rockets in the night - a metaphor

Book Update

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:26:52 GMT

For the last two years, since I started work on a new book, I've been told by lots of people, over and over again, "don't worry about it, the book is great, just finish it and send it in!" Meanwhile, I went into comatose states working on it and trying to rework and fix it and etc. etc. until I finally sent it in to my agent a month ago.

(Well, I sent in the 400-page version a month ago. The original 500-pager I asked for back. The original original 582-pager is in my room in a Staples box where it earned me lots of Staples rewards points.)

Yesterday I talked with my agent about the book.

Now, there are two ways to describe the nature of the phone call:

I'm making lots of progress on a new project right now, so we're going to put this book aside until I can take a look at it later on, so I don't get burned out about it, and maybe revisit it in the future

Shelved!

I was worried, naturally, about the phone call. But when I got off the phone I felt great. Basically, everything that I was worried about with this book was confirmed for me: it was kind of all over the place, you didn't have a connection with the narrator, the whole part about Los Angeles felt like a sideshow, the characters were thin, the relationships weren't really there, the whole thing with the baby felt a bit phony...

At the end we agreed that the whole concept, which I'm going to keep under wraps because I think it might make a good video game someday (seriously), is a bit dated.

Considering that I spent 22 months writing this book, that's not surprising, and it would be nice to hear that it was great and that we can go sell it.

But writing it was a horrible experience and I'm glad it's over and since then I've been working on something better that I am on track to finish by the end of summer.

In other words, I got off the phone feeling good, and I still do, when for once in my life maybe I SHOULD feel really crappy. But getting the monkey off my back means a lot. I finished the thing. It just will not be published because it isn't good enough for you guys to read.

Post-mortem on the book: it was going to be called Urban Renewal Renewal, the final draft was 392 pages. July 2007 - April 2009. This was an attempt at an "adult" book, in that the protagonist was in his 20s and not a teenager. But one thing that we discussed in the phone call was that that's no longer even a distinction. To wit, re: youth and adults:

Our biggest movie is Transformers
[I think it's important to remember that the Transformers STARTED as a toy; it's not like they were a comic or TV show before they were toys; but then again, people had to make up the narrative for the toys; this means that means some nameless writers at Takara are some of the biggest cultural forces of our time]

The biggest books are for young adults
[and James Frey just signed on to do a series]

One of the biggest pop stars in the world is named "Ga Ga"

In other news:

Toyota technology has brain waves move wheelchair

Whoa.

Got this on the subway. It's not a corporate thing; the guy handing out the flyers wrote the text. Very distinct writing style you should check out.

"You will not even have time to think, because the torment and scorching heat of Hell fire will keep you in excruciating pain and discomfort."

Pain and discomfort?

Something Useful and Something Fun

Sat, 30 May 2009 18:45:34 GMT

I am doing a new speaking program at the Queens Public Library this summer: "From Personal to Published". It is, as you might imagine, a presentation (in two sessions) that shows anyone interested in writing how they can take their work from something they do for fun to something they do in public (and get paid for).

In the talk, I present a number of resources/tips, and I wanted to post them here for anyone interested in getting their writing out there:

And then, something fun:

I put up Attack of the Killer Turtle.

[link]

Those of you who have read Teen Angst? Naaah... may remember that when I was 15, I made a very independent film (budget: $0) that was actually REJECTED FROM CABLE ACCESS TELEVISION.

Well, after more than a decade, the film was discovered and it is now up.

BONUS: A summer or so after Attack of the Killer Turtle, my collaborator Max Lodge and I made another film: Funk Cops. Generally regarded as an inferior film, it nevertheless has my favorite moment of either film: Max and I kicking over the bikes as we strut toward the murder scene.

[link]

These bring back really good memories for me, I hope you enjoy them.

Also: the giveaways from the last two entries are closed! I'm responding as I get the chance--if you responded early enough, you will get your swag--it just might take a while.

Thanks!

Thanks for Making Me Feel Good

Fri, 29 May 2009 20:53:50 GMT

I don't do blog analytics. If I had a program that let me see exactly how many people were looking at my website at any given time, I would be catatonically depressed. I can just see myself, refreshing the screen, tracking a puny visit... no thanks.

My version of blog analytics is posting a giveaway, as I did the other day, and seeing who responds. Thank you everyone for making me feel good! I found some more stuff:

Be More Chill Play Glossies (5)
(obviously the real ones don't have the yellow circles)
(Please note that that particular picture includes an adult situation; they don't all. Each picture is different and I'll just give you whichever one comes up because I can't scan them all!)

These are 8 x 10 press shots for the Be More Chill Play that ran last year in Chicago (interested in putting on a Be More Chill play yourself? Contact me).

I'll sign and send. I have five. Speak up if you want one!

Then, I contributed a very short essay to the following book:

I have a signed copy of that to give away. The editor, Read Schuchardt, is a really great guy; check out his work here on True/Slant:

"Houston, this is getting to be a problem: first there was the story of the woman found dead in her home... then there was the story of the woman who was murdered by a boyfriend who, after the murder, kept her virtually 'alive' to the outside world by going online and updating her social media networks..." [more]

So, here's how all the giveaways stand now:

giveaway	winner(s)	status
Signed It's Kind of a Funny Story German	playinreverse iwasaposttcard	waiting on addresses
Signed Be More Chill Hebrew	gender_euphoric soulchanger	sending
Signed It's Kind of a Funny Story Italian	plunkster	asked fro address
Signed Through the Wardrobe	klynn44 marika_k	asked for address
DVD of Be More Chill Play	the_wondering_1	asked for address
Be More Chill Play poster (glossy, about the size of a rock band poster in a club	instal_mi	asked for address

So speak up if you would like a glossy or book! Also there is still one more Through the Wardrobe book to give away! Thanks.

Judge of Elegance & Giveaways

Tue, 26 May 2009 22:04:10 GMT

Petronius, author of one of my favorite books, had an official position within the Roman court circa AD 50. As elegantiae arbiter, or "judge of elegance," it was his job to find the best things in Roman culture and serve them up to the emperor.

This would be my dream job, without an emperor.

Here are the things I find most elegant.

Get a look at these Chinese bridges.

I had a great talk at the Academy at Swift River a few weeks ago. Here are just some of the things to say about it:
1. Beautiful, incredible place, THANKS everyone who was there.
2. I found a strong Magic: The Gathering contingent, and I told you guys about magic-league.com, where you can pay for free on illegal software.
  
  Magic-league.com is hardcore. The comments there feature the BEST trash talking I have ever heard. Example:
  
  Person 1: You sound like a 7 year old.
  
  Person 2: You better hope I'm not a 7 year old, or your mom is going to jail.
  
  Oooooooooh!
3. I learned a psychologist insider joke: the clinical diagnoses of the Winne the Pooh characters:
  - (Pooh) = comorbidity; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), inattentive subtype.
  - (Piglet) = "clearly suffers from a Generalized Anxiety Disorder"
  - (Tigger) = "ADHD, hyperactivity–impulsivity subtype"
  - (Eeyore) = depression
  - (Owl) = dyslexic
  - (Rabbit) = "Narcissistic personality disorder"
  - (Christopher Robin) = sees and hears voices
Thanks ASR. I had an amazing time.

In the thorny world of mental health nomenclature, I think the Autistic Self Advocacy Network has achieved a real victory:
"The Neuro-Diversity Movement"

What a great term! I think everyone should adopt it. I'm not mentally ill, I'm neurally diverse!! Article here.

New York Times roundup of interesting mental-health articles:
1. sad op-ed I've been meaning to post by Judith Warner
2. "Signs of Rising Stress as People Face an Uncertain Future" (from article: "“people of less means” were handling some of this better because “their identity is not as caught up in how much money they have”")
3. today's lazy kids (great companion to this piece of Onion brilliance)

Wall Street Journal: "The military is facing a sharp spike in suicides, and Maj. Gen. Mark Graham is leading the fight to reduce them..."

MSNBC: "Many Christian pastors dismiss mental illness"

I had never heard of this before: TWLOHA. It's a really impressive movement, thanks to those who alerted me.

"Lead Servant"

Thanks to everyone who has been putting school projects related to my books on YouTube!
I really appreciate it. Part of my goal as a writer is to make books that you can do school projects on without it having to be bad.

"Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion"
(from article: "Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code...")

It occurred to me recently that if I sell the new book I wrote, I won't have enough room for all the special thanks. Seriously. It should really have a special thank you for each reader; maybe we can do a thing where anyone who wants special thanks sends in their name and I put you on the list.

In any case, I got to thinking about the best thank-yous I've ever seen.

Of course, they haven't been in books, where for some reason people want to keep their pictures, dedications, and acknowledgments rigidly sanitized, but in albums they can get a little fun. I am fond of Fred Durst's thanks from Significant Other (1999, Interscope):

"Most of my friends have done all they can to betray me, but those of you who are true friends are all I need... I thank everyone that has caused me to suffer, without you I would have no reason to express myself..."

There is only ONE better set of special thanks, and that is the special thanks on the extremely rare album I Gotta Bang Her by Harpoontang (2002, Tequila Dave Productions). Not a lot of people know Harpoontang, although they do have fans. I don't have it on me, but the thank-you list is basically a bunch of bars, women, people with ridiculous names, and then at the end it says:

"...and to the warm and generous peoples of Southeast Asia."

I didn't know there was such a thing as a carnivorous sponge:

The most $$$-making medicine ever in the history of the planet will be the fat pill, when they finally get it. It's coming closer...

Honestly, I think the Fat Pill (eat whatever you want, never get fat) will revolutionize society as much as The Pill. It will change our food industries completely, further twist up our interesting relationship with the environment, and create a grand new class barrier.

Be More Chill play videos are up. See the Be More Chill theatrical adaptation live at Chicago's Griffin Theater (starts 28 seconds in):

For anybody who read Be More Chill and wants to know...

2009

Here are the latest developments.

"A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators..."

"Study takes step toward erasing bad memories"

MAN POSTS TWITTER MESSAGES USING ONLY HIS MIND

~~Giveaways~~
~~I haven't done one of these for a while. All of these things are totally free for the first person who speaks up that they want one.~~

Thank you so much.

What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? Answer Below

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:05:05 GMT

I'm not an impulse buyer. I prefer to have a rotating list in my head of things I'm looking for (a better letter opener, Ziggy's jacket from the wire, the services of a collection agency). Probably the last impulse buy I made was this:

I'm not trying to make myself seem noble or anything, that that was my impulse buy. I'm just very very cheap. But I was depressed, very down, and I picked the book up, and I read the beginning, and I thought what the hell. It didn't seem particularly good, but it didn't seem bad, either.

I brought it home and as soon as I did, I regretted the purchase.

First of all, it was expensive. Secondly, it was full of crap! "The purpose of life is to seek happiness." "To achieve happiness we must make ourselves happy." Tautologies like that. (Paraphrased, in this case.) Pure anger at the fact that this guy was supposedly so happy drove me forward to the parts of the book that really are life-changing. Because in the end, this is a GREAT book that I recommend to everyone -- especially the more "neurodiverse" among us. (Better than "mentally ill?" I certainly think so. I didn't make up the term; the autism community did.)

The Art of Happiness is presented as a series of discussions -- not strict dialogues, but ordered passages that read a little like the results of a therapy session with the Dalai Lama (who is referred to, awesomely, as "His Holiness" or "HH"). The co-author, Howard Cutler, meets the Dalai Lama in some interesting place (Tibet, or maybe a conference in Arizona) and asks him an important question: how can we defeat anger? How can we keep from being guilty? Then he highlights the most pointed parts of HH's responses.

I highlighted a number of things from this book. What I really love about Howard Cutler and HH is that they're delightfully blunt.

On Guilt
"If we allow our regret to degenerate into excessive guilt, holding onto the memory of our past transgressions with continued self-blame and self-hatred, this serves no purpose other than to be a relentless source of self-punishment and self-induced suffering."

On Problems
"If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it."

But the best, the one that I photocopied and hung up, is this:

"Be constantly aware of the destructive effects of negative behavior."

It doesn't seem like much. But think about it: when were you last truly aware of the destructive effects of your negative behavior? I don't mean later, when you regret it. I mean during or before you do it.

Example: I wake up and I just want to lie in bed for another hour and do nothing but be sad. I know that that's a negative behavior, and I know that I don't want to do it, and I want to do something else, but... what I'm not doing is simply being aware of the effects of the behavior. If I don't get out of bed I will miss work, feel guilty for the rest of the day, piss off the people who love me...

So just be constantly aware of the negative effects. The next sentence is, "One may need to repeatedly remind oneself of those destructive effects." To make it perfectly clear.

Reading this over, I don't feel I've quite sold it yet, so I'll just repeat and suggest: be constantly aware of the destructive effects of the negative behavior. Next time you're going to do something negative, remember that.

I mean, I think the advice is primarily aimed at drug use--be aware of the effects and you won't get high, etc. But watching TV alone at home all day is also a negative behavior, and it also has destructive effects, and... hey... wait... how do I turn off my TV again?

Around the time I got Art of Happiness, my mother, ever vigilant, sent me an email with the following:

Meditation Beats Drugs in Reducing Depression Relapses

I would like to have a link there, but my mom sends me stuff from some news service that doesn't include permalinks, so I have to copy-and-paste the relevant paragraph:

"A British study that pitted traditional Buddhist meditation against anti-depressant drugs to treat depression found that meditation prevented more relapses."

Like most of these news stories, turns out to be a gross oversimplification. The "traditional Buddhist meditation" compared against anti-depressants is actually something called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, which sounds like a racket off the bat, but given my positive experiences with Art of Happiness, I figured I'd look at it.

It turns out to combine Buddhist ideas of self-awareness with the techniques and "homework" of cognitive-behavioral therapy. If you don't know about cognitive-behavioral therapy, it's one of those things for which there's one basic amazing website that explains it all:

Essentially, cognitive-behavioral therapy aims to put a middleman between your thoughts (cognitive) and actions (behavior). When you have a thought, using CBT, you don't act on it. You step back to see whether it is productive or destructive thought. If it's destructive, you move away from the behavior that that thought would cause.

People sometimes think of cognitive-behavioral therapy is as therapy with "homework." In traditional psychoanalysis, you come in and talk about your past, what's happening to you, what your girlfriend said, why you can't get a job, how this rat died somewhere in your apartment and you have to hire a guy to find it...

Then, when you're done, you leave.

