When my mother turned 50, I sent her a card that declared joyfully “Congratulations, you are now officially a crone!” like she’d been reaching for that moment her entire life.  She was horrified. She felt as if I’d labeled each one of her wrinkles with a proper name; but I, on the other hand, believed the word crone to be the most flattering thing to call a woman. As a child, I couldn’t wait to escape ingénue-hood for when oh when could I be that crone, an old woman who oozed grace and insight from having lived a life, a real gritty passionate life. I once dramatically confessed to my friend Maria, “I can’t wait to be old,” to which she responded in 7-year-old solidarity, “I can’t wait to wear lipstick.” She didn’t understand that “old” for me meant wise.

In pursuit of wisdom, I grew up trying to define it. I assumed that it looked serious–a solemn face furrowed in Deep Meaningful Smart Thought and often staring into the grassy distance. When I spotted people like this, I gazed upon them like a dutiful servant, terribly impressed by what they might know about the world, but never particularly soothed.

As I step into my 30’s (and therefore become supposedly wiser, though I’d trust a toddler’s insight over anyone’s my age), wisdom is begging for a new wardrobe. Be-gg-ing for it.

What I’ve noticed is that the people I respect the most do one thing consistently… Read more…

I am naturally organized. It’s one of my superpowers.

As a toddler, my parents once found me methodically pulling clean diapers out of their box, lining them up along the wall in the hallway, and then placing all of my stuffed animals in a diaper, one by one. As a pre-teen, I would empty my big container of collected pennies and line them up on the carpet in order of their year. Now, I take great satisfaction in a well-constructed Excel spreadsheet, and even my writing talismans on my desk-side table sit in a specific arrangement. I moderate Crucial Minutiae’s comments without second thought, and took deep satisfaction from re-organizing the weekly columns.

When I started meeting professional writers in my early 20s, I noticed that many of them, especially the most commercially successful ones, were naturally disorganized. They are brilliant writers and thinkers who, when they go deep into the writing process, seem to lose all sense of their physical world.

Read more…

I contributed to the recent media darling of a report: A Woman’s Nation (co-produced by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress). After speaking on a great panel with Michael Kimmel and Stephanie Koontz last week, I couldn’t stop thinking about the need to reframe this issue so that men feel like they can really own their own stake in making work policy more flexible, family-friendly, and generally honoring of the fact that we are all more than drones. Here’s an excerpt from the column I penned on this topic:

For all of our progress on framing the issue, however, one challenge remains largely unmet. We have yet to figure out a way to tag these issues as critical to both women and men. We have to stop using “work/life balance” as coded language for “working-mom stress.” Despite ample evidence that men are served by investing more time and energy outside the workplace and “coming out” as fathers while in it, there are very few men who are taking on this issue in a substantive, political way.

I’ve been getting lots of emails from men, in particular, who are excited about my argument, but no one seems to be suggesting a new framing, new language. Any ideas from the CM audience?

My cohort at Emotion Technology (and husband) Christopher Gandin Le is live blogging for the CDC at the National Environmental Public Health Conference: Healthy People in a Healthy Environment.

Majora Carter, a genius and one of my favorite speakers on this subject, is speaking at this conference along with many other great minds. You can enjoy the highlights of a conference on a vital topic from the comfort of your own computer!

Check it out via Twitter

You can also register to watch a free live webcast here.

The first brag round-up since August! Our Crucial Minutiae writers have been busy.

Jennifer Gandin Le

• The South by Southwest Conference selected Jennifer’s company, Emotion Technology, to present a panel titled “RT: I’m Going to Kill Myself. Preventing Suicide Online” at the 2010 Interactive conference.
• Jennifer’s short film “Small Changes” won the Grand Jury Prize in the Intelligent Use of Water Competition, and was screened at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Her win was written up in the Austin Chronicle.

Courtney Martin

• “American Ignorance and Afghanistan” on The American Prospect Online.
• “Extreme Makeover, Health Care Edition” on The American Prospect Online.
• “The Imperfection and Redemption of Ted Kennedy” on The American Prospect Online.

Cristina Pippa

• In August, Cristina gave (calm) birth to Francesca – the first Crucial Minutiae baby!

Kate Torgovnick

• Kate’s book CHEER! will be made into a TV show for Warner Bros. TV. Read about the show at Variety.
• “Is Your Friend Toxic?” on New York Post.

