar” on the radio, I imagine that the man must be just, like, physically and mentally frayed to the bone. How much can one person stretch himself?

But he keeps going. How? Well, the $75 million probably helps a lot.  He can afford cooks, maids, chauffeurs, personal assistants, interior designers, real estate brokers, financial planners, nutritionists- all the people that you never hear about, but are quietly in the background, making order of lives.  He can also have other people manage parts of his businesses, and for many of these things all he needs is a buy-in over the phone.

He makes it work.

But also, he doesn’t, because the laws of physics apply to Adam Levine, just like they do to every other mortal.  Everyone pays and everyone trades-off.  He pays for his fame with his voice,  his privacy,  his health:

On a frigid afternoon in late February, Levine emerges in the lobby of New York’s The Mercer hotel with an apology. He landed funny while performing in Montreal the night before and tweaked his neck. “If I’m somewhat out of it, you’ll know why,” he says, his head cocked awkwardly to one side. Between sips of a red eye — a caffeine jolt of coffee mixed with espresso — he reveals himself at once charming, cocky, self-deprecating, self-aware, funny and grateful.

And eventually, I am sorry to say, but he will probably pay with his marriage. Two people who are never in the same city are not really married in any sense of the word.

He makes the trade-offs that he wants to make.  Although, at that level of celebrity, I’m not sure you’re making choices as much as you are trapped in an ever-revolving hamster wheel of fame, notoriety, and money, hoping desperately it never stops, but also, hoping that it could just be over one day and you can be normal again.

These are the kinds of things we don’t talk about when we talk about success stories, but we should.  Because these invisible exchanges of time and money and sanity are the ones that are most important.  They tell you what you care enough about to let go, and what you want to wrench away from time’s steely grip and place firmly in your own control as it keeps marching onward.

1. My mom got me tickets to the Impressionist exhibit and free babysitting! I get to get out of the house!
2. I get to leave the baby and take the train into the city like I used to!
3. I get to listen to my own music on the train and I can listen to every song uninterrupted!
4. I don’t have to wear sweatpants or other clothes that are easily washed!
5. I get to meet my husband after work and walk to a museum! I don’t have to see if it’s too hot or too sunny during the walk, because I don’t care if I personally get sunburned! I don’t need to stop every five seconds to adjust a wiggling hand or foot in a stroller!
6. I’m at a museum! An actual museum! There is culture here! There are people listening to smooth jazz and drinking cocktails! They are all wearing clothes that are not at all conducive to baby-wrangling.
7. The actual exhibit is just ok.  I mean, yeah, Impressionists are cool, but this is maybe too many impressionist paintings. And not all of them are interesting.  Like ,how many pictures of poplars can you paint? 25, apparently. That’s a lot of poplars.
8. Oh, this one painting is cool. I’m looking at a painting! And not changing a diaper!
9. There is a woman with a newborn at the exhibit. Oh no, that baby is too cold. Why is it not wearing socks? Newborns should be in long sleeves.
10.  I remember when my baby was a newborn.
11. Waterworks.
12. That’s a lot of scenes of the sun-splashed Normandy coast.
13. I’m still looking at paintings! It’s been over an hour. I wonder what my baby is doing. I wonder if she is asleep. Did my mom put her in the right pajamas? I laid them out, but maybe she didn’t see them? If my baby is wearing the wrong pajamas, there’s no way she will survive the night.
14. That’s a lot of ballerinas.
15. I get to leave the exhibit and go to dinner!
16. I am at a restaurant with my husband! We are ordering food! There are other non-baby people around, and they are all eating and talking quietly!
17. We get to eat tasty Thai food and talk quietly too. We talk about the art exhibit. “It was boring, I mean it was ok, but there were only a couple really good paintings. Hey, do you think the baby is asleep yet?
18. We talk about the baby. Then we eat. We are still eating Thai food and we are still uninterrupted. There is no one screeching from time to time in the background.
19. We realize we need to get home to relieve my mom. It’s getting late. It’s 8:27.
20. What a great night taking in sophisticated culture and being completely away from the baby!

I need to get something off my chest.

I’ve never read War and Peace. Or Anna Karenina. Or The Brothers Karamazov.

In all the years I’ve been pretending to be an expert on Russian culture, I’ve never read any of the great works of Russian literature.