CBT isn't like that. First of all, after an initial discussion of where you are and where you want to go with your therapy, a cognitive-behavioral therapist is not going to ask about your past at all. What they will do is assign you homework. So you have to go home and, when you have a negative thought, write down what brought it on, how you reacted to it, and how you feel because of that reaction. Then, in the next session, you'll try and come up with a better way to have handled that thought.

It's very pragmatic, which makes it a good match for Buddhism. One of of the biggest misconceptions about Buddhism is that it's "spiritual" or "deep" and therefore not practical. The truth is that Buddhism seeks to take you out of your own head so that you can see that all the complex, chattering thoughts in your brain are impractical.

So... in this newly discovered "Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy," what they are essentially doing is wedding the techniques of CBT with the Buddhist idea of "mindfulness," which is something I hadn't heard of before. Turns out that mindfulness is essentially the same thing as CBT. Mindfulness is a state of mind in which you are constantly aware of your thoughts. (Good reading here.) So I can't see a way that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is any different from cognitive-behavior therapy by itself or mindfulness by itself.

But in the great pantheon of rip-offs, this doesn't seem so bad. Like maybe it's 20% ripoff. The website is very good-natured, and it makes perfect sense that a form of cognitive-behavior therapy would be helpful in getting people out of recurring depressive periods. CBT has been proven to help with recurring depression before. It's just unfortunate that every article about mental health has to compare drugs and therapy and declare a winner. Can't they both help?

Anyway, between all this mindfulness, CBT, and MBCT lie the Zen koans. You remember those? You remember when you first heard "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and you made the little half-fist and held it up to your ear and said that's it?! What's the big deal?

Well now you know. The point of the koans was to bring on a state of mindfulness in the person who heard the question.

When you think what is the sound of one hand clapping? you picture a single hand in your head. Or maybe you don't: maybe you picture a hand clapping an invisible hand. Or a deer. Doesn't matter. You're aware of your thoughts. It's a question that makes you think about thinking. And if you're able to think about thinking, then you're able to say:

"Hey, that thought is no good. It's destructive and nasty. Let's get rid of it."

Angstpiration Recaps / I Finished My Book / I'm 28 and No Longer Have to Think That Way

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:26:05 GMT

Angstpiration speaking engagements continue to go well! Just recently went to Kennesaw, GA for the Kennesaw State University Annual Conference on Literature for Children and Young Adults. I spoke to education and media specialist students, as well as to the students at Cherokee HS in nearby Canton.

This was fantastic. You'll notice that one of those pictures is a CAKE. That's because it was my birthday; more on that later. But this is certainly the first time that any school has ever made me a cake (in addition to the beautiful window display).

See the Anchors and the Tentacles?!

In addition to the visit to Cherokee (THANK YOU students and teachers), an attendee at the conference named Zach created the following poster for Be More Chill:

So thank you to Aaron Levy for arranging my visit to Georgia. I had a wonderful time. More to come, and as always, if you are interested in having me visit your school, library, or conference, please learn more.

So, my birthday. April 4th. The day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, the day legendary Mets manager Gil Hodges was born, and one of the days (I think the 5th is used as well) to which they date Kurt Cobain's death (but more on that later).

This year, I also promised that it would be the day that I finished my new book.

I didn't quite make it. I needed a three day extension. But...

I finished my new book!

I handed it in this past Monday. I wrote the details (and I know it's not a whole lot, but it's better to hold these things close to the vest at the beginning) on the message boards.

Right now the book is with my agent. This is the start of the process. My agent will read it and tell me if it's any good (fingers crossed) and then we'll go try and sell it. So questions about a release date? Very premature.

This is the thing. It's REALLY hard to sell and publicize books. And in this economy, etc. etc. But much harder than the publicity and the selling is writing a good book to begin with. I'm happier than I have been in a long time.

A week after my birthday, my family threw a party for me that combined birthday with Easter. They presented me with the following cake:

[Please note: every single bit of this cake, besides the candle, was edible. Good year for cakes this year, huh?]

It made me really happy. If I hadn't just finished the book I would have been devastated, so it's good it worked out. For the first time in a long time my wish was not "finish a book this year," it was, well, you're supposed to keep them secret, right? But it wasn't that.

I'd like to take the time to thank anyone and everyone reading this for helping me get to the point where I have another book finished. I could not do it/have done it without you. I wouldn't have a career, plain and simple. Thank you for your good wishes and THANK YOU FOR YOUR FAITH.

This was an important birthday for me. I turned 28. It was important because, early on in my life, I got pretty fixated on Nirvana, which made me romanticize the idea of dying <= 27.

I don't want to get into a personal history of how and why I love this band. I wrote a review of Journals for New York Press way back when; that should be enough for anyone. But I think it's common for people, around age 13, 14, to find artistic idols, and that was mine. So I had some pretty vivid and detailed plans for dying before I turned 28 for a long time.

I know it's melodramatic and self-centered, and I apologize for it, but it's also true, and I know I'm not alone. Suicide has been romanticized since at least Achilles.

[I highly recommend this book for a different perspective on Achilles; it's the Iliad written in interlocking 1st-person perspectives]

(Then, of course, there's Jesus, who made a very clear choice to die, although suicide is a sin no matter how you slice it [St. Augustine, Aquinas]. [There is a VERY interesting summary of religious and philosophical views on suicide here.] It's not coincident that people believe that suicides/near-suicides [i.e. Elvis, Jim Morrison] never really died, or that they're saints, or that they're coming back.)

So I grew up with occasional (days, weeks) convictions to blast off this rock before I turned 28. Because when you get really into an artist--and it could be anybody: Miles Davis, Slash--you don't just get into their art. You get into their life, and you feel that it's the most interesting life ever, because it's the one that interests you.

You think, by extension, that you have to live in a similar way in order to be interesting.

~~But something strange happened to me as I got older.~~ (Just forget I ever wrote that. Stricken from the record.) But then I saw something amazing in these two guys:

Guy on the left is Marcel Proust. Proust wrote A Rememberance of Things Past and is acknowledged as one of the 20th century's great writers. He was rich as hell and hung out on his mom's couch. Proust did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead.

Guy on the right is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski wrote Post Office and Ham on Rye is acknowledged as one of the 20th century's great writers. He was paid $100/month by an editor to write so he didn't have to work at the post office. He made a living for a number of years betting on dog races.

This is wonderful stuff. What this means is that great art really can come from anywhere. Don't believe people when they tell you you need to go to graduate school to be a good writer, and don't believe them when they tell you you need to NOT go to graduate school to be a good writer. Because the fact is it's different for everybody.

So, seeing as it's now not POSSIBLE to go the way of an artist I fixated on, I've acknowledged that my life might not be as exciting, romantic, kick-ass, and hardcore than lots of other people's, but it IS just as unique.

I live in my house in Brooklyn but about once every three weeks I get depressed and go five blocks up the Slope and crash at my parents', where I eat only cereal and do not change clothes, until I get sufficiently bothered by things there to come back home

I have jumped off a roof into a pool like in that movie, but what I remember more than anything else was shimmying up the wall to get on the roof. I was wearing boxers, and the wall was grainy and it was chafing my crotch. And I thought, Man, they do not show this part in the movies

Once, when I was in Los Angeles, I was walking with a woman on a sort-of date. (It wasn't a real date; it had the potential to be a date.) When we left, she got immediately cold and I didn't have a jacket for her. (In Los Angeles, people have different temperature gauges, and women expect you as a man to have a jacket for them.) While I was trying to think up what to do--I actually thought about harvesting some palm leaves to wrap her up in--a man in a RED SPORTS CAR did a fast U-turn across the street, rolled up to her, powered down his window, asked her "Hey baby, you wanna ride?"

And she drove off with him in the night.

So that stuff didn't happen to Proust or Bukowski. Guaranteed.

Final piece of the puzzle? I'm a very common person. It's a strange combination, but it's true: we all have unique lives but our experiences are common. Don't ask me how it's possible. But if I write about the eating cereal and the phantom red pimp car, people get it, because they've experienced such things in one way or another, the way they've experienced what Bukowski and Proust did in one way or another.

Conclusion: I can now embrace the unique qualities of my life, whether I should be proud of them or not, because I've got no one else to fixate on. I'm actually really lucky I didn't fixate on someone who lived longer--if I fixated on Bukowski, I'd be trying to turn myself into an alcoholic; if I fixated on Hemingway, I guess I'd have to wear the shirts.

As discussed in a previous entry, I was in the Largest YA Book Signing Ever last month. It was a huge success. A thousand people showed up! Thank you so much to everyone who asked me to sign their books.

Someone was going around at the event asking authors for their favorite words, with the object of writing a short story that used all of those words. I picked out the following word:

"luff"

I read somewhere that this was voted the most beautiful word in the English language by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, but I can't find that online anywhere so it's probably something that a certain not-to-be-named family member told me as an utter fabrication.

But it's a pretty word, isn't it? Luff. Thing is, I felt encroached upon, because TWO authors picked "lust." How crazy is it that two out of 40 had the same favorite word? And why did they have to hone in on such a crude imitation of "luff?" Luff is like want lust wants to be, and love splits the difference.

All 40 of us at the event

Apologies to all who were not captioned!

Important Extras

Shadow Forest project
Authors out there--take note of the Shadow Forest Project. Very simple idea: they take donated books and, in exchange for putting your name on a website, give them away to charities. You get to pick the charity and your name is listed on their site, which I suppose can't help with Google. But the real cool thing is that the charities are very cool. I sent a hardcover It's Kind of A Funny Story to Mission Australia.

Hobbit Home
Wow. A real home in Wales:

Sugar Out Now
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the screenwriting and directing team who are working on the It's Kind of A Funny Story movie (and who made Half Nelson), have released their latest film: Sugar. It's the story of a Dominican baseball player and it's fantastic:

82 in Metacritic!

Go see it! Support them! The more you do, the more likely it is that an It's Kind of A Funny Story movie hits theaters.

Thank you for reading. I'm going to go outside now; it's supposed to be a great day today.

Angstpiration

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:59:49 GMT

I have been holding off on a post on ANGSTPIRATION because I wanted to wait until it really got going.

It has.

This entry is going to focus on it. By the time you're done reading, you'll be able to:

understand what what the program is

recognize its success through the events that have already happened

see what's coming next

save a whole lot of money by learning concepts of public speaking that people usually charge thousands of dollars for*

So, Angstpiration is my new speaking program. I've been visiting schools and libraries and talking about writing for almost 10 years; I've read from Teen Angst? Naaah... and Be More Chill to receptive audiences and hostile ones; I've stayed in hotels, motels, and cars.

But I never really got a grip on how to present the It's Kind of A Funny Story material until now. It's tough to talk about depression without being depressing--and it's easy to fall into the trap of quoting statistics and trying to make them exciting.

The breakthrough came when I realized how writing basically got me through high school and the rough times that came later. Stephen King says that writing is telepathy, but I think it's also alchemy: it can take horrible moments into something one can be proud of.

To this end, in a log line, Angstpiration is about taking your most stressful experiences and turning them into great writing. It's part mental health primer, part writing workshop. I generally do an auditorium presentation of 30 minutes with a 15-minute Q&A, and then I do breakout sessions where I give students with a special interest in writing practical, rarely-discussed strategies for becoming a professional.

That was the pitch. Now, if you are a librarian, teacher, principal, student, or professor, here's more information:

[goes right to a pdf]

The Angstpiration dates have been fantastic so far. First, I spoke at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School a month ago. This was a blast because I got to see some special behavior techniques for guiding kids that blew me away. I was backstage, getting ready to go on, and the students were making the normal boisterous noises that I've heard students make for years. Then, the principal clapped her hands.

Bap bap bap.

The students responded.

Bap bap.

And everyone went silent.

It was an agreed-upon behavioral cue. I'd never seen anything like it. Everyone became quiet instantly. When I was in elementary school, the teacher would just yell "Be quiet!" with varying degrees of success. Here it worked perfectly and instantly. (Here are some other cues.)

It reminded me of a behavioral technique that I read about years ago: tracking the speaker. When someone is talking in the classroom, all the students look at them. It's supposed to be sort of disconcerting, but it also enforces productive behavior. These new psychological techniques are apparently the way to go with really making a learning environment work.

In any case, it was amazing.

Up next, I spoke at Lake Forest High School outside of Chicago. Dave Eggers and Vince Vaughn went here. This was a fantastic event; thanks to everyone who made me feel welcome, from teachers to students to administration. This was the first time in my life that an event of mine has been promoted with a screen saver.

After my auditorium presentation, I did three breakout writing sessions:

Then, with Marshall High School in Illinois, I did a Skype event. This was my first of these; I appeared on a pull-down projector screen and talked with students about mental health, writing, and life. You can kinda see me in this picture, like the Wizard of Oz.

This event was fantastic, really fun and cool, and I thank Katie Dailey for setting it up. Here's a recap.

Then I did an event in Morenci, MI. Morenci is a really special place for me, a small town on the Michigan/Ohio border. It was one of the first places I ever did a speaking event and this was the third event I've done there.

Here's are two recaps. The second is by Sally Kruger, a librarian who has supported me for years, who I can't thank enough!

I drove there, and I'd like to take a break from the self-promo to talk about a wonderful thing I found on my way.

Okay, I love driving long distances. I simply find it liberating and cool. I've driven to Morenci twice before; it's a ten-hour trip. Ohio isn't a problem, New Jersey is a breeze, but Pennsylvania is a crazy state to drive through, a real monster. I know it's nothing like out West, but man: 312 miles, a punishing little journey.

The great thing is that, along the way, they have TA, Trucker America, the restaurants/bodegas/shops that serve as pit-stops for our long-haul friends across the nation.

I love these places. They have crazy stuff at TA: fruit-flavored liquid speed, meals that heat themselves, and chapels. But on this trip, I found the best thing ever:

Graphic Audio

What is graphic audio? It's an entirely new entertainment medium. It's an audiobook with a full cast, original music, and sound effects. The tagline?

A Movie in Your Mind.

I guess it's like a radio play more than anything else, but let me tell you: this stuff is absolutely wonderful and unique. I thought I wanted a CD for the road, but when I saw Graphic Audio, I had to plunk down $20 for a four-CD set of my new favorite hero:

Mark Dalton: Trucker/Detective

(You know how you're supposed to italicize book titles and quote TV shows? I'm not sure how to handle Graphic Audio. I'm gonna make an executive decision and give it the respect that books command.)