“The Killing Season” is not a spoof television show–it’s an eerie phrase used by Mongolians who live on those grassland plains called steppes. It’s not hard to imagine which season exactly is the killer. These nomads usually lose half of their herd (of camels, yaks, sheep, horses) during the brutal windswept winters. Since their herd is their livelihood, the death of the herd is a kind of death of human existence.

I don’t depend on a herd, but I am anticipating living in a cold unlike any I’ve experienced, partially because I’ll be living in a yurt. Winter blasted into Montana the first week of October with 1° temperatures, a foot of snow and icicles hanging like daggers from homes. The snow has melted and left us some semblance of fall, but aspens and cottonwoods never had a chance to turn golden yellow. The leaves froze into a mottled purple color; now they flutter like strange ghosts casting a strange purpley hue in the valley.  

A friend of mine hates summer. I love summer. Maybe for her, summer is the killing season, a killing of some piece of her, but I’m not sure anyone reading this blog or using a computer (like me) can understand what a killing season actually entails.

I know, I know. You’re tired of reading about Balloon Boy. I just wanted to take a moment and ask: Remember when you were that trusting? Someone older and supposedly wiser told you to do something and you went along with it because you yet hadn’t accumulated years of experiences, good and bad, to give you insight as to when to follow directions and when to say, “Are you kidding me?”

I remember. It was when a freckle-faced girl named Alice told me that I should eat the “blue Hawaiian ice” from the toilet in our pre-school bathroom. This was back in the days when you had to go to the potty with a buddy. While mine was a year older, she wasn’t much of a buddy– inasmuch as she nearly poisoned me with toilet freshener. Luckily, a teacher was suspicious about how long we were in there and saved me from an early death before I took that first bite.

It’s been a few years since I’ve taught theater to young kids, but I’ll never forget the discussions we had about the difference between make-believe and lying and between a show and real life. Some parents had clearly put deep-seeded fear into their children about the dangers of deception. Other kids found story-making and trickery to be second nature. I wonder what will become of Balloon Boy. Will he decide that he likes the limelight and continue to do things “for the show”? Or will he realize that he was manipulated by his own parents and never be able to trust anyone again? The trust of a child is so freely given and so easily lost.

Check out this fascinating article from the Chronicle of Higher Education the millennial generation and all its critics and champions. As many of you know, I write and speak quite frequently about generational issues, so I’m fascinated by the tension between pointing out trends and making over-generalizations. It’s not an easy sweet spot to find, as I often learned working on my upcoming book on this generation’s relationship to activism:

Figuring out young people has always been a chore, but today it’s also an industry. Colleges and corporations pay experts big bucks to help them understand the fresh-faced hordes that pack the nation’s dorms and office buildings. As in any business, there’s variety as well as competition. One speaker will describe youngsters as the brightest bunch of do-gooders in modern history. Another will call them self-involved knuckleheads. Depending on the prediction, this generation either will save the planet, one soup kitchen at a time, or crash-land on a lonely moon where nobody ever reads.

The article essentially analyzes the analyzers, a whole crew of folks who have created an industry out of: “the idea that people in a particular age group share distinct personae and values by virtue of occupying the same ‘place’ in time as they grow up.” But sometimes it seems like we have less in common with individuals within our own generation than the media makes it sound, doesn’t it?

Do you identify with your generation? Do you see yourself as fitting the generational trends (social justice-oriented, compliant, visionary, distracted) that these experts describe? Or do you think it’s all a bunch of stereotyping dressed up as social science?

When I heard that he was flying out from L.A. to give a talk here, I squealed. A star like Brad Pitt or a rocker like Steven Tyler, both of whom I considered swoon-worthy at some point, wouldn’t have gotten such a reaction. I have to go, I have to go. Joe, skip rehearsals. We have to go. It was like the Dalai Lama was coming. Actually, the Dalai Lama did give a talk at the University at Buffalo, but it was a couple of years before we moved here. And I don’t think even he would have garnered such a reaction from me.

There he was, a bespectacled pediatrician in a fencing sweater from his college days in the 80’s just getting over laryngitis but still ready with parenting humor. And I was his most attentive disciple. After the talk, I was maneuvering Francesca’s stroller out of an aisle backwards to avoid the crowd, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I had just backed into Dr. Harvey Karp. Swoon. “Thank you so much.” He smiled and nodded. “For the talk,” I added, in case he thought that I was thanking him for preventing us from plowing him over and running into the wall. I think he got it.

How many mamas have looked at the doctor, longingly, with circles under their eyes, eternally grateful for the spell he casts to calm their crying infant? Even Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm) describes him in this way: “There’s nothing quite like watching Dr. Harvey work wonders on a screaming baby. He’s not a pediatrician, he’s a magician. Every time I bring my kids in to see him, I walk out wishing he was their father.”