This fact is so embarrassing that I’ve never admitted it to anyone. I don’t think even Mr. B knows the extent of my Russian illiteracy.  Every time someone mentions War and Peace, I nod. “Oh yes, the French occupation of Moscow. The love of the land. Austerlitz. All of that,” but I’m praying the conversation doesn’t go any further.  So I try to distract them. “Hey, speaking of how much Russia sucks, did you hear that Putin’s press secretary bought a $620,000 watch?” and I’m off and running back in comfortable territory.

Since I was little, I had this grand idea that I would read Russian literature in Russian. I’ve presented with many opportunities to read translations of Russian works, but I passed, because, to me, it was embarrassing to be reading words that had been filtered into stilted English when I could very well understand and read the richness of the original.  It was a cop-out.

But every time I started on the original, it was just too hard. In English, I am an extremely  voracious reader. I can get through a 300-page novel in one sitting if no one bothers me, and I’m reading Middlemarch without a dictionary. In Russian, as I’ve written before, I’m at probably a fifth-grade level as a speaker, and probably a second-grade level as a reader. I have to rely much more heavily on context clues than I’d like. Not only am I fighting grammar, I’m fighting context.

My Russian history knowledge is pretty strong from 1901 onward, but before that, I’m lost in a sea of unfamiliar tsars, backwater regions, and military terminology I’ve never learned in school.  I’m essentially going from driving 150 miles per hour on the autobahn in a BMW to 30 miles per hour on some unpaved road in a  2001 Honda Civic.

So I struggle on for a couple pages, but I eventually just give up. So far, I’ve given up on Babel, Bulgakov’s Notes of a Country Doctor, War and Peace, and Turgenev. I am missing an enormous gap of cultural knowledge that I will not be able to pass onto my child because, basically, I’m lazy. And the lazier I get,  the less my vocabulary expands, the less time I have before my daughter learns to read and starts asking questions.

Unfortunately, The Russian Federal Agency of Publishing and Mass Communication’s recent ad campaign did nothing to assuage my guilt (in English and in Russian).

I’ve been wallowing in my secret Russian classic shame for years, but once I realized that I wasn’t gaining words and therefore wouldn’t be able to communicate my feelings about, say the state of feudal serfdom in Russia in 1861 to my child, I decided it was time to get cracking.

A couple days ago, I  picked up Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, in English. Yes, it was cheating, but I was reading for content. The book was extremely interesting and I got sucked in. But as I progressed through Pechorin’s adventures, I couldn’t help feeling a nagging sense of guilt. You’re not getting the full picture, it kept saying, because you’re not reading the Russian words.

Just a single word can paint an entire picture, regardless of context, depending on your background.

Take the Russian word for bread, for example. Хлеб. (Khleb.) One syllable. Simple. Easy to translate.  But when I think of хлеб in Russian, I think of rich, warm black bread harvested somewhere in the Ukraine, flecked with pumpernickel seeds, eaten with steaming hot borscht, preferably after a hard day’s work in the fields. Or of the bread that never came to Russia during the revolution, of starvation and desperate winters, of coarse crusts soaked in water and salt and crammed down hoarse throats hastily in dimly-lit peasant huts. When I think of “bread”, I think of thin white Wonder Bread that tastes like nothing and lasts for weeks unrefrigerated, under the glaring neon lights of a generic suburban supermarket.

Each word is a world of its own, a world that can’t be replicated through translation. As a result, I’m constantly questioning all the English words in translated works when I read.  For example, the one of the first sentences of A Hero of Our Time is “As I entered the Koishaur Valley the sun was disappearing behind the snow-clad ridge of the mountains.” In the original, it reads, “Уж солнце начинало прятаться за  снеговой  хребет,  когда  я  въехал  в
Койшаурскую долину”, which translates in my head as, “And already, the sun was beginning to hide  behind the snowy mountains, when I rode into the Koishaur Valley.”

The Russian sentence is more playful and poetic than the English, which is very precise. The Russian sentence is the beginning of a poem describing the beauty Caucasian landscape, whereas the English is much dryer, almost sterile, even.

Here’s how the valley looks is in real life:

And here’s how I picture it based on the English description:

This  concept of passive duality got to be so annoying that I felt like I was splitting in half: the English half, going full-speed, reading as quickly as I wanted to, finally getting through the classics, and the Russian half, whining about how every word was being translated incorrectly, begging the English half to slow down.

So, I decided to compromise.