Here's the rap on Mark Dalton:

"Mark Dalton is a truck driver and a detective and he takes you on the open road for stories of action and adventure with his sarcastic sense of humor. The scenarios are realistic and Mark Dalton is your average guy just trying to make a living in the midst of it all. Spurned by the discovery of his wife’s infidelities, Mark Dalton hangs up his hat as a Private Detective and heads out on the open road as an Owner/Operator. But his talents for solving crimes come to quick use as he encounters hitchhikers with shady pasts, goods smuggled across the border and a murder at a movie shoot where almost everyone is a suspect."

And here's a clip:

Mark Dalton clip
[wma]

At first, I listened to them with a healthy sense of city irony. But on my way back, I found myself really eager to listen to Mark's adventures. They're pretty funny and smart. I can't recommend this stuff enough. It's not often you find an entirely new medium!

So, what's next for Angstpiration? I'm going to Kennesaw State College, outside Atlanta, to speak as part of the school's annual Conference on YA Literature. This presentation is actually not Angstpiration, but my other topic: COPING IN A CULTURE OF UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS: my journey through depression.

I can't wait. I'll have a recap when it's done.

So, what about that public speaking advice? Before I did my first public speaking event a decade ago, my mom sent me to the American Management Association for a course on public speaking. It was taught by a man with the biggest handlebar moustache I've ever seen.

There were all sorts of people in this class. The one I remember best was a guy who had to do a presentation to his superiors in the sanitation department, who was the most morose and beat-down guy I'd ever encountered, and even he was decent by the end of the course. I learned the basics from AMA that I have applied ever since, and if you ever find yourself having to present to a group of people, this stuff is invaluable. Here goes.

Never start with "I'm going to tell you."
Your inclination when presenting to a group of people is to say "Hi everyone! I'm going to tell you about..."

Bad idea. By that point everyone's already asleep.

Why? Because when you say "I'm going to" you immediately sound like a salesperson. Nobody wants to hear a salesperson. You're immediately making the talk about you instead of about them. That's why EVERY presentation should present the topic as:

"At the end of today's talk, YOU will know how to..." and then you pick a verb.

Good verbs are:
recognize

understand

perform

accomplish

A bad one is "learn." Sometimes you can't avoid it, but no one wants to learn. They associate it with school.

Good things to start your presentation with (before you get to "you will be able to"):
- a story
- a shocking statistic
- a prop

Repetition is good. The general rule?
1. Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em.
2. Tell 'em.
3. Tell 'em what you told 'em.

Cool. Wanna pay me $3000 now?

I learned one other great thing at AMA: how to do a proper executive handshake. But I'm not talking about that, because I'm using in my new book. Which I'm going to have an announcement about soon.

Final thing. You've only got today and tomorrow to contribute, but in conjunction with that handlebar moustache, writer William Bert has been growing his all this month to support the Capitol Letters Writing Center in their Moustache-a-thon 2009. Sponsor him here; I assume in a few days we'll get to see his 'stache.

I meanwhile, have been clean-shaven for the events. Just can't rock the mountain-man look when I'm presenting in high schools and colleges; I look a bit too lazy. So I couldn't participate in this year's New York City Beard and Moustache Championship.

* You've already seen one: the public speaking construct of "by the end of, you will..." More about it as the entry goes on.

Thanks a bunch. Hope to see you at an event soon.

A Small Journey Into The Medication Question

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:50:03 GMT

Last year, in Brooklyn, a 49-year-old woman named Esmin Green died on the floor of the waiting room at Kings County Hospital. She had been lying on the floor for an hour after suffering complications related to blood clots. It was all caught on video and the family sued for $25 million--exactly half of the monkey-face-eating lawsuit.

What many people don't know is that Esmin was in the hospital for involuntary psychiatric treatment--something very close to what I went in for in November 2004. I went in for voluntary reasons; I called up the Suicide Hotline and they told me to go. They admitted me to triage after the normal 3-4 hour waiting period. With the exception that I was voluntary, that I was in a better neighborhood, and that I was white, I was in her position, and I was as shocked and horrified as everyone else as to what happened.

An author named Dr. Peter Breggin wrote a Huffington Post piece responding to the incident, which was brought to my attention by longtime reader Marc Peters. (Here is Marc's new blog.) Breggin's point: because she was a quote-unquote mental patient, Esmin was ignored by staff who would otherwise have attended to her.

What I like and agree with about this argument is that Esmin could have been the victim of nomenclature. I talked about nomenclature in my last post--how important (and different) it is when we say "mental illness," "mental health," "mental condition," "mental disorder," and so forth. (I came down in favor of mental condition.) It is possible, although in my mind unlikely, that a nurse knew that Ms. Green was a "mental patient" and therefore discounted the fact that she was lying on the floor.

Would things have been different if she was considered a "person with a severe mental condition?" Possibly. "Mental patient" does still mean batty, and partially ignorable, and I agree that we should move away from the term.

But Breggin stretches this argument to be a critique of psychoactive drugs in general.

He says that drugs which Ms. Green was on contributed to two forms of indifference that killed her:

The indifference that the hospital staff felt towards her as a "mental patient."

The indifference that she felt herself because she was whacked out on the drugs. ("She was almost certainly being administered antipsychotic or neuroleptic drugs, such as Haldol, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel or Geodon.")

Wow, what an irresponsible argument! There are three fundamentally flawed points here:

"She was almost certainly being administered..." Okay. So Breggin is basing his entire argument on an educated guess. I suppose I'll accept that this is now a thought experiment and move forward...

How does the fact that she was on drugs affect the fact that she was a "mental patient?" If she weren't on drugs, wouldn't the hospital still consider her a mental patient, given that she was involuntarily admitted for a psychiatric condition?

If the drugs made her unable to take care of yourself, aren't we essentially talking about an overdose/adverse reaction to medication here? And doesn't that happen with ALL categories of drugs?

Breggin is an anti-psychoactive drug guy. That's what he does. His latest book is this:

.

I've heard both sides of the medication argument, thought about them long and hard, and come down on the fundamental efficacy of medications. I DON'T think they're the cure-all for everything, but I think that when we write them off, both in the press and personally (in our rooms at night, deciding that we don't need what we've been prescribed), we open ourselves up to great danger.

My (tempered) faith in medicine comes from three sources:

Experiences of Friends
I'm going to speak specifically about an old friend of mine who will remain nameless. He's a great guy; he's the originator of the Chef Salad Story. (I'm also changing the name of the salad to preserve the identity of the salad.) I lived with him for a while in summer 2004, and when I first moved in, I was at one of my lowest points. It was five months before I went into the hospital.

I came home. I didn't want to do anything other than curl up and die, seriously. He was in the kitchen preparing something.

"What are you making, man?"

"Chef salad."

"Oh, cool. What's in it?"

"You don't know what's in a chef salad? Everything! Tomatoes, cheddar cheese, Swiss cheese, turkey, ham, bacon, onions, eggs, olives, and I put blue cheese in."

He finished up his salad and we went to the living room to watch Terminator 3. As it played out, we started talking, and I felt so much better. It was one of those classic I-just-needed-someone-to-talk-to moments. He told me about Le Tigre Feminist Sweepstakes (2001), which he had on vinyl, and which I wish I had now. (I just have one song, "My Art.") At the end of the movie, he had eaten most of an entire massive mixing bowlof chef salad.

The next day, around the same time, I went into the kitchen.

"Hey man, what are you making today?"

"Chef salad."

"Oh."

The dude made chef salad every day for the 3-4 months I lived in with him. He was a madman. The problem was that scraps of bacon, tomatoes, blue cheese, etc. don't smell very good the next day in the garbage. So after a week of chef salad, we had odors and flies that didn't go away until we moved out.

But, that first day, this guy told me that he was on meds like me. Specifically, one of the meds listed by Dr. Breggin above, an anti-psychotic. He told me the simple story: he was totally normal until one day he had a psychotic episode and almost burned his house down. He got put on the medication and that was it; he'd been fine since.

Wow, I thought. Thank God for meds. Because if this guy had died, I don't know what I would have done, without his Terminator 3 companionship and his Le Tigre and his chef salads. He was a real friend when I needed one, and he brought me smiles and laughs, and if he had immolated himself maybe we'd have two dead people on our hands.

Statistics
Unfortunately, assessing the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs has unique pitfalls:
1. Reporting success. This is an obvious one. Unlike a blood thinner or antibiotic, results of psychoactive medications are, by and large, self-reported. And people lie for all sorts of reasons. (Most probably in my mind, they say a drug doesn't work to get into more clinical trials and get more money! [A friend of mine was going to get paid ~$3K for a clinical trial that, in addition, would send him to France.])
2. Lumping the drugs. People in media and academia always want to make grand, sweeping statements, because (once again) that's where the money is. But it's entirely possible that anti-depressants are less effective as a whole than mood stabilizers. You have to analyze things on a per-category basis.
3. The problems that befall ALL analyses of drugs.
  1. Drug companies want the drugs to be successful.
  2. Alternative medicine people--everyone forgets this--want the drugs to fail just as bad.
  3. As with diet plans and places to vacation, people love TRENDS in the pharmaceutical world. A certain drug will be "in" and then "out," sometimes on the basis of some ridiculous anecdote, and don't think that doesn't effect even "balanced" media or scholarly opinion.
But in general, statistics show that anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and mood stabilizers do have real benefits. Anti-depressants are in a down phase right now, but even with a little upside, one has to acknowledge that they're better than nothing--and I believe the tide will turn again. Mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics are better supported by research. [1] [2]

Personal Experience
I went to the hospital after I stopped taking my meds. I felt better, decided they were all I lie and I didn't need them, and then crashed and found myself on the phone with 1800-SUICIDE, simple as that. One of the most common reasons that people go through with it is by doing the exact same thing.

So I don't think that the death of Esmin Green can be stretched into an argument against medications--and it's even a little distasteful, coming from someone who's financially obligated to be against medications. The death of Esmin Green happened because Kings County is terrible, and that's why they're being sued for 25 million dollars.

Bedroom Decoration Fail

Now for a little dumb fun. I found these at Blockbuster at the height of Dark Knight DVD-mania. They are called "character stands;" you them put up for kids' parties, room decorations, and so forth.

Uh, are we sure about this selection?

MOMMY NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! (Thanks to zatzbatz for introducing me to the FAIL blog and the idea of a fail in general.)

Mad Pirates

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:24:54 GMT

Last year, one of my favorite news stories was the Saga of the Somali Pirates.

[ready for Hollywood]
The pirates, as I hope we all know, terrorized (and continue to menace) ships in the Gulf of Aden, where they go out to sea in tugboat "mother ships," deploy speedboats, use rocket launchers and machine guns to subdue crews of large ocean-going vessels, and hold their cargoes for ransom. Among other things, I just realized: there's a real element of surprise in this job. Who knows what the cargo will be today?

But I bring the pirates up to talk about that word: "pirates." Since they take ships, we call these folks pirates. If they took planes, instead, we would have to call them "hijackers."

Now, there's a big difference between "pirates" and "hijackers." When we think of pirates, we think:

When we think hijackers, we think:

This is real genius on the part of the pirates. It allows us to think of them as cute, ironic, throwback heroes. As "hijackers" (or even "terrorists"), we'd have a very different opinion of them.

This is the latest, best example I've seen of the power of naming. (Another? "Operation Iraqi Freedom.") Names frame issues, create assumptions, and shape opinions. Unfortunately, in the world of mental health, we're swamped with names, all of them weird, and nobody can agree on what to use.

"Mental illness" or "mental health?"
I speak at libraries and schools, and when I do, I'm never sure whether to say I'm speaking about "mental illness" or "mental health." Illness, of course, is good because because it gives depression, bipolar, and DiD the same weight as, say, heart disease or diabetes.

But "mental illness" still makes people's faces squiggle a little. It's unpleasant. They would much rather hear "mental health." But then there's that vague, new-agey association: we could be talking about suicide prevention, or we could be talking about Stuart Smalley.

The answer might be to stick with specifics: "let's talk about clinical depression," "let's discuss generalized anxiety disorder." And if you want to cover lots at once: "let's talk about clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, all that good stuff." But I'd love to ask: in your opinion, "mental illness" or "mental health?"

What about being "mentally ill?"
Even if people are comfortable discussing "mental illness," no one wants to say that they're "mentally ill." Still. This might be the last barrier to acceptance, since there's no stigma in saying that you're physically ill.

(Exception: pockets of physical illness still have quite a stigma.)

But if I'm not mentally ill, what am I? Very quickly, the other options (mentally "unsound," mentally "unstable") spiral down into plain old crazy.

Besides, by saying you are mentally anything, you define yourself in terms of your touchy, flighty brain. No one would say "I am cardially ill;" they would say, "I have heart disease." So we look toward using that verb have. But then...

What do I have?
Let's see:
- A mental health "issue?" Too temporary.
- A mental health "disorder?" Sort of strong, sounds a little like Quasimodo. [note: link has sound]
- A mental health "problem?" Strangely enough, this sounds confrontational to me. As in, "I have a mental health problem with YOU."
- A mental health "condition?" Given the options, I think this might be the best. It seems a bit wimpy, wordy, and weird, but then again, when people say "heart condition," that's okay. Once again we are giving a mental issue (disorder/problem/disease/etc. -- sigh) the same weight as a physical one. And "condition" sounds manageable and blameless.
This all reminds me of something an old friend once told me:

"Hey [friend], I have a real problem. I--"

"Ned, you never have problems."

"No? I actually have--"

"Not problems, issues. You never have a problem, you just have an issue. You see the difference?"

What about the word "mad?"
Last year, the New York Times published an article about "Mad Pride". It reported on the phenomenon of people with mental health conditions (I'm testing the term out -- sounds good!) reclaiming the word "mad," the way the LGBT community reclaimed the word "queer."

Boy, it seems like a long-shot to me. The "Mad Pride" movement is largely a UK phenomenon, with a kinda busted website advertising a Valentine's Day event from two weeks ago. A better advertisement for the movement is Bonkersfest --

-- an annual arts festival in London that celebrates "madness, creativity, individuality and eccentricity." (That word eccentricity, too, might have a place in the mental health lexicon.) I think "bonkers" has a better chance than "mad" of being the reclaimed word we're looking for.

Mark Twain said that when you find the right word, it's like lightning, and when you find the wrong word, it's like a lightning bug.