Read more…

A brilliant healer friend of mine recently gave me homework: “You always write about the space around you, what you see, how others respond to their surroundings. Why don’t you spend some time writing about the inner space?” I am continually obsessed by the contention that our inner space is shaped by our outer space. But instead of exploring that orientation (again and again), here goes an attempt at only the inner space. 

I am a chronic anticipator. I anticipate what will happen next, how it will happen, and often I anticipate the worst in order to pre-grief whatever might await. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t–and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.” 

So when another friend of mine (a visionary artist) shared his debilitating worry about whether a commission would go through with an important client, I told him about what I try to do in those moments of self-doubt or worry. Imagine that “worry thought pattern” inside your brain. Give it a color and watch it traversing across your scalp. Now, erase it; start at one end and smudge it out inch-by-slow-inch. With that new vacant space, draw a vibrant healthy thought pattern in a different color. Do this every time that “worry thought pattern” appears. Eventually, you reprogram yourself. 

That’s an inner space I can visualize. We make grooves in our brain and our heart. Usually those grooves are worn-down roads. Despite the difficulty of traveling these roads, we like strolling down them again because they are familiar. I wonder about all the uncharted pathways in our inner spaces. There’s a fact floating around out there that humans only use 10 % of our brain. The possibility, the possibility, the possibility. And what of the heart?

In May, I posted a video of The Beckoning of Lovely project, headed by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. She recently posted a new video with an update, a year after the original experiment. It’s short, but worth watching for its breath of fresh air.

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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.

I guest lectured at the New School today in the amazing Ann Snitow’s class. The crew of about 80 students asked amazing questions–How do you see perfectionism playing out in terms of gender? What advice do you have for current gender studies students about post-graduation life? How can we heal the rift between different generations of feminism? etc. etc. It was inspiring to be around such thoughtful, diverse students who are really engaged deeply in the questions and actions that I’m passionate about.

One of the dynamics that I left thinking a lot about is the tension between critique and action. A particularly savvy student asked about the nonprofit industrial complex, a concept popularized in an amazing book by INCITE! titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. She waxed poetic for a few minutes about the difficulty of removing oneself from globalized corporate conglomerates while doing any kind of institutionalized social justice work (i.e. philanthropic wealth is often a direct result of abusive practices in third world countries that a foundation then ends up funding nonprofit organizations to eradicate…so twisted.) In any case, I understood where she was coming from. She was in that very alive moment when you are discovering these critiques, making some of your own, feeling really powerful and visionary.

But the flip side of that is paralysis and a lot of precious energy being spent on tearing down rather than building up. I think all thoughtful activist-minded people are put in a position to find some balance between merciless, eyes-wide-open critique and imperfect action. I’m sort of on a lifelong quest to find that balance, as I think many folks are. Meanwhile, the older I get, the more convinced I feel that critique is only as valuable when tempered with moving forward on some flawed but progressive path.

I met an elderly woman on a metro-north train in Connecticut. Without any prompt from me, she began explaining why she gets off at Harlem 125th instead of Grand Central Station. Though Grand Central is closer to her home, it is a daunting space for her to navigate. 

“I have a fear of open spaces,” she shared. Before I could dredge up the word Agoraphobia (that anxiety disorder that Woody Allen, and even mermaid Daryl Hannah are labeled with), she launched into a lament about how her children and husband never understand and that she can only cross a street in NYC when someone walks with her. Otherwise, she spirals into a debilitating anxiety attack.

“What about fields outside? Does it happen there too?” I asked, because a life without the distinct pleasure of feeling tiny in the natural world seemed to me like no life at all. 

“Well, I’ve lived in the city my whole life, but anytime I have been in a field, it’s the same,” and she rambled on and on, as if I were the first person to listen.

Some people with Agoraphobia can never leave the house or “safe space”; most photos detailing it show people staring out windows with painful/longing/confused looks on their faces. As an open-space junkie (which isn’t to say that I don’t also love a nook), I had a hard time hearing this woman’s story and imagining all the lack of arms-thrown-open delight in her life. 

Are we each born with a unique spatial orientation? Why would the shapes I see coming at me look the same as the shapes coming at you? Like everything, it reminds me of the nature v. nurture debate. And then I tracked my own fear. Though I can lie in a sparse field for most of the day, at some point, the cells in my body register that animal-feeling of wanting to take shelter, to dash towards a cozy spot under a tree, or at least to know that there is somewhere to hide.