I got the Russian audiobook version.  I’m now reading Hero in English and then listening to an audiobook version of it in Russian afterwards. This has got to be the most I’ve ever worked at reading a book, and it’s taking me the longest. But this way, I understand everything going on in the book, and then I get the full scope of what exactly the author was trying to say when I listen to the Russian version.

I’ve so far listened to two chapters, and even the most simple descriptions which were just beautiful in English come alive in breathtaking color in Russian.  The military terminology makes more sense, and the relationships between the narrator and the Russian army officer he meets feels more genuine, more real, like the author intended it to be.  And I don’t feel guilty about either skipping out on the Russian or the book.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish the book because this is just as much work as all my previous attempts, and honestly, on the drive home from work, when I usually listen to podcasts,  my concentration and energy are towards unwinding from work and transitioning to taking care of the baby. But I hope I will finish, because then I might be finally ready to move on to War and Peace, just in time for her to graduate from college.

It seems like a week doesn’t pass without a controversy among Internet Moms.  This week’s controversy is an ad for a $1,000 stroller in which a Dutch model is pictured running with her 2-year-old in said $1,000 stroller. Oh, and she’s running in a bikini.

Internet Moms are outraged because she’s not encouraging positive body image, as opposed to all other luxury product ads, I guess, which definitely do depict average-looking people doing everyday things and definitely do not depict Photoshopped celebrities standing near their private planes with bespoke leather handbags.

This controversy is boring.What I thought was more interesting is that no one’s discussing how her child’s face isn’t shown in the ad.

Today, photographing children and posting them on Facebook is default behavior. Writing at length about them is, as well.  We assume default public when it comes to kids.

And when I had my baby, I wanted to do all of that. I wanted to post pictures of her in those hospitals swaddles, like everyone else does, talk about how much she weighs and what milestones she’s achieving, like everyone else does,  and generally share what I think is the best part of my life with my social circle, like everyone else does.  Because, I think, as people, we are hardwired to share our experiences and receive feedback from the community, which is why Facebook, despite the fact that it’s completely terrible, is so successful. We want to know we’re not alone, and we want to share positive things in our lives, including our children.

We want to kvell.  But there’s a fine line between kvelling and, pretty much 80% of the content on, say, the eponymous Kveller.com, which started out as a very nice Jewish parenting site and now has pivoted to specializing in posting very detailed personal parenting experiences wrapped with inflammatory headlines for pageclicks. When does kvelling about your child turn into exploiting them for Kveller, or Facebook for that matter?

Is posting pictures of them trying to walk ok? How about pictures of them naked in the bathtub? Or eating?  How about details about them like height and weight? How about Instagrams of your kid throwing up? Or blogging about their health problems? (Both exist, but I didn’t want to link to either.)  There is obviously a fine line between posting cute pics of your baby turning a year old and posting Instagrams of them bawling that end up on Buzzfeed.  Whoever crosses the line usually ends up on STFUParents. But where is that line between innocence and the need for self-validation? Between making sure our kids are loved or end up haunted by their online past?

I don’t know, which is why I don’t trust myself to post any pictures of my baby on Facebook or expose too much detail about her in my status updates. I do have a private password-protected blog with pictures and updates for friends and family, and I still try not to post anything too personal about her there, lest it end up on the bigger web later. A Jewish magazine wanted to publish my last post about her name and how I think her Jewish identity would be, and I’m still waffling on accepting because it’s right on the border line of where I think my right to talk about her for my own personal need for validation and intellectual exploration ends and her right to privacy begins.

I also don’t want my baby’s photos in a database used for selling products. There is exactly one picture of her floating out there on Facebook and that’s because we weren’t paying attention when someone asked if we could post it.  Finally, what’s probably scariest or most unknown to me, is that this is only the first group of kids growing up with all documentation all the time, and we have no idea how they will end up as adults.

All of this is to say, I’d really like to have more public discussion about Bugaboo’s decision to cover up the daughter’s face. I am an overthinker. I am also more privacy-oriented than most, so I’d really like to know whose decision it was to cover up the daughter’s face. Are my reactions to these kinds of issues normal? Will our kids not be impacted by having their lives on line because everyone else’s will be, as well? Do others think about these same kinds of things? Who owns the rights to our children’s life story? That’s the real story here, and I’m sad there’s not more discussion about it.