That's exactly it. I don't know when communal lightning will strike and we'll find the right group of words to address the whole process of having days when you wake up shivering with fear and only leave bed because you have to go to the bathroom, or driving off one night to an after-hours poker room and losing $1200, or cutting yourself.

But I do know that specific words are better. And I have one more idea for specifics.

What if instead of saying that you had depression, you said that you had "what Hemingway had?" Maybe you seem a little haughty putting yourself up there with Hemingway, but you can pull it off with the right amount of self-deprecation. Then the person you're talking to goes "depression?" and then you nod and keep on with the conversation.

What if instead of saying that you have bipolar, you say that you have "what Beethoven had?"

Folks with anxiety disorder, you're a little more screwed: lists cover people from Michael Crichton to Isaac Newton, but I wouldn't say that any of them is immediately connected with anxiety in anybody's mind. Who's the most famous, iconic, anxious person ever? Woody Allen? Unfortunately he's a character, although the real Woody has plenty of issues of his own. Any help here?

Schizophrenic people: possibly best to say "what the guy in A Beautiful Mind had." You could say Van Gogh, but there's some debate as to whether he was schizophrenic, bipolar, or absinthe-affected (American Journal of Psychiatry 159:519-526, April 2002).

The upshot:

People with Depression | People with Bipolar | People with Anxiety Disorder | People with Schizophrenia

Final idea? Just say, "I take some medications." You'll be surprised how many people say "me too!" and you can all be bonkers together.

I am speaking at a number of places in the coming days and weeks, some of them schools, some open to the public. Here are some for anyone who's interested in Chicago and NY. Anytime you see "Angstpiration," well, that's my new speaking program which I will talk about more in the future.

Wednesday, 3/4/09 -- Angstpiration Comes to Lake Forest High School, Chicago, IL

1285 North McKinley Road, Lake Forest, Il 60045
I'm very excited to be visiting Lake Forest High School, outside of Chicago, on Wednesday, March 4th. I'll be talking about my books and my life as a writer -- as well as signing.

I'll be presenting in the Raymond Moore Auditorium at 9:45am and conducting breakout sessions with students at 10:45, 11:30, and 12:40.

All students and staff are welcome! Also, the event will be open to the public, but it is first-come, first-serve! At a preview discussion for the event, 45 students showed up, It's Kind of A Funny Story was sold out, etc. etc.

Saturday, 3/7/09 at -- NYTimes Panel at the New York Public Library, NY NY

New York Public Library Children's Center, 475 Fifth Avenue @ 42nd Street, Room 84, New York, NY 10018
I'm honored to be part of The Children's Literary Café panel at the New York Public Library on Saturday, March 7 at 2pm. In conjunction with the New York Times, the panel looks at the following issue:

What makes a book so good that it gets reviewed by The New York Times? How are the reviewers selected? What goes into writing a review for “the old gray lady”? Join Julie Just, the Children’s Books Editor of the New York Times Book Review, and her panel of remarkable reviewers as they discuss with us the state of newspaper reviews, particularly newspaper reviews of children’s literature.

In addition to me, the special panelists will include author and scholar Leonard Marcus (Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature) and former public school teacher Rebecca Zerkin, who is currently experimenting with paper-engineered books (I'll find out more what that means!).

Organizer Elizabeth Bird has more in her blog.

For more info email childrenscenter42@nypl.org or call 212-621-0208.

I talked about it before, but once again...

Sunday, 3/22/09 -- The Biggest Teen Author Book Signing EVER

Books of Wonder, 18 W. 18th st., New York, NY‎
Yes, that's right. David Levithan, YA editor and co-author of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, has invited me to be a part of The Biggest Teen Author Signing Ever on Sunday, 3/22, at Books of Wonder in NYC, at 4pm. (Books of Wonder is a famed children's & YA bookstore.)

From David:

It'll be an extravaganza as 40 authors take over the store, sign books, and converse with fans new and old. An incredible event that is sure to go down in book-signing history. Authors include: Nora Baskin Jessica Blank Judy Blundell Coe Booth Elise Broach Susanne Colasanti Sarah Darer-Littman Matt de la Pena Heather Duffy-Stone Gayle Forman Aimee Friedman Madeleine George Maureen Johnson Kristen Kemp Justine Larbalestier David Levithan E. Lockhart Barry Lyga Carolyn Mackler Sarah MacLean Megan McCafferty Laura McLaughlin Neesha Meminger Billy Merrell Blake Nelson Micol Ostow Matthue Roth Marie Rutkoski Lisa Ann Sandell Courtney Sheinmel Abby Sher Brian Sloan Rachel Vail David Van Etten Ned Vizzini Adrienne Maria Vrettos Cecily von Ziegesar Melissa Walker Robin Wasserman Scott Westerfeld Suzanne Weyn Maryrose Wood Lizabeth Zindel

Hope to see you there! Thanks.

Finally, this is a message for published authors out there -- I think some of you read this! Megan McCafferty, author of the Jessica Darling series of books --

-- recently told me about HiTOPS, an adolescent health clinic and peer-to-peer education center in New Jersey. Check them out:

HiTOPS is having their annual award gala this May, and they are taking donations for their silent auction. I'm signing and sending in a few foreign editions of my books. (BTW, I have more, we'll do giveaways soon).

If you'd like to make a donation (and they're tax-deductible, the whole deal), first check out the programs that HiTOPS does, get a feel, and then, if you like, contact me: I can get a submission form for you.

If you're not an author, maybe you can email one of your favorites and ask them to donate. 100% of the proceeds go to the organization.

And fellow authors, don't front: you've got your own books just lying around your house, don't you?

Everything I've Been Meaning to Post for The Last Year

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:35:42 GMT

[file under miscellaneous]
Here's how my email works: I use Gmail, and I label all the incoming mail. Some of my labels are, for example, "to print", "by end of Feb", and "update mailing list."

But the three big categories are:

"!! CODE RED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"* code orange"

"*code yellow"

I think the codes are self-explanatory. But I'm not great answering my mail; currently, the oldest "!! CODE RED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" email is dated 7/9/08, more than 6 moths ago.

(That old code-red email is a reminder to myself to "put videos on YouTube." I have, since last year, put a lot of old TV interviews, readings, etc. on YouTube. I didn't make a big deal about it because, since each video has about 50-150 views, I hardly even want people seeing them, as that's so embarrassing. When you see a video with 50-150 views on YouTube, you just go, "oh my God, a fool not even worthy of my scorn." But then again, the only way you can break out of the small # of views is to tell more people to see the videos--you see how hard my life is?!)

By the way, the oldest "*code yellow" email is from 9/15/07... 18 months ago.

SO, someday, I am going to get through all these emails, and when I do, I think that it's possible that my head will explode with joy. I'm not kidding. Extruding that kind of responsibility from my life will be simply incredible. In that spirit, today I am going through all of my email labeled "add to blog." This is stuff I've been meaning to post for a while--in some cases a week, in some a year. Enjoy it.

There's something in here for everyone. If you're bored, skip to the next!

I've decided to start something new related to Be More Chill:

Basically, since Be More Chill came out in 2004, we've come a lot closer to having a squip. (Thanks to whoever made the Urban Dictionary definition!)

In addition to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and materials science, people around the world have accepted a creepy sort of familiarity with computers (I'm thinking Google Street, the read-all-your-email US anti-terrorism act, Facebook) that make for a much richer incubation climate for squips.

Ask me? Mark it: by 2020 there will be commercially available implantable/ingestable/wearable computers that give out social advice via little headphones (or neural pathways) directly into your brain.

Here is my evidence so far:
1. "The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least"
  
  Great primer about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, "that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software."
  
  Kurzweil goes by the assumption that human intelligence doubles every year to predict that "by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves."
  
  (I was actually going to say the squip would be here by 2015, but I amended it to 2020 based on Kurzweil, who's really accurate: he said a computer would be a human at chess in 1998; Deep Blue happened in 1997.)
  
  Here is a more detailed article about how Kurzweil is preparing to live forever. And if you dig that, HERE is Aubrey de Grey --
  
  -- officially the coolest-looking scientist since Galileo --
  
  -- who as a biomedical gerontologist has identified seven simple problems that we can fix to make ourselves immortal.
2. "Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment"
  
  This is an interesting piece about a theoretical drug called "Morvigil" that is very squip-like: something that would simply improve you ("reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects"). When a drug like this appears, how will we regulate it? How will we "make things fair" for people who can't afford it? It's a good ethical question.
  
  And the article also features a woman who had a magnet implanted in her finger and can now sense electricity in live phone cords.
3. How are squips going to be powered? Try VIRUS-BASED BATTERIES.
4. Or maybe you'd prefer DNA-BASED COMPUTERS?
In short, we're on our way. Please contact me if you see any evidence of the squip coming!!

farewell_dear posted the following brain maps based on It's Kind of A Funny Story:

Thank you! There are more on my site.

I had a reader point out this CD to me, saying it was a ripoff of It's Kind of A Funny Story:

I have to say, it did come out a year after. It wouldn't be a big thing, except it was an iTunes bestseller in 2007, so maybe I should sue this person. Or would I just be being a dick? I don't know. The Wikipedia for the guy makes me want to sue him, but I know that's just petty and juvenile. I really should have sued for Teen Angst? Naaah... vs. Running with Scissors:

A few people have told me about this movie:

It's a documentary about the student gov't elections process at my old high school. I have to say, the school looks EXACTLY the same, as do the participants -- there is even a part in the trailer where a kid slides down an escalator handrail, as kids used to do when I was there.

They all got diagonal black streaks across their asses.

David Levithan, famed Scholastic editor and author and co-author of Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, has organized the first ever NYC Teen Author Festival the third week of March. I am participating in the largest young-adult reading ever on Sunday, March 22nd; the details for it and other events are below.
- Juvenalia Smackdown Monday, 3/16, 4-6pm, Tompkins Square Park branch of the NYPL, 331 E. 10th Street Join Holly Black, Alaya Johnson, Justine Larbalestier, David Levithan, Diana Peterfruend, Scott Westerfeld as they read some of their (ahem) less accomplished work from their middle school and high school years. Hosted by Libba Bray.
- I Have Seen the Future…and It Sounds Like This Wednesday, 3/18, Mulberry Street Branch of the NYPL Teen authors are notoriously stingy about reading from their works-in-progress. But for Guest of Honor Joe Monti, authors Libba Bray, Rachel Cohn, Eireann Corrigan, Justine Larbalestier, Barry Lyga, and Scott Westerfeld are willing to share a little bit from their future books. Hosted by David Levithan.
- The Five-Borough Read Thursday, 3/19
  BROOKLYN: Central Library, Dweck Center, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn 10-11am Gayle Forman Jenny Han Leslie Margolis Abby Sher Matthue Roth Robin Wasserman
  BRONX: Bronx Library Center, 310 E. Kingsbridge Road, Bronx 4-5pm Coe Booth Madeleine George Paul Griffin Brian Sloan Melissa Walker
  MANHATTAN: Countee Cullen Branch, 104 W 136th St 4-5pm Matt de la Pena Daphne Grab Mary Hogan Bill Konigsburg Barry Lyga Carolyn MacCullough
  MANHATTAN: Jefferson Market Branch, 425 Avenue of the Americas 4-5pm David Levithan Bennett Madison Laura McLaughlin Billy Merrell Marie Rutkoski
  MANHATTAN: Webster Branch, 1465 York Avenue 4-5pm Lisa Ann Sandell Courtney Sheinmel Rachel Vail Cecily Von Ziegesar Martin Wilson
  QUEENS: Far Rockaway Branch, 2002 Cornaga Ave, Queens 4-5pm Tara Altebrando Laura Dower Heather Duffy-Stone Aimee Friedman Eliot Schrefer Siobhan Vivian Rita Williams-Garcia
  STATEN ISLAND: St. George Library Center, 5 Central Avenue 4-5pm Kate Brian Judy Goldschmidt Michael Northrop Micol Ostow Lynn Weingarten
- I Love You, New York: Teen Lit in the City Friday, 3/20, 6pm, NYPL, 42nd Street, Court Room Join authors Coe Booth, Paul Griffin, Maureen Johnson, David Levithan, Cecily von Ziegesar, and Rita Williams-Garcia in a spirited reading and discussion about teen novels set in New York City – from the glamour of the gossip girls to the grit of the Bronx projects, from the everyday battles of the high school halls to the extraordinary events of 9/11.
- Stuff for the Teen Age Ceremony Saturday, 3/21, 1pm, NYPL, 42nd Street, Celeste Bartos Forum This new list only has the best of the best, and includes books, music, movies, and video games. Featuring a keynote by Walter Dean Myers
- Teen Authors Celebrate Teen Readers Sunday, 3/22, NYPL, 42nd Street, Trustees Room, 1pm Over a dozen authors salute teen readers and teen advisory board members from around the city, including Blake Nelson, reading from his upcoming novel Destroy All Cars.
- The Biggest Teen Author Signing EVER Sunday, 3/22, Books of Wonder, 4pm Join over 40 authors for a signing extravaganza as they take over Books of Wonder, sign books, and converse with fans new and old. An incredible event that is sure to go down in book-signing history. Authors include: Nora Baskin Jessica Blank Judy Blundell Coe Booth Elise Broach Susanne Colasanti Sarah Darer-Littman Matt de la Pena Heather Duffy-Stone Gayle Forman Aimee Friedman Madeleine George Maureen Johnson Kristen Kemp Justine Larbalestier David Levithan E. Lockhart Barry Lyga Carolyn Mackler Sarah MacLean Megan McCafferty Laura McLaughlin Neesha Meminger Billy Merrell Blake Nelson Micol Ostow Matthue Roth Marie Rutkoski Lisa Ann Sandell Courtney Sheinmel Abby Sher Brian Sloan Rachel Vail David Van Etten Ned Vizzini Adrienne Maria Vrettos Cecily von Ziegesar Melissa Walker Robin Wasserman Scott Westerfeld Suzanne Weyn Maryrose Wood Lizabeth Zindel<-- this is what I'm doing; Books of Wonder is here

Once Again: The Baby Mop

The Abe Awards
I have been nominated by the Illinois School Library Media Association for the 2009 Abraham Lincoln High School Book Award. Last year Stephanie Meyer won; the year before that Scott Westerfield did. The website is here; the award is voted on by students, so the best thing you can do is send good vibes to IL to help me come away victorious -- unless you're an IL student, in which you can just force me to win. I'll know the results by the end of February! Thanks to Kathleen Shannon.

It's Kind of A Funny Story news -- thank you!
- Here is the latest sales feedback from my publisher:
  "[A]lmost every BORDERS and every B & N regularly carries FUNNY STORY. As of this morning, 723 of the 726 Barnes stores had FUNNY STORY on hand."
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT. If you go into a store and you don't see It's Kind of A Funny Story (or Be More Chill, or Teen Angst), just ask; "all books are in the backlist and sometimes it takes a few days for them to get shelved."

Some of my aunt's art.

I never knew anything about the book Anne of Green Gables except that it existed. There is more to know (re: mental health).

Banned Books Week isn't until next year, but it's always good to learn how to fight censorship.

I might've posted this before, but Mickey Z's book CPR for Dummies is one of the only good books I've read lately.

(Does anyone have any reading suggestions? Seriously.)

Have you heard of a company called Schmap? I am now part of their applet widget iPhone thing because I took their picture of KGB:

I also took the Wikipedia photo for Miles Davis until some other Italian usurped me with this:

I have another piece of German press that someone can translate if they want to practice German:

But probably you don't really want to and couldn't care less so that's cool.

Radio interview from a bit ago: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Another radio interview: this is the one I freaked out about not being able to find, where my answers are dubbed over in German, as if it were an NPR report from a foreign land! I don't know why, but I'm really proud of this. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Be More Chill used for comparison in a small New York Times review:

Yay!

A very dedicated and talented reader made this 3D animated video inspired by the first chapter of Funny Story! Really cool; I never thought there would be these sorts of artistic responses to the book.

That's it! OMG! Incredible! That may be the last link post ever; it just took too long to put together. But I hope you found something interesting.

Next time, back to mental health news and stories.

Bad PLAY-er!

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:51:56 GMT

It's been more than a decade now since I was sucked into to the seductive, sexless world of Magic: The Gathering. And I'd like to posit that there IS no less sexy addiction, which makes it that much worse.

I'm not going to go through the preliminaries here. If you don't know what Magic cards are, then you probably know what Pokemon cards are, and they're like that, but more intelligent. They've been around now for 16 years, and in that time they have intermittently come into my life and destroyed it.

I recently had a relapse. And it got me thinking about my history with it. And I started writing about it, and at first I was very, very sad. Because it's no joke: Magic takes over my life and hurts my friends and family. And at the same time, there's no respect for it; it's not drugs or alcohol; it's not even poker; it's not even potato chips or World of Warcraft. It's the lowest, most insidious addiction of all--the one that makes other people chuckle.

But as I kept writing about it, I found something different. So here goes.

1993
High school was my most long-lived, if least intense, Magic-playing period. I got introduced to the cards at the end of junior high on some kind of field trip to an ice-skating rink. I remember the disorienting smell of the rubber floor indoors and the sweat in my skates and the fried chicken smell from the concession stand and the way my ankles wobbled dangerously back and forth as I walked in my skates.

I sat down next to this kid and he had these colorful cards on a bench, pointing them and turning them at another kid who had his own colorful cards.

I asked what they were doing, because these were two of the people in my school who I felt were about equal to me socially.

"It's Magic cards," one of them said, not looking up.

"How does it work?"

The first card I saw was Savannah Lions. Revised edition:

The kid explained to me that you bought these cards and they had wizards and lizards on them and stuff and then you fought against your opponent with them. And then all the weird wonderful numbers of Magic: you start with 20 life; you use 60-card decks; you draw 7 cards at the beginning; if you want, when you first draw and you see that your cards suck, you can take a "mulligan," putting them back and drawing 7 more (they later changed it to 6) to give yourself a fighting chance against the other guy.

Why 20? Why 60? Why do they say "at your pleasure" when a person sneezes in French and "God bless you" in English? Idioms. Rules. Culture.

I watched these guys play and at one point, someone used this card:

What terror does is instantly kill a creature in the game. When the guy played it, I butted in:

"Wait! How is that allowed?"

"What do you mean?"

"You can't just have one card that just KILLS another creature! That's not fair!"

"They have a card called Wrath of God that kills all the creatures. There's all sorts of cards."

And that was what really got me. On the subway a day later, I started thinking: That guy's wrong. That card is unfair. I bet I could make a whole DECK based around that card that would just kill all the other guy's creatures and win. I guess I need to buy some cards.

1996
Having bought a lot of cards, I found out that I was bad at Magic. Really bad. A "scrub." The game is pretty much math, like poker; indeed, Jon Finkel, a member of the Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame, went on to a career as a professional poker player. (I know one person who does this professionally, and a few who are semi-pro--it's crazy! It's like a very legitimate career now.) And I was good at math, but I just couldn't think on my feet with the cards.

(I don't want to get into the details of it, but for those who know, I kept trying to make Lord of The Pit work for me, not recognizing it for what it was--the card that they printed to make noobs try and build decks around it and fail.)

[a LotP interpretation by ~MARKCW]

There was one guy at my high school who was fearsomely good: Zvi Mowshowitz. He's also in the Magic Hall of Fame. I'd say he's one of the better-known graduates of Stuyvesant HS. Zvi--and what can I say, Zvi, I'm sorry to say this--was a brilliant, roly-poly, slightly pungent guy one year ahead of me.

He had this incredible facial hair that grew in patches, and one of the patches looked like Bolivia.

Once, I went to play Zvi, and instead of playing me with a deck, he just picked up a bunch of cards up off the floor. He beat me with them. Twice.

He went on to win a fair amount of money playing Magic, and he wrote a Magic column for a long time, but I didn't think about him until I got back into the game years later, and then I saw him on Wikipedia.

And I got very wistful. He lost the weight. And somehow, without it, he wasn't Zvi, with the maniacal laugh, and the archipelagoic facial hair, who did tower over high school in a certain special way.

2005
I heard something hilarious once from Gabe, my friend who I played in a band with for years (1999-2002) and who now has a group called Consider the Source that tours nationally. Gabe told me that Mike McCready, the Pearl Jam guitarist, everytime he read an interview with him, said that "this album came out of a really difficult period in my life."

Every time. It was never a not-difficult period in Mike McCready's life.

So I'm loath to say that winter 2005 was a really difficult period in my life. But it really was.

It was brick-cold, like it is now, and I was fresh out of the psych hospital. A succession of crises of confidence landed me at a computer job at a huge corporate entity in Long Island.

I'm not going to say the name of this corporate entity, but it is known, Long Island-wide, as the place that you work at for a maximum of six months because it will break you mentally. It jellifies you. I have a lot of stories about this place, and I'll tell them when I tell them--the best ones are about my co-worker, Yakov--but I do remember the day that we got free pizza. It wasn't announced. It just sort of went around the office: free pizza! Free pizza!

And I found myself in line getting free pizza, being so excited about the pepperoni, and I realized that my life had sunk to the point where I was now the sort of person who could get excited by free pizza at work.

Two of the saving graces of the place were two friends that I met there. One I've lost track of, although I feel like if I called him, he'd answer. The other one texts me and supports me and deserves all the best in life. And these guys played Magic.

We played just as Ravnica came out in a Chinese restaurant by work. (We broke out! We weren't pizza drones.)

Ravnica is considered by many to be the best draft set in Magic. (I'm not going to go into what that means.) I think it's the best set ever. It was fun and priceless and shining to get to play Magic with these guys in the middle of the day; as I walked to work from the dark gray parking lot over the white snow into the building whose color I can't even remember, at least I had that to look forward to. That, and these:

They were free.

Now, I was going to make this entry about addiction in general. I was going to talk about theories and mental health practices and new research and why the hell it is that I could get addicted to card game and not to alcohol, when I've been exposed to both.

But thinking about what I just wrote (damn, I'm writing about my writing; this is what John Strausbaugh told me never to do; he called it "writing about the pencil"), I'm going to let it stand. Because going through those memories, shit, yeah, Magic took a lot of time and money and made me dumb in a lot of people's eyes and I hated myself for playing it, but I also remember:

That freaking kid at Neutral Ground who would look over your shoulder and go "bad play-er, "bad PLAY-er" if he thought you messed up.

The "crap box" that I would bring to school when I sold Magic cards, full of all the crap cards that nobody wanted, and how people would smile when they got to pick some randomly after they bought a card from me.

The essay I wrote about Magic in New York Press, tacked up to the wall in Neutral ground.

The worn-in potato-chip smell of that place.

The Russian kid--I think his name was Anton--but not that Anton, other Anton--oh, it's not important anyway--who was just always smiling and willing to play with me and fun and cool and our decks always challenged each other well and while we sat on the floor on the sixth floor of Stuyvesant High School the sun rayed through the window behind him and hit me on the cheek and I had to turn my head.

--Ned

Mental Health & Dogs

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:27:00 GMT

I have never been a dog person or a cat person. The reasoning is simple:

Dogs

You must debase yourself by curbing them.

Cats

One room in your house always smells.

My father always ascribed to these views, especially the first, and I never had a dog as a child. As soon as all the children were gone from the house, however, he changed his tune. My parents did the classic thing and bought a dog immediately. One dog became two, and now they love the dogs with incredible fervor.

So, in part because of her love of dogs and part because of her concern for me, my mother recently sent me an email about a new study that shows that dogs are more effective than Prozac. This struck me for a few reasons:

They're more effective than Prozac? The article didn't mention Lexapro, Effexor, etc. Makes me wonder if the makers of those drugs lobbied not to be studied vs. dogs.

The study explained that "[Having a dog] actually works better than having a loved one next to you.” Whoa.

The professor who published the study is also the author of a book, How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog-Human Communication.

Now, I know I'm not supposed to be cynical about these things. But I think people go a little nuts about dogs and how they're a cure-all for every physical and psychological trauma that humans face. I think it's actually a little harmful to promulgate the idea that if you get a dog, all of your mental health issues will be solved. There are a lot of people out there who aren't capable of handling a dog and it's probably going to be worse for them and the dog if they get one.

I have a friend who has a dog. I asked him once if he likes it. He told me:

"Honestly, it's kind of a pain. You should only get one if you really want to deal with it all the time."

Now, he clearly loves this dog. He nuzzles it and plays with it and etc., etc. But the answer blew me away.

"You're the only person I've ever heard who hasn't said, 'Dogs are amazing. I love them so much. They're the best thing you can bring into your lives."

"I'm just being honest."

I tried to look up the study by Dr. Stanley Coren (University of British Columbia) about the dog/Prozac war. It was purportedly published in Pyschosomatic Medicine in December. I can't find it anywhere on the journal's website, however.If anyone can find it, please tell me. (I would also like to know what language uses the .dtl file name suffix. The site is http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/search.dtl.)

So I'm suspicious of this entire study and this entire line of thought. I'll get a dog eventually, but for me it'll be an alarm clock, because I have a tendency to wake up and lie in bed paralyzed when I get depressed. You can't do that with a dog or a child. I suppose that makes them a good mental-health aid right there. But in the meantime...

While I was searching for the dog study on Psychosomatic Medicine...

I found the following studies about dogs:

Conditioning Neuroses in Dog and Cat

Effect of Chronic Fear on the Gastric Secretion of HCl in Dogs (this must really suck for the dog)

Studies with Experimental Neurosis and Drug-Induced Ulceration of the Colon in Dogs (ditto)

Effect of Alcohol on the Sexual Reflexes of Normal and Neurotic Male Dogs (!!!)

and

10 Most Bizarre Scientific Papers

Two Little Tidbits of Manliness

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:05:38 GMT

For your (holiday) enjoyment:

I was recently at an independent press website, buying a book, when I came across a banner ad for a self-publishing company. "Want to publish your book?" it asked. And they had to show a hip young writer-type, so here he is!!

wait for it...

Waaaaaaaa! I just thought that was hilarious. Who does he look like? Trent Reznor?

?

It has recently come to my attention that the professional pick-up artist community uses a LOT of the squip's lines from Be More Chill. (Notably "target [female].") I frankly feel like suing these bastards. But the pick-up artist community is giving back, with delights like this one:

Audio Affirmations: Intensive Listening, Track 3

I dare you not to laugh when it starts telling you about "aeons of evolution."

On a final note, a lot of people responded very kindly to my post about regrets and how I have so many. Thank you. When I made that post, I put a warning on the top that it was whiny and I wrote that I would have a "real" post in the next few days. Then, two or three days later, I changed that "next few days" to "soon." I should know to NEVER EVER EVER post anything on a blog indicating that you will write anything again "soon" because you have no effing idea when you'll get the chance to write again and meanwhile every day you look DUMBER AND DUMBER AND DUMBER.

Dumber than this man, even? Oooooooo.

Anyway, now that I've posted two weeks later, I have something new to regret, and therefore by my policy of not being able to remember more than one regret at once, I'm now more regretful about being late writing this than I am about that other thing, whatever it was!

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!

Oh well

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:44:35 GMT

First of all, this is a whiny, self-involved post. I'll have a more palatable one soon. If you can handle whiny, keep reading; if not, abandon hope all ye who continue! You might want to go back to another entry.

Now, I don't know if I've posted about regret here before, or my system with it. It's possible that I will regret double-posting about regret. But at that risk, I have to get it off my chest.

I don't understand people who say they have no regrets.

(a skater shirt company called "No Regrets"; I regret that this was the best picture I could come up with)

"I've got no regrets, man." Really? None? Doesn't that make you like Jesus?

If you have no regrets, that means you've never done anything wrong with your life. You've never failed at anything; you've never had to reconsider a decision; you've never hurt someone you wish you hadn't hurt. You've never missed an opportunity; you've never been late; you've never said anything wrong at a party. You've never missed a question on a test.

I'm trying to think of people who might never have had regrets. The first that comes to mind is Hitler. As the embodiment of ultimate evil, Hitler wouldn't regret any of the atrocities he committed. But he certainly had to regret some military decisions.

Other end of the spectrum. Mother Theresa. This one's a little tougher. But I find it hard to believe that, at some point, Mother Theresa didn't regret the life she chose just a little bit. She saw a man she was attracted to; that's the easiest example. There's no way Mother Theresa didn't see someone she thought was cute in her 87 years and question her choices.

Now, Jesus. I said he didn't have any regrets before, but I had to rethink that. The whole point of Jesus is that he came to Earth as a real person, with the problems of a real person. So he had to have some regrets. First thing that comes to mind is that he was tempted by Satan in the desert for 40 days, but ultimately chose to continue on his path to crucifixion. Now, in order to be tempted, you have to want something, and if you fail to get it, some part of you has to regret not being able to get it. Some part of Jesus had to regret getting killed.