Yesterday’s topic was let by a very awesome educator from the National Museum for American Jewish History, who brought a suitcase of artifacts a single woman’s family had generously given to the museum. We then worked in groups to reconstruct her life, from immigration from the Russian empire, to getting acclimated, to raising a family in Philadelphia.

This is a workshop she often does around Philadelphia public schools, but she mentioned that she was interested in how our crowd, Russian Jews in their 20s-40s, would react differently, having been through the immigration process ourselves. “American kids react differently to these artifacts. For them, immigration is something very distantly in the past.

For us, it may have been as recent as a couple years ago.” Katerina had us go around the table and say where we were from, how old we were when we left, and if we still read and wrote in Russian. I was the youngest at age of immigration, at five. Everyone else had come either as a teenager, or on their own, as a student or worker. Everyone gasped when I said that I still read and wrote in Russian (I was just relieved that they hadn’t read my blog.) She said this kind of information was important in understanding the woman’s story.

The woman was named Eva, just like my baby. She came from Ukraine in 1913 to join two brothers already in Philadelphia. Her artifacts included her Russian empire immigration papers, vouchers for having completed public school in Philadelphia, and her English composition practice. The whole exercise in reconstructing Eva’s life was extremely interesting for both myself and Mr. B since we are both history fanatics.

But it really made me wonder how our own Eva, born one hundred years after this one, would be American.

“Her original name was Chava Brucha,” Katerina said, “But she changed her name to Eva to Americanize, to lose the old, and she spoke English until she died. Her daughter, who gave an oral account of Eva’s life to the museum, did not speak any Russian or Yiddish.”

When Jews came from Russia, they were assimilated into American Jewish culture by the shared common virtue of religion, because, in spite of what the Pew Portrait of Jewish Americans survey says, American Jewish life is still religious life. During the Russian empire period, this was particularly salient: many Jews came from shtetls where Yiddish, Jewish boy’s schools, and Jewish rituals guided life in much the same way they did Jewish life in America, especially New York.

Today, even though we are all post-racial, post-national, post-everything, the structures of that original Jewish culture are still in place. Being Jewish in America on the surface means asking other Jews which synagogue they belong to, which bagels they like, where they spent Passover last year, and whether their children will go to Israel for a bar mitzvah.

However, since the 1930s, Russian Jews have not defined themselves in any of these ways, because they were not allowed to by the government. When the Soviet Union outlawed Judaism in the 1930s, being Jewish for most Russian-speaking families has meant your Jewish last name, studying math or science, supporting Israel, and trying to figure out — more secular definitions of what peoplehood means, outside of traditional structures of hierarchy.

This definition of being Jewish often clashes with the American one, leaving Russian Jews feeling excluded and rootless. In our family, we do Judaism like jazz does covers of popular songs; it only sometimes sounds kind of like the original. We do Passover, but we always have multi-tiered Russian cakes because you can’t have a meal without a good dessert. We (rarely) light Shabbat candles, but when we do, we usually have a movie going on in the background. We have a mezuzah, but it’s not hung correctly.

Our Jewish identity is very much formed individually inside our heads, outside of group structures. Neither Mr. B nor I had bar or bat mitzvahs. We never went to Hebrew school or Jewish day camps. We’ve never kept kosher or even done anything on a regular basis for Jewish holidays. I was never forced to take Hebrew classes: I came to the language on my own, not from the Torah, but through rap lyrics. Mr. B had never been to Israel until I took him, by myself, sans Birthright, in 2009. None of this has ever stopped us from feeling 100% Jewish.

But since Eva was born, my mom has been encouraging me to make sure she has a good foothold in the American model, so that she fits in with other American Jewish kids. Because babies don’t understand Hadag Nachash or Lev Landau. Babies understand routine, structure and ritual. So how do will she understand what being American and Jewish is? By watching Prince of Egypt alone on YouTube? Or attending services with a large, joyous group?

Spurred on by that Jewish guilt, I’ve gone to three or four different synagogues to look at memberships. I wanted to see if there were other young families, hopefully also Russian-speaking, but not necessarily, just as unsure and uncomfortable in their new roles as parents and guardians of ritual, to see if we could bond together in our wobbly unsureness within the larger, solid structure of a congregation, kind of like a wobbly toddler to walk by holding the wall. Unfortunately, no matter how welcoming the synagogues were, or how many times I talked to admission officers, though, they all made me feel uncomfortable.

First, everyone knows each other at a synagogue. If you are new, you are an outsider. I had to get an introduction to several synagogues – I felt awkward approaching them on my own. And when I did, they automatically asked me if I had belonged to another congregation, what my affiliation was, whether I had been in BBYO, and what my Hebrew name was. Hey, I just got in the building, what’s the hurry? (No, no affiliation, no, and Vered, but only by accident.)

All synagogues assume you already know everything: the songs, how services work, things about high holidays. But we have no idea how any of this stuff works. We need training wheels.

The other problem was that, the synagogues in my area of the Philadelphia suburbs are, to put it delicately, full of people that are closer to their yahrzeit than their bar mitzvahs. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Philadelphia suburbs had a rich Jewish community that Eva Baen had probably been a part of. Just within ten miles around me, there are seven synagogues. One was built by Frank Lloyd Wright. However, as the Philadelphia economy declined and Jews left for New York and other places,these communities stagnated. Today, all of that community is gone. Every congregation I talked to is losing young people my age and losing them quickly. Most services are made up of people over 50, over 60 even. The number of families with babies Eva’s age is very small.

And finally, I guess my largest hesitation in joining a synagogue is that I don’t want Eva to be assimilated, to be completely American. Eva Baen’s children may have belonged to synagogues, but they didn’t speak Russian. If Eva expresses desire, I would love for her to join BBYO and go to Israel. But I would also love for her just as much to travel the Trans-Siberian Railroad with me and be able to talk to the attendants on the train in Russian without hesitation. I would love for her to go to Hebrew school, but with the understanding that no one in her family did, because her family couldn’t afford things like that as they were going through the early stages of immigration. I want Eva to understand that Pushkin is as much her culture as Tevye, that she was named first in Russian before she received her Hebrew name, that there is a part of her that is different and distinctly not American and not American-Jewish.

Eva Baen seemed like she had an easy time assimilating into American life. And I have no doubt my Eva will be great at English and American culture, either. I have big dreams and hopes for her. But I’m also worried about how she will be Russian and Jewish, but I guess we have to wait for that story to unfold. Unlike Eva Baen’s story 100 years ago, my baby’s Jewish, American, and Russian story is just starting (as soon as she wakes up from her nap.)

Idea from here.  Photo from very cute Creative Commons collection.

When the baby wakes up at 4:37 am

When the baby smiles at something you did

When you finally got the baby to sleep but the Amazon delivery guy rings the doorbell:

When your baby grows out of her size 3 diapers and you realize she will go to college someday:

When you’re trying to change the baby quickly and she keeps trying to flip over:

When your baby shows A Symptom and you’re reading Dr.Google  to see what’s wrong

When you think you see the first tooth:

When you cut the baby’s nails wrong

When you go out with the baby and need to take her stuff:

When you’re trying to get the baby to smile for the camera:

When your baby-less friends post on Facebook:

When it takes you 40 minutes to put your baby to sleep and you hear her waking up 25 minutes later:

When you, your spouse, and your parents are all in the kitchen and you hear a baby noise in the living room:

When the baby is crying because she needs to be changed and fed and your cell phone rings:

When you’re trying to kiss and hug your baby but she only wants to crawl and roll over:

When you’re bracing yourself for the spit up

The spit-up:

Your living room at the end of the day:

When the baby is asleep for the night:

When you are asleep for the night, with the monitor next to you:

Art, seen as a way to communicate  and gain favor with the population, which was still largely illiterate at that point, was encouraged, in any shape or form. Proletkult, short for Proletarian Culture, arose out of the chaos of the Revolution and Civil War, and encouraged thousands of artists to spread socialism in any way they chose to express themselves, be it through traditional painting, expressionism, modernism, or abstractionism.

Art in the czars’ time looked like this: traditional themes of portraits or the Russian landscape, nationalist in nature, harmless. Shishkin was particularly good at this.

Now, artists were free to roam the entire breadth of their imaginations, and came up with things like this: 

Цифровая репродукция находится в интернет-музее Gallerix.ru

For a brief moment from 1917-1922, everyone was free to experiment with what socialism meant to them. Then, Proletkult started becoming too independent for the liking of the Soviet government, and it was disbanded. Art was cracked down on.Only state-sanctioned Soviet realist paintings that, according to the Party’s own objectives, lifted communism, were allowed. All Soviet artwork started looking like this:

The socialist realism movement squashed any real creativity until after Stalin’s death, and even beyond, to the point where Russian artists are still hemmed in by the constraints of realism on the nation’s psyche.