This is starting to feel like an Aristotelian logic puzzle.

Can animals feel regret? This one I'm not sure about. If a predator fails at the hunt, don't know if it regrets it so much as feels hungrier and tries again. If a mountain goat fails at a mating contest, I'm not sure it regrets the failure so much as takes its place in the pecking order and shuts up.

I don't think plants have regrets.

Maybe regret is a luxury afforded the higher animals, who have time to think about failure before they have to try again.

But in any case, I have about ten million regrets. One of them is that that statement won't make a lot of people feel good. I don't need my mom thinking that I regret anything about her, or my fiancee, or my friends. But they don't have to worry. My regrets are very self-centered. I regret that they're so self-centered!

The good thing is that I have a system with them.

Last week, I was out. I've tried to go out lately, to bars. It hasn't worked. I don't really have time. But I've tried, to make myself normal. The first time I went out I had a good time. The last time was pretty terrible. There was someone there I knew, and I didn't want to talk to them. I liked this person; I just was too ashamed to talk to them because my book hasn't been delivered yet.

So I escaped from the bar.

That was stupid. That was rude. What if he saw me?! That was a regret. But then another regret pushed it out.

This is the wonder of my system.

I have too many things going on, too many things to worry about. So I can only keep track of one regret at once. When another one comes along, it pushes the first one out. My old regrets, thank God, will never get picked up again. They're dessicated and lost to history.

Except for the Super Regrets.

There are five or six of these. They are special regrets that tower over all the others. Every so often something happens that is so bad that it gets promoted to Super-Regret status and then I have to think about it for the rest of my life, every day or every other day.

The regret that pushed out the not-talking-to-the-person regret was a Super Regret.

Here goes: a few weeks ago, I got a letter from a TV station in England. They wanted to use me, among many other authors of YA novels in Brooklyn, as part of a segment for a show about books and education that airs on SKY TV. The email came in to my speaking agency and was forwarded to me. I got confused. I thought the folks at the speaking agency were handling it. I didn't realize, of course, that it's not their job to handle media requests; it's their job to give me the opportunity to speak in high schools and colleges. So I sat on the email.

After some radio silence from the TV folks, I emailed them last week. It turned out that they were filming December 3rd, 4th, and 5th--just soon enough for me to miss them completely.

This show is the real deal. It's called "Reading Aloud" and it's hosted by UK Children's Laureate Michael Rosen.

You know how people say, "it's tough to express how I feel?". It's not. Stupid, ridiculous, failed, deserving, irresponsible, unprofessional, and most of all, validated in the way people view me.

I talked to one person who told me, "Everything happens for a reason." I appreciate it. But I can't find a silver lining in this one. Only a regret that's gone Super. Wait... there is one thing. I know there are plenty of people out there who are invested in my failure. For you folks, last week was a good week. I'll keep having regrets for you, don't worry, to keep you positive.

Oh, A Whole Huge Slew of Things

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:59:21 GMT

how to pronounce my name

Through the Wardrobe, the collection I contributed to about Narnia--

--now has accompanying lesson plans from Teen Libris/Smart Pop for teachers. If you're a teacher, please use this one, I swear the class will not be bad! And if you're a student, please force your teachers to teach my materials at all times.

My actor friend in Hollywood Wayne Robbins--

--is producing a movie about the death penalty called “The Death of Reasonable Doubt.” He's looking for two types of help from people (like me) who think the death penalty is a bad idea. (Personally, it's a logical question: just by having the death penalty, due to human error, you guarantee that, at some person, an innocent person will be killed by the state, and I just can't support that ever happening.)

Here is what would help Wayne:
1. PLEASE BECOME A FAN ON THE FACEBOOK PAGE:
  
  http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Reasonable-Doubt/37476376190
  
  There, you can watch a 1 minute teaser trailer by the director (Terry Benedict who directed award winning “The Conscientious Objector”) and read letters of support from The Pope, Former FBI Director William Sessions, Presidential Candidate Bob Barr and many more...
2. DONATE $5. It would also mean a lot to Wayne also if you would ON THE FACEBOOK SITE, PLEASE DONATE $5 VIA PAYPAL AS A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION THROUGH THE SHAE FOUNDATION (www.shaefoundation.org).

An old acquaintance of mine, Fran Carpentier at Parade--

--has an excellent blog about diabetes. Diabetes, Day-by-Day is like The Trouble With Spikol, the mental health blog, with similar personal stories and great writing. Sample:

I devoted the whole of Saturday morning and afternoon to busy beaver activities (in a word, errands), which in turn sabotaged Sunday, because I never fully recovered from the Extreme Low I suffered right in the middle of the bath-and-body aisle in my favorite discount store. The kindly manager came to my aid with one of those metal folding chairs, which he set up next to the loofah sponges, and there I sat in a mental daze and a visionary haze for about 15 minutes—feeling quite the fool—while the cashier fed me a roll of Lifesavers.

What I hated most about the whole humiliating episode is that I always counsel other diabetics on how to prevent lows, but when it comes to fending for myself, I get so caught up in the mundane demands of daily living that I forget to take precaution with extra food whenever I'm going to be more physically active than usual. (My epitaph? Done In By Mundane Demands. I can see it.)

Joe at book of joe continues to chronicle strange things that he thinks are related to Be More Chill

Chill Stick

(By the way, book of joe really is worth visiting.)

absolutely terrifying art made of meat (courtesy the wonderful fiancee)

I have FINALLY added all my German press to my press for It's Kind of A Funny Story. The book has been doing very well in Germany. (It has been doing well in lots of places; more on that in a later entry but basically all I can say is THANK YOU.) As I uploaded the German press pieces, I found that they had the best titles ever.

In fact, I sequenced these titles into an EP, loosely based around Beck's Sea Change.

I remember when I first looked at Sea Change at my friend's house. For those who don't know, Sea Change is Beck's sad album because he broke up with his girlfriend before making it.

The album made me laugh out loud.

It wasn't the art or the vacant-model face that Beck is so good at, it was the track list!

"Guess I'm Doing Fine", "Lonesome Tears", "Lost Cause", "End of the Day", "It's All in Your Mind", "Round the Bend", "Already Dead"?!

Ha! It's like a maudlin CONTEST! I couldn't believe there could ever be a more depressing track list for a record. It was like a joke.

But here comes the compilation EP of German press for It's Kind of A Funny Story:
1. Bulletin Jugend & Literatur - "All the Normal Madness"
2. Süddeutsche Zeitung - "The price of Success"
3. Hamburger Abendblatt - "Failure as an Opportunity"
4. Bücher Magazin - "(not only) for the Wacky"
5. literaturkritik.de - "In the prison of thought carousels"
"In the prison of thought carousels!!!"

Jesus, it's brilliant. Who can play A, G, and C chords? And I want someone whose voice always cracks when they sing, no matter how easy the line is.

(If you can read German and would like to confirm these things, all the links are here. And if you would like to start a musical project, please respond and we'll see what develops with this EP. Thank you.)

Fantasy

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:41:05 GMT

When football comes up, besides the Giants, I root for the Indianapolis Colts. In 2005 Tony Dungy, the Colts' coach, was trying to bring his team through the playoffs when his 18-year-old son committed suicide. I think about it every time I watch football. Your kid commits suicide and next Sunday you're back on the field? It takes a resiliency I can't imagine.

For better or for worse, racist or not, when I read about Abraham Biggs' death on the internet--

--I connected it with Tony Dungy and his son, James, just because they're both African-American. But it brought me back to a topic that I'd read about before: depression in the black community, which often goes unreported and is highly stigmatized. I found a report on NPR with some very interesting points, like the fact that among blacks, depressives often avoid the stigma by coming forward with physical symptoms--headaches, stomach aches.

(Also, in poor black communities, there's often no health care, no chance for treatment. And one of the most moving things I read in The Noonday Demon is the chapter on the poor and mentally ill. We still think of depression as a luxurious, rich-person's disease. And there are studies that show that it's higher in affluent adolescents than middle-class ones. But depressed people in poverty are another case all together. The "Poverty" chapter in Noonday Demon has unbelievable descriptions of lives constructed of sex abuse, mutilation, institutionalization, disability, death, and wreckage.)

So this is what Abraham Biggs brought to my mind. But he made the cover of the papers because he did it on his webcam.

It's not like the first time it happened. In Britain, in March 2007, a 42-year-old named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself while Internet users watched. [Update: A man in Argentina just shot himself on live TV.] Biggs hit the front pages because he was a teenager, and because the people who watched him were teenagers (although it seems hard to assert that, and I don't see proof of it in any of the news pieces). The media will NEVER tire of reporting on the despicable behavior of teenagers.

These teenagers called him a "faggot" an urged him on, etc. etc. Some of them might end up liable. But the thing is, Abraham Biggs wouldn't have a problem with any of this. Because there's no way he didn't WANT to be on the cover of those newspapers.

See, among many other things, suicide is a selfish act. It's a lot more selfish than murder. People murder people all the time on behalf of other people. But people kill themselves for themselves. There are two great, selfish lures of suicide--

peace

fame

--and they run opposite one another in real life. (Being famous is never peaceful; just ask Tupac or Vince Neil.) Suicide seems like a great strategy to get both at once.

So, when the press writes about Abraham Biggs, over and over again we hear about "the way teenagers chronicle every facet of their lives on sites like Facebook and MySpace" (Miami News). We hear about "an extreme example of young people's willingness, even desire, to share intimate details about themselves with strangers online" (LA Times).

But the truth is, the desire for fame related to suicide has been around since Achilles.

That's why I don't think we should call them "suicidal thoughts." Or even "suicidal ideation," like the doctors do. I think we should call them "suicidal fantasies."

So, should we be surprised this happened? For people who have suicidal fantasies, the internet is the most tempting, instant medium of all time. There will probably be copycats. What can we do?

We can focus on that first part. The part about him not getting the help he needed, maybe, in part, because he was black. And then we should ask what kind of support his college offered him. And then whether the people around him knew how to help.

Focus on the prevention, as opposed to the tawdry aftermath. The aftermath's old news.

The Genius Thing

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:51:47 GMT

Two days after David Foster Wallace killed himself, my friend went to Barnes and Noble to buy Infinite Jest.

They were sold out.

A week later, David Foster Wallace's "last days" were profiled in Rolling Stone under the rock n' roll title "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace".

Also that week, Jonah Lehrer quoted one of his essays at length.

Today, I saw a fresh copy of Infinite Jest at my other friend's house. (I call this the post-suicide edition, with the blue.)

Now, I've had David Foster Wallace's commencement speech forwarded to me. (I thought it started out well.)

Suicide remains a great career move.

(RIP)

A friend of mine--Nick--told me that you can't ever kill yourself. Because you need to be famous to kill yourself, and you'll never be famous enough.

But I think the word that goes with suicide more than famous is genius.

Professor Nash from A Beautiful Mind, ~~who killed himself~~ [turned out I completely made that up; thanks people for catching it], who was schizophrenic, wasn't famous (had to wait for the movie for that) but was told that he was a genius.

This is why it's very, very scary to be called a genius.

The last person who called me a genius got a lot of money out of me.

It softens you up but it tenses you up at the same time.

Are there any HAPPY geniuses?

Scientific evidence points to "no." Studio 360 on NPR gave a GREAT summary of recent research in 2006:

Biology of Creativity: Method In The Madness

My only problem with the segment is that it came off as a little too pro-suicide, for my tastes. In the first part, Dr. Barry Panter tells the story of Edvard Munch, who went into therapy after painting "The Scream," cleaned up his act (he was formerly an alcoholic who shot people), and lost his creativity completely. "His creativity was goooone," the professor intones, without a thought as to how Munch might have been a lot happier after that therapy.

(One great thing about the NPR report is it talks about the Kurt Cobain Daniel Johnston T-shirt:

.)

Now, The Noonday Demon, which I'm almost done with--

--gives a history of depression in which five different periods are discussed:

Ancient Greece
Remarkably similar to today; depression was considered a physical disease that could be cured or ameliorated through medical and talking remedies.

Medieval Times
The church held that depression was a sin, or possession by the devil. There is some evidence that, in the 7 Deadly Sins, what we call "sloth" was really thought upon as "depression."

The Renaissance
This is the David Foster Wallace period. Depression was heavily linked to artistic genius. Many upper-class writers and artists faked depression to get credibility.

The Victorian Era / Industrial Revolution
Depression was thought of as an uncurable biological disease that required confinement to an asylum.

Now
Very similar to the Greeks.

So, in a few hundred years, we might feel differently. Or we might have the brain mapped to such a degree that people will be choosing depression genes for their children to make them artists.

But there is something you can do right now to keep these artists who enrich our lives around (and happy). Don't call them geniuses.

Michael Crichton, 1942 - 2008

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:15:21 GMT

Before we get any further, note that a new Crichton book is scheduled for release May 4, 2009.

I heard about Michael Crichton's death on the radio, and that seemed appropriate. With all of the other writers who died recently--Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer--I got text messages from my friends, half-sad but in no small part excited that they had gotten the news first. (With one guy, David Foster Wallace, I tried to text message MY friend about it, but of course he had heard long before and I was very embarrassed.)

With Crichton, no intermediaries were needed. I heard it over the airwaves as soon as it hit the wire. Just the way his words got to me when I was a kid.

"Crichton... long battle with cancer..." I heard. It made me sit up at my computer, and it made me give a little sigh--a very specific sigh that said the following:

(open breath) There's a person who I hadn't thought about for a while, who I always thought I'd hear from again (close breath)

It should have its own name, this sigh. It's very different from a sigh of regret or fatigue or frustration. (Gosh, now that I start thinking about all of them, sighs are their own language; we have as many different ways to sigh as we have to speak.) I guess you could call it a wistful sigh, but that's actually mawkish and terrible.

No, the BEST way to describe the sigh would be to bring up the last time I heard it, in August 1995.

My Dad called me up from work.

"Ned, I'd just like for you to confirm something for me."

"Okay."

"Can you confirm for me that Jerry Garcia has died?"

"Sure."

I opened it up on my computer, in the AOL browser, and sure enough.

"Yeah," I told Dad.

"Oh," Dad said, and then he made the sigh. "Oh, that's too bad."

Now, I'm not going to argue that Michael Crichton be put in the death roster above. He doesn't need me to argue for him. For as long as people consume entertainment--not just read books, consume entertainment--it will be possible to find, access, and enjoy things created by Michael Crichton. Going through his Wikipedia, it's pretty ridiculous to see what the guy was responsible for:

Jurassic Park et. al

E.R. -- he wrote the first three episodes and didn't have to bother writing any more

a coffee-table book about his close friend Jasper Johns

one of the world's first "get-to-know-your-PC" books

the example programs in BASICA that accompanied this book

the world's first movie to use CGI

a Zork-style video game that sold 100,000 copies in 1984

Twister

having a dinosaur named after him

He didn't quite turn everything to gold--he formed a computer gaming company that bombed in 2000. But he never stopped reaching for new things--including wives, of which he had five.

And he could write! What else can you say about Michael Crichton? He could write like a bastard! He was one of the first people--him and George Orwell--who made me realize that if you did it the right way, if you put the words down in simple blocks that people could understand but with little bits of humor and turns of phrase where the words flipped or split, and then you paced it with dialogue and description, but also made cool stuff happen, and then put ONE BIG THING at the end of each scene, even if it was just a telling statement...

Well, shit, then it got like Legos. That's what he made it look like for me. A sentence gets put into a paragraph gets put into a chapter that's three pages long. Then a SMASH cut to another character in another setting. Then--BAM. Someone's dead. (You never knew who was going to die in Michael Crichton book. There was always the possibility that, having delivered a fascinating piece of scientific knowledge, the character could now die.) Then--HA--another orderly plan of man has been set awry!

I loved it. I dug it every time. And while I know that all of Crichton's novels are, essentially, Frankenstein, they're all also better than Frankenstein--better written, more fun to read, more interesting. There's no question in my mind that he's the 20th century's answer to HG Wells and that we'll be getting a new Jurassic Park every twenty years.

Now--about the global warming thing.

It's unfortunate that, post-2003, Crichton had to play Jesus for the professional global-warming advocate class. He was a good writer with better things to do than take up the (perfectly defensible) position that perhaps we shouldn't be making trillion-dollar global policy decisions based on computer models that have proven their inefficacy time and time again. You can't do long-range weather forecasting on a computer. That's why you can only get a few weeks ahead on weather.com.

Aw, God, I know this gets bad, I know I'm being an idiot, but seriously, if the weather.com people could tell you the temperature for next June, they would, because it would be very profitable, right? But they can't. The little note at the end of State of Fear suggests, simply, that any scientific study or piece of news brought forth to a reader that is based on computer modeling needs to be labeled "based on computer modeling." I agree with that.

I remember reading as a kid very clearly that global warming was going to heat us all and kill us by 2000, CERTAINLY by 2005. Does anyone else remember that? I was completely scared and convinced it was true, so I made sure I turned out all the lights when I left the room. Since then, the hottest summer I have seen was the summer of 1988, and I still turn out all the lights when I leave the room, to save money. I don't worry at all about global warming, because I know that long before we destroy our planet by consuming fossil fuels, we will make them much too expensive to consume at all.

Anyway. I will love all the classic stuff--Sphere, Congo, Airframe--until the day I die. I'll love the other stuff too, but maybe nothing better than Chip Kidd's simple, stark, mysterious Jurassic Park cover. I have a 3rd edition hardcover (I want a first):

I'd love to pick out a phrase in there, something like "vast and cool and unsympathetic" (the way that HG Wells describes the aliens' attitudes towards man in War of the Worlds, page one). But with Crichton's books, a single phrase is like the whole book. You start anywhere and the sentence you're reading isn't special, but suddenly you're at the end of the book and your lower half is numb. He numbed me a lot, Crichton did.

I wish he'd had the chance to write about more personal issues. I feel like if he'd dug into the whole four-divorce thing (last alimony: $40M), he'd have found some good material. But as is? Add it all up?

He did a pretty good job.

The New York Times appreciation is here, but the Guardian has the absolutely spot-on tribute essay.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:48:07 GMT

Vote!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:49:50 GMT

Reasons to vote:

the people who sit behind desks and sign you in when you vote are some of the scariest, most interesting people you will ever see in your life

assuming that you're pretty young, if you DON'T vote, you will prove people right AGAIN that the youth vote is a big lie and young people are too busy getting stoned to vote

you get to learn all of these strange names and parties on the ballot that you never heard of when you vote

you will find out the answer to the critical question: will Barack Obama be listed as Barack Hussein Obama?

you can pretend the vote machine is like an old arcade game

you'll feel like you're in the shower, but with no water

you can scratch yourself

you can walk through your old elementary school and see if it looks smaller

guys--you'll qualify for the attention of girls who wear the shirt:

girls--you'll get to meet guys who fulfill the requirements of this shirt

you can cancel out your mom's vote just to mess with her

you can masturbate on the machine--NO! DO NOT MASTURBATE ON THE MACHINE!

you can leave all self-satisfied

when you sign in at the voting center, you can look at the sheet and spy on what parties people belong to

you can watch the live vote counts on CNN and be like, "Yeah, that's me, what"

you're good for the next two years

after you can get a sandwich

when you leave, there will be exit pollers there, and they will make you feel SPECIAL

you'll help us get one step closer to not needing stupid ads to tell people to vote

you can leave the voting booth and go "Yesssssssssss!" and people will look at you all funny

unlimited nose-picking

participate in democracy

This entry is part of Chasing Ray's Blog the Vote project.

Eh... Mental Health Parity Ended Up as Pork

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:29:42 GMT

I haven't gotten political on this blog before, but crazy times cause for crazy measures. As Noah Cicero says:

to all the writers out there that read this blog

this is a paradigm shift

a great historical epoch is occuring

write about this in detail, what is happening to you, what is happening to those around you

I agree.

So, the government bailout bill passed two weeks ago, and I still can't believe it. A $700 giveaway to people who screwed up. It's not hard to find an analogy here. Here goes.

You screw up. You borrow a billion dollars from your friend in the Mafia. You lose ALL of the money gambling--like the stupid gambling in 21 (which I saw on a plane, and which I hate to say, is a lot better than it deserves to be). You lose it because you start gambling but don't want to stop and keep saying, "I'll stop in five minutes... I know I can get a little more money."

But no: you lose ALL the money.

The Mafia guy comes at you with a GUN. He's going to SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD FOR LOSING HIS MONEY. He wants it BACK.

Then the government gives you the entire billion dollars to pay him.

Why? Because the government has calculated that you're so important, if the Mafia guy shoots you, the world will end.

Okay, so replace the hundred billion dollars with seven hundred billion dollars, and make yourself an investment bank or insurance company.

That's what happened.

As if people in giant investment banks didn't get enough perks.

I can't BELIEVE this got passed. It's disgusting. And it's even more disgusting how it happened. The House of Representatives tried to pass it--everyone expected they would bend right over and pass it, because Bush wanted it, Nancy Pelosi wanted it, Obama wanted it, McCain wanted it, but the American people spoke.

People called up their freaking House representatives in such huge numbers that the vote was shot down. EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED. I was ecstatic. I realized that democracy worked. Let's see:

the Democrats didn't want the bill to pass because it bailed out greedy CEOs

the Republicans didn't want the bill to pass because they thought it was a socialist power grab

When the Republicans and Democrats don't want something passed, usually it doesn't get passed. Left and Right together are quite powerful. (Look at Mussolini + Stalin.)

But see, there were some OTHER people on Capitol Hill. (I feel like I'll be telling this to my grandchildren.) There were:

The President

The Senate

The Federal Reserve

The Lobbyists

And they wanted this bill passed. Why?

The Senators wanted it passed because it gave them power and they weren't accountable to the people who didn't want the bill. That's because they have six-year terms and only a third of them are up for re-election this year. So only a third of the Senators had to worry getting voted out of office by passing the bill.

The lobbyists saw an incredible opportunity. If this bill ABSOLUTELY NEEDED TO BE PASSED, then they could make sure it was loaded up with other special little bills to give tax breaks to the companies that paid them (toy companies, oil companies, fish companies, freaking box companies).

The Federal Reserve wanted it passed because they loan money to banks, and damn, if they control all the banks, that rocks for them.

Bush wanted it passed because... Seriously, I have no idea. I don't know what Bush's agenda REALLY is. Maybe he's an reptilian humanoid like David Icke says.

So these people got together and decided that they needed to get this bill passed no matter what. How? Well, the lobbyists could make sure that all their nifty little bills--they're called "earmarks" or "pork"--would be attached to the big bill. Then they could tell the House reps, "Hey, look at this great little package we got in for you. THIS is going to make your constituents happy. You'll get re-elected if you vote for THIS for sure! All the people who want tax breaks will get them!"

And this is the Spider-Man part. With great power comes great responsibility.

The House could have stood up and said, "No. With our power, we will do the right thing and make sure the government doesn't bail out the kids who owe all the money to the mob. We'll make sure that they face the consequences of their actions like everybody else. We won't pay them seven hundred billion dollars."

But no. They did it. They wussed out and passed it.

And those special bills attached to it that got it through--they were ridiculous. Porky pork.

This isn't the first time this has happened, of course. And every time it happens, the media picks out a particular piece of pork that is so ludicrous that it infuriates everyone. In this case, it was:

a $6 million tax break for makers of children's wooden arrows

The last time there was a great pork example like this, it was the 2006 "Bridge To Nowhere," a $398 million bridge to an island occupied by 50 people in Alaska (which Palin was involved with). That's quite a bit worse than the bridge to my high school, which cost $10 and which my father always said was financed by the mob.

Some other tax breaks in the bill go to rum producers in the Caribbean ($192M) and auto-racing track developers ($128M).

But what's saddest is that in all this pork, the Mental Health Parity Bill got passed. The Mental Health Parity Bill, which advocates, congressmen, and people with mental illnesses, like me, have tried to get passed for 12 years, got shoved in with a bunch of pork and given to the American people as an afterthought.

Not that it's a bad bill. Here's how it works:

when someone is diagnosed with a mental illness, the company providing health care for them has to pay the doctor the same same amount of money as they would for someone with a physical illness (this is called a co-payment)

likewise, when someone is diagnosed with a mental illness, they pay the doctor the same amount of money for care as someone with a physical illness would (this is called a deductible)

the amount of money that companies providing health care will pay to the insurance companies to provide this new range of coverage goes up about .2% (this is called a premium [this is nice; I need to know these terms anyway])

you DON'T get coverage for EVERY type of mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (the "Bible" of mental disorders), because companies don't think some of them are legit (jet lag as a mental illness, etc.); you get coverage for the disease only if your managed care company (a middleman) deems that it's serious enough (I wonder if they'd treat Cotard's syndrome?)

it all gets phased in by 2010

Via some complex legislation that I'm not going to go into, the Bailout Bill actually IS the Mental Health Parity Bill, with the bailout tacked on, but only as a technicality. (The machinations are described here. Scroll down.)

That means that, for many people, the mental healthy parity is now officially pork, and it's some of the most expensive "pork" in one of the worst bills ever. Conservative outlets like HumanEvents.com and the NYPost lump it right in with the $6 million for wooden arrows.

Isn't that sad?

By lumping mental health parity in with the bailout bill, we trivialized it. Mental health parity could and should have been passed on its own. The fact that it wasn't shows that true mental health parity is a long way away. As of right now, the disease I take mood stabilizers for is an afterthought shoved through congress to help put in place a bill I think will go down in history as one of the worst ever.

A Pyrrhic victory.

Interview with Alison Malmon of Active Minds on Campus

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:17:22 GMT

Once a blog starts doing interviews, it becomes a different thing, right? It crosses that line into... not good. I tried my best to avoid that in my first interview, with Alison Malmon of Active Minds on Campus. It doesn't hurt that she has a great organization and an important story behind it.

(And their color scheme jibes with mine!)

Active Minds is the nation's only peer-to-peer organization dedicated to raising awareness about mental health among college students. They're on over 100 college campuses nationwide.

Active Minds was founded in 2001 by Alison Malmon, then a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, following the suicide of her older brother, Brian, one year earlier. Brian, also a college student, had been experiencing depression and psychosis for three years but had concealed his symptoms from everyone around him. On March 24, 2000, as Alison was wrapping up her freshman year at Penn, Brian ended his life.

Recognizing that few Penn students were talking about mental health issues though many were affected, Alison was motivated to change that culture on her campus. She wanted to combat the stigma of mental illness, encourage students who needed help to seek it early, and prevent future tragedies like the one that took her brother’s life. After searching unsuccessfully for existing groups, Alison formed the organization that became Active Minds on Campus.

I conducted this interview by email this summer.

[Hi Alison]. [I should have said that at the start; I was rude.]

With respect to mental health, what differences do you see in students coming to college in 2008 as opposed to 2003 [when Active Minds went national]? Are they more knowledgable about mental health? More stressed?

Alison: times are changing, and it’s amazing to see how much can and has changed in just a few years. Circa 2003 was when campus mental health issues first became noticed –- primarily because of a string of suicides on NYU’s campus [six student suicides in '03 and '04]. Pair that with the high-profile suicide at MIT in 2000 for which a lawsuit settled in '04/'05, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech in '07, the media has cared a lot more about mental health issues in the past 5 years than I had ever seen before.

In line with that, administrators are caring more, and parents seem to be noticing more. The result, I think, is a rapid increase in knowledge about mental health among students due to increased programming and dialoguing. I do think that college students today are more knowledgeable about mental health than they were in 2003.

Are they more stressed? It’s hard to say. Clearly stressors are different now than they were 20, 10, even 5 years ago. But different is not always worse. What’s clear is that students today are juggling internal pressures, external anxieties, financial burdens, and the questions of "what am I going to do with my life and how will I feel satisfied?" It’s not easy. Is it worse than in 2003? I’m not sure.

Active Minds is peer-to-peer. To what degree do you think that people can get mental-health assistance from their peers, as opposed to teachers/family/professionals?

There is no doubt that one of the strongest factors in healing – whether it be physical or emotional – is having a support system. When talking about mental health issues, that support is strengthened because of the inherent ‘loneliness’ that accompanies the issues.

While peers are not mental health professionals and should never be relied on for full-fledged mental health treatment, the ability for someone to talk to another person who he/she feels is an equal, in whatever context, and know that he/she is not alone cannot be undervalued.

It’s time that we treat mental health issues as the true public health issues they are, involving peers, family members, coaches, mentors, professionals, and everyone else who comes in contact with an individual.

2008 Election Question: What's the best thing we could do as a nation right now to help young people keep their mental health?

We need legislators in office who understand the importance of mental health in the framework of overall health. As a nation, we need to elect the leaders of our country who give mental health the attention it deserves – in advocating for mental health parity in health care, in NIH and other research funding priorities, and in a national focus towards creating a healthier society.