In the beginning, all new movements are free and unfettered, allowing for the mind to wade in the shallows of possibilities and play. Adam and Eve started out naked. Malevich and the other Proletkult members painted what they wanted.  And when the internet as we know it began in the early 1990s, there were no rules, only possibilities. That’s why the early internet was so much fun.

You could upload anything to YouTube. There was no Vevo, no copyright restrictions. You could talk to anyone on AOL chatrooms and maybe even meet them in person without being worried about who they were. Napster. Limewire. The crazy ugliness that was Geocities (where I first learned to write HTML.) Early Twitter, where there were no discovery tools, where you had to fend for yourself, where I met dozens of people I have now met in real life. Blogger, before blogging was monetized and pictures of glossy, skinny women in jeans sponsored by advertisers.  Digg.

And then reddit came onto the scene. I was a relative late-comer to reddit, starting to read seriously only in 2011 or so.  I found out about it through Mr. B,who probably found out about it through Slashdot, another early pioneer in tech news, now also floundering.  But once I really got into it, I was hooked.

Its mostly text-only format, no-nonsense posts, puns and humor abounding in the comments, and often generosity to complete strangers was a welcome relief from the shimmering sheen of the post-Facebook and Twitter socialized, “CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE”, Buzzfeed-ized version of the monetized internet that I have come to hate.

Because no real names are required, people are free to share all kinds of information. I’ve learned about everything from other women’s experiences with pregnancy, to the worst IT environments to work in, to the best books, to what a normal day in Russia is like, to what people looked like in 1914, to how to manage my finances, to what’s going on in my city, to why certain languages work the way they do, to reading actual professors write about history.

There are no “You won’t believe what this guy did next” ads, no slideshows, no SEO keywords, no “SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK”, no b.s.

Reddit is amazing and one of my favorite places to be on the internet.

Or, rather, reddit was amazing.

Because, like any public forum with free speech, reddit started to attract its share of really huge jerks.  And since Reddit is accountable to advertisers and some investors, probably, and, as a result,  reddit has been painfully congealing from the early days, to something much cleaner, more user-friendly, safer, more PG. The Party is mad that it is not in control anymore, and it’s trying to gain some of that back.

Only, every time the Reddit leadership tries to clean reddit up, it messes up, ends up making the situation worse, and makes reddit less reddit-y, more confined, more rigid, less full of play.

This is not the Soviet Union, and reddit is not Proletkult.

But over the past 15 years, we have been progressively moving to a model of consolidation and of squashing of creativity on the internet driven by an intense need to monetize and sanitize everything, to control what is essentially, in some cases, uncontrollable, or requires an extra level of finesse.

And I am extremely concerned, especially with this latest at Reddit,  that we are moving to an internet version of socialist realism: the Buzzfeed model. Easy to implement, easy to get pageclicks, easy to get people to engage, friendly, sanitary, clean, safe.

So what’s the answer? Allow all hate groups? No. People must be allowed to voice themselves on the internet without fear. But the answer is not reactionarily banning groups from time to time.

The answer is not easy to create or to implement and has to be thought through very carefully and maybe implemented on a case-by-case basis and tested in focus groups and maybe they have to read some case studies for how this type of thing has been handled in previous years, even without technology and maybe it takes more than just a blog post to keep a community running and whole and beautiful.

There are several communities that do a great job at self-policing based on firmly-established rules by the founders and produce clear, insightful comments despite the fact that they have grown: HackerNews, The New York Times, and Metafilter come to mind. Each has a different model that is appropriate for only that audience and that was put into place after a lot of thought. Each has been going for a long time.  And, as anyone dealing with a lot of people with a lot of opinions will tell you, this stuff is HARD.

But reddit is not doing reflection and analysis and thought. It is just trying to flex its editorial muscle with a blanket statement.  And by doing this, reddit loses, and the internet loses, and, in the long-run we will all lose, because instead of seeing all the myriad possibilities of weirdness, like Malevich and co did, all we will see is walled gardens of Facebook and Time.com and whatever other sites make money off the boring and the mundane and the cleaned-up.

The old internet,whatever it was, is gone. The revolution is over.