Finally, do you think that anyone is really ever going to be able to say "I have clinical depression" and get the same kind of reaction as someone saying "I have diabetes?"

I wouldn’t be in this field, doing what I’m doing, if I didn’t think that was possible. While it seems almost unattainable, we have come a long way in many fields of medicine in a short amount of time, and I believe that mental health is one of the ‘last frontiers.’

I do truly believe that, in the not too distant future, mental health issues will be treated with the same dignity and respect as physical health. And I believe that the next generation, those coming up through high school and college today, will be the ones to significantly affect that change and will be the ones to know that reactions towards depression and diabetes do not have to be different.

There you go. A call to action. And Alison was really great to take her time to do this. In addition to Active Minds, which continues to expand on campuses nationwide, Alison wanted to direct people to Mind My Rights, a website that shows you what your rights are on campus in dealing with mental and emotional help.

Thanks Alison.

And, this is a LOT less important, but if you didn't know, this is how to pronounce my name. Been a long time coming.

Bi-Annual Picture Post

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:02:07 GMT

These pictures gather in my cell phone until it just can't hold them anymore and it extrudes them in a controlled manner. Enjoy!

Little Kids Playing Star Wars (set)

This was pretty darn cute. At Disney World in March. They have this interactive show where they pick 4-6 year old "younglings" from the audience and have them fight Darth Vader. One kid FREAKED OUT when Vader came out and had to be removed from the stage post-haste.

Guy Cracked Out on Pizza (set)

He was probably a heroin addict and I shouldn't make fun, but what can I say? The good news was that the pizza place didn't kick him out and that he was on his hands, not actually IN the pizza.

Appetite-Supressing Mouth Spray

The All-Englebert Humperdink CD Aisle

Only in The Beautiful Neighborhood of My Upbringing Can You Get Organic Ramen

They Opened an IKEA in Brooklyn and To Promote It They Sent Around a Truck with A Showroom Inside

My Favorite Subway Poster -- I Wanna Be This Guy! I Don't Care!

Insane Window-Washer

In Seattle this August, I found this crazy-looking building:

And I saw this highly paid union employee was WASHING it:

Jesus.

Blue Lobster

"Office of Professional Discipline"

There's a little story to this one. I used to have my (bi-)monthly mental health consultations at the HIP Mental Health Center in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. It was a special place for me. It was the place where I met my psychopharmacologist for the first time, the guy who "Doctor Barney" is based on in It's Kind of A Funny Story. All the advice he gives in the book was real advice he gave to me. I don't want to mention he's name. He's a humble man but a good one.

Anyway, soon enough they shut down the HIP Mental Health Center because it cost too much to run, but before its demise, I went there to my meeting one day and got off at the wrong floor. I looked up and saw this sign:

That was just too funny. What did they teach at the "Office of Professional Discipline?" Caning? I pulled out my phone and took a picture.

About twenty seconds later the elevator opened behind me. Two big guards came out like "What're you takin' pictures for? You not suppose to be takin' pictures in here!"

"No, see, I mean, it's just really funny, don't you see, like what does that even mean? 'Office of Professional--'"

"You got a reason for taking pictures here?"

"Well, I just--"

"Get the hell out of here, man."

One of the guards made a gesture like he was going to slap me on the back of the head but he didn't really slap me.

Colonial Dames of America

The last two pictures are vulgar, so we might as well add some class while we can. This is a real organization of WASPS headquartered in Manhattan.

Vulgar Picture #1

Vulgar Picture #2 aka The Most Inappropriate Tree In Queens

What is your favorite?

I personally have great respect for the anonymous 2000s satirist behind the last one.

Suicide, Lipid Rafts, Information Balls

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:01:30 GMT

First of all, for anybody who doesn't get it, here's why David Foster Wallace killed himself: he wrote a universally praised novel when he was 34; after that, he kept trying to write another one for 12 years; as the letters piled in from people who said Infinite Jest was the greatest thing in their lives, he slaved over this new book. He knew that it could never be as good. It would always be a disappointment. And so he gave up. Guarantee that's what happened.

PS My friend tried to buy Infinite Jest a few days after he killed himself. It was sold out. That probably was a factor as well.

-------------------------------------------

So, in the interest of NOT killing yourself, I learned it again recently: every time you read an article about a science finding, you owe it to yourself to look up the study. It's not so much that newspapers lie, it's that they over-summarize. A while ago my mother sent me an article called "Test for Depression May Have Been Discovered" that wasn't really about a depression test at all. It was about lipid rafts:

Man, they are so cool. They look like the cover of the old Operator Generator album Polar Fleet (2001):

So, lipid rafts were discovered in the mid-late 1990s, right after Infinite Jest came out. The deal is that, starting in the 1970s, biologists followed something called the "fluid mosaic model" for cell membranes. The fluid mosaic model held that the membrane surrounding all your cells was a soup -- chemicals seeped in and waste seeped out, regulated by elements of the cell.

Then lipid rafts were discovered. They are literally that: little rafts of fat (a lipid is a fat) that float around in your cell membrane with their own complex interactions with the proteins that are also swimming in there. The Journal of Clinical Investigation gave me the best primer.

The scientists in the "test for depression" story (and as always, they deserve to be named, not the college:

Robert J. Donati

Yogesh Dwivedi

Rosalinda C. Roberts

Robert R. Conley

Ghanshyam N. Pandey

Mark M. Rasenick

) took a look at a particular lipid raft named Triton X-100. They found that a protein called Gsα moved freely from this raft into the cell membrane in a patient treated with anti-depressant medication. So it's sort of a reverse-engineering thing: we know that anti-depressants work; here is one reason that they might work.

(By the way, you know how they did this study? They cut open the brains of people who had killed themselves.)

So how is it a "test for depression?" Well, if you go into the doctor and say you're depressed, conceivably, in the future, they could take a look at your lipid rafts and tell you if you really were. That's inane. I always thought depression *tests* were stupid. If you're depressed, you know it.

But the way that this could be helpful is by showing you whether your depression medication was working on the right spot. The idea being that if it's moving proteins off the lipid rafts, it's doing the right thing; if not, try something else.

This is another in the long line of machine-gun approaches to depression treatment. People find a chemical situation that occurs in depressed people and then prescribe a pill that acts on that chemical situation. First it was SSRIs, which targeted serotonin (Prozac, etc.). Then scientists began exploring cortisol, a hormone released during stress. But drugs that target cortisol have crazy side-effects. So crazy that all I can find out about them is that they're crazy.

And now there are lipid rafts. Another correlative that might be a cause. So ultimately, here, we're not talking about a test for depression, any more than a test for lowered serotonin or high cortisol is a test for depression. We're talking about the quest for the Holy Grail -- the single chemical that causes depression.

But maybe we're on the way... Maybe the Muppet Babies have already found it!

Muppet Babies

Okay, when I was a kid, I watched Muppet Babies frequently. And they rocked. I never understood why ANYONE had any interest in the adult Muppets. I just watched the opening theme on YouTube and felt dumb about how much I smiled. Here's an appreciative post about the show, which ran as an afternoon and Saturday-morning cartoon in the late 80s.

Now, one of the things about this lipid raft stuff is that, once again, something that scientists thought was uniform and indivisible turned out to be made up of more parts. This is a common theme. A cell membrane was thought to be jello; it's actually got stuff inside the jello. An atom was thought to be protons, electrons, and neutrons, now it's:

LIST OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLES 9/23/08

up quark u u +2⁄3 1.5–3.3

down quark d d −1⁄3 3.5–6.0

charm quark c c +2⁄3 1,160–1,340

strange quark s s −1⁄3 70–130

top quark t t +2⁄3 169,100–173,300

bottom quark b s −1⁄3 4,130–4,370

Electron e− e+ −1 ~ 0.511

Electron neutrino νe 0 < 2.2 eV/c2

Muon μ− μ+ −1 ~ 105.6

Muon neutrino νμ νμ 0 < 0.170

Tauon τ− τ+ −1 ~ 1,776.8

Tauon neutrino ντ ντ 0 < 15.5

Photon γ Self 0 1 0

W boson W− W+ −1 1 80.4

Z boson Z Self? 0 1 91.2

Gluon g Self? 0 1 0

Graviton G Self 0 2 0

Higgs boson H0 Self? 0 0 > 112

Axion A0 Self? 0 0 unknown Unconfirmed

X Boson X Self? 4/3 1 unknown Unconfirmed

Y Boson Y Self? 1/3 1 unknown Unconfirmed

W' Boson W' Self? -1 1 unknown Unconfirmed

Z' Boson Z' Self? 0 1 unknown Unconfirmed

Majoron J Self? 0 0 unknown Unconfirmed

So it's entirely likely that inside lipid rafts, neurologists will find more particles, and more, and more -- where will it end?

Why, of course, with...

The imagination ball!

That's right. It's not an exact picture, it's a representation, but the imagination ball was the key reveal on my favorite Muppet Babies episode of all time, "The Incredible Shrinking Weirdo." The Muppet Babies all get shrunk and go inside an atom, and after exploring all the subatomic particles (three, in the 80s), then they find that inside everything else, there's the imagination ball. It proves that behind everything else in the world, there's imagination.

THEN, in A Wind at The Door, the mind-blowing book by Madeleine L'Engle that I thought was way better than A Wrinkle in Time --

-- the Murray children shrink themselves to an almost inconceivable size: they get inside the mitochondria of a cell.

(Jesus, THAT looks like Polar Fleet too!)

Once they get inside the mitochondria, they find that it holds farandolae, tiny beings that must bind to the wall of the mitochondria and mature into "fara" for the cell to survive.

(Digression: one of the coolest parts of this book is that, when they go inside the mitochondria, the protagonists hear a rythmic beating noise.

Boy: "Is that the body's heart beating?"

Spirit guide: "No, no, you're much too small to hear the heart beat. At this size, you hear a heart beat once in a million years."

That blew my mind. I went around for an entire summer wondering: If you shrank down to the level of a mitochondria, would time be slower for you? I still don't know the answer.)

The point, here, is that we've discovered lipid rafts and bosons, so why not imagination balls and farandolae?

It wouldn't be the first time art preceeded science. Jonah Lehrer wrote a whole book on the subject:

I for one would like to think that we are made up of imagination balls.

Saving Myself

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:38:42 GMT

This fall I'm beginning a speaking program called "Angstpiration." I'll write more about it soon. But tonight, the portmanteau (that's what it's called! I knew there was a word!) helped me. And reminded me. And although you might feel that we are in cornball territory already --

-- you should know that I cried at the end of Home Alone when the scary guy with the shovel saved Maculay Culkin. So angstpiration is fair game.

(That Home Alone thing just sent me on a 20-minute tangent. It turns out that the scary man with the shovel is an actor named Roberts Blossom; he's retired and he writes poetry in California. Also, in looking for pictures of Roberts Blossom, I came across one tacky one that absolutely makes me crack up every time I see it, so sorry. Here goes:

I'm sorry. Really. It's just the angle of Jackson's head -- is he opening a door?)

Anyway, I have a nasty email system. I've written before about how email has crushed me. In one instance, when I lost a Gmail account completely, I found myself weeping in a rental car in LA on the phone with Mom.

More commonly, I struggle to keep 100 messages in my Inbox -- categorized and awaiting some action. The oldest one right now is from March 28th, 2007.

Maybe 25% of these emails are things that I have marked "add to blog." The vast majority of those are press items. I feel pressured to document every piece of press that I get.

I'm sure it seems like arrogance, but it's more OCD and fear. I'm worried that, in 20 years, someone will back me into a corner and I'll be forced to defend myself against their accusations of uselessness and failure.

Plus, the people who interview me are genuinely nice and interesting -- it's horrible to not link them.

So tonight, I started going through my list of things to post. They were:

An interview I did with the wonderful Debbie Fisher and Katrina Cryder on The Teen View Radio. The interview is on iTunes, too. Debbie and Katrina are great, go listen.

An article from my mom about a new test for depression. (Sent from NewsMax, which apparently does not provide links back to their articles.)

Mom's article, even though it didn't have any links, introduced me to these awesome things:

[lipid rafts]

Those are thick, gluey microdomains in cell membranes that either facilitate or impede communication between membrane molecules. More on them in another entry; I can't write about Mom's depression test until I read a few things from The Noonday Demon and have something half-way informed to say. But thanks for the image, Mom.

Then I came to an email from Florian Lamp, my former publicist in Germany, one of the coolest people I've met doing writing..

[Florian at the Liepzig Book Fair 2008 accepting It's Kind of A Funny Story's "Golden Lufti" award.]

It was from April. Florian had something I'd asked him for and been really psyched to get: an interview I'd done with Deutschlandfunk Radio. The interview was conducted in English, but dubbed into German.

Do you realize what that means?! That means it would sound like when they interview screaming villagers on CNN and you hear the translator over them: "My family is dying. No. No. Help us."

Well, I really wanted to hear myself spoken over by a German person. I just thought it would be the coolest thing in the world. A weird combination of being proud and being erased.

And Florian had the link to the mp3 right there! And guess where it led?

Isn't it amazing how clear that is in another language?

I tried Google-translating it anyway.

Audio file no longer exists

Unfortunately, we selected file for copyright reasons only for a limited period at the hearing.

We ask for your understanding.

...On one hand, it's really sweet for the Germans to apologize, and to provide such detailed reasoning. On the other hand, it's pretty clear from the phrase "copyright reasons" that I am never going to hear this mp3 file.

When I saw that it wasn't there, I closed my computer and I went to go to bed. Fuck it, I thought, I'll deal with this tomorrow. That's what I think when I get depressed. I go to bed heavy, thinking I will wake up tomorrow and this will be all better and I will get out of bed QUICKLY and WITH PURPOSE and all of these problems will be fixed, and instead I sleep late just enough to hate myself.

But fuck it, I said to the first fuck it. I stopped at the bathroom, turned around, and went back to my well-appointed writing nook, which is almost complete, as it now includes this brass thing which I can polish:

.

(As you can see, now I can actually be polishing my brass when a visitor comes to the door and I say "Excuse me, sir/madam! Please wait a moment! I am polishing my brass!"

)

I sat at that chair and wrote this essay. So there. Done. Got it out. Can't go to bed depressed now! And of course the real solution to this is to get on more German interviews, and that involves a new book, and that has been moving nicely. Thanks for reading.