Another Semester Of Grad School Complete

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Tonight, I finished my final “normal” semester of my part-time, low-residency graduate MFA program. By this I mean, I am done with my last regular class. This end came unceremoniously, in the parking lot outside my daughter’s gymnastics, with me hunched over my laptop in the dark in the passenger’s seat, using my hotspot from my phone. I responded to the required reading for the week. I have already turned in my final project early.

It is best to turn things in early when you’re a sandwich-generation student working a full-time job. You just never know when real life will blow up. In my experience it does all the time.

The more time I spend studying writing, the more I come to believe I have no business writing. Or that I have no business doing anything but writing. The absolutes come flying at me strong, and with feeling, as if by embracing the extremes I can avoid the dull reality of what it means to keep up with the work and the laundry on a regular basis.

Next semester, I start thesis. I will do this for two semesters. My thesis is a novel I have been trying to write for years.

I know I will emerge with this degree, and this novel draft, one year from now. And I accept that I’ll probably have to revise that draft eight times or more after the degree is over.

What I’m learning most of all in this program is that it’s not about writing, which I have always done. It’s about revision. It’s about ruthlessly staring at your own words and asking how they could be better. About excising the phrase you thought was so clever. About building the eye, and then the courage, to find and eliminate that wicked phrase. And to sharpen the next one. And to try rewriting the whole damn piece, again. A fourth time.

And it’s also about managing to do all that ego-whipping grunt work when the parking lot of your child’s activity is the only available option to getting it done. I’m continually struck, reading male authors, how little they talk about the needs of daily life, of interdependence, cohabitating with their precious writing time. This imbalance is part of what inspires me to keep going.

Goodbye, Democracy. Goodnight, Social Media Time Suck. Hello, Old Friend The Blog.

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For the past two weeks, nearly every conversation I’ve had starts with:

How are you doing?

Well, of course we’re all doing terrible, generally speaking. There is a looming fascist dictatorship. It’s a variant of the doom feeling before throwing up is certain:

It’s coming. Nothing can be done.

Some days the check-in is cathartic. Other days, it’s draining. And throughout these conversations, even conversations occurring on the same days, my answers change.

Because sometimes I get really sad. I’m human.

But mostly I’m okay. Fighting authoritarianism is something I’ve thought seriously about for several years at this point. And I’ve been studying and working to address an important segment of this issue—the anti-abortion movement is an anti-democracy movement, full stop—for years.

So, I feel equipped to fight in my own corner, and I have resources to do so. And, I’m not afraid to keep fighting if and as crackdowns on activists get more intense than anything previously seen. And I do believe that’s going to happen. While I’m not seeking to martyr, and I hope this is not necessary, I’m willing to make sacrifices in service of my commitment to living in a democracy where there is rule of law, freedom of expression, and equality for all.

Because I’m a motherfucking American, dammit.

I’m not jejune about our collective predicament. What’s ahead will be much uglier than the first time around with Mr. Dictator. He’s going to go for it. Some people are going to be rounded up and put in jail. Others are going to die. He will simultaneously seek to dismantle the government and replace it with a retribution chamber in the mirror of his own whims. This is what authoritarian governments do. And that is what our looming collective future is.

I’m not really joking when my husband calls out to ask what the hell I’m listening to, and I answer, Pussy Riot, while I can still listen to it without going to jail.

But also, I want to share the most wonderful thing from the past two weeks. I have drastically changed my relationship to social media, as well as news consumption.

Acknowledging the concerning matter of Mr. Musk and setting it aside from its own explication, all social media has created an echo chamber that has promoted the rise of authoritarianism, and the division of neighbor from neighbor. It has also created feeds that are, frankly, a drag. I’m mourning with people all day long, and I don’t want to do it on the Internet as well.

Moreover, dictatorships depend on overwhelming you. The news cycle is purposefully made awful to overwhelm you. I don’t want to consume news through social media anymore. There is no value in having my news curated by for-profit monsters in bed with the regime. It distorts my views and makes it more difficult to understand what is going on.

I’m also stepping back from a robust engagement I had with news alerts. I am and will always be what my mom calls a “news junkie,” but I’m relying more on actual newspapers and occasional check-ins on television. I don’t need to doom scroll anymore.

Protecting my strategic headspace from the steady drip-drip of outrage gives me the space I need to fortify myself for what’s ahead. It keeps me from inadvertently colluding with the algorithms built for our domination. And, it’s giving me more space for reading books and writing for myself.

So, if you want to find me on the internet, erintothemax.com is more likely to be the spot than social media. If you want to, go ahead and subscribe to get emails each time I post, and we can do this together.

Running With A Coaching App: Clippy In My Ears

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I run four times a week. Sometimes I run in silence with a GPS watch. Other times I run on the treadmill, watching news or movies. Most often I run outdoors listening to music.

I’m a bit of a codger. I oppose the Apple Watch. I don’t track myself on Strava. I do use the Nike running app. It’s generally a good app. It integrates well with Apple Music. It tells me I’m awesome after I finish a run.

Or, more accurately, one of the Nike Plus running coaches tells me I’m awesome. They don’t say anything until I stop the run, stop the music. “Save some miles for me,” Mo Farah pleads. Coach Bennett tells me “the run is done.”

The app seems to really, really want me to go on guided runs with the coaches rather than to listen to my own music. Guided runs are recordings where the coaches follow you the whole way, talking through your music. I’ve looked at these runs with trepidation for years. What? Why? During my alone time?

In December Rivka Galchen published a great short story in The New Yorker, “Crown Heights North,” that clearly takes some inspiration from the Nike running app, though Nike is not named. It is May and I am still regularly thinking about this story.

A man is dead and he starts running with the app. The dead man runs around New York City, thinking deep thoughts with the assistance of a coach.

Last week, after four years of using the app while avoiding guided runs, I gave Coach Bennett a try. He seems like a nice man. I have no animus. But dang, he was invasive on my run! He gave me prompts to stew upon my life. Then he repeated those prompts. Then he kept coming back with more prompts. It was not coaching about running, mostly. It was about bringing up my self-esteem, letting me know I’m okay, you’re okay, and we can all be okay together. I appreciate that. It’s good and it’s right. But I prefer Barney and Sesame Street for that type of thing. When I’m running I like to rock out to Metallica.

I found the effect of a running coach in my ears to be one of Clippy, that invasive ‘helper’ popping up on the screen on retro Microsoft products. “Hi!” (Smile.) “Try this!” (Bounce.) Clippy in my ears broke the sanctity of my run. Hacked my flow. Getting continuously told to be inspired made my run feel longer and harder, not shorter and easier.

The Anti-DEI Crusade

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Let’s call the anti-DEI crusade what it is:

  • A mechanism for forcibly removing women of color from leadership positions
  • An attack on non-government power structures — the academy and the corporation — during a moment of consolidating government power within the hands of anti-democracy forces
  • Racist butt hurt

The concerted attack on former Harvard president Claudine Gay did not merely arise in a congressional hearing, and unfurl from there. Rather, her enemies (and enemies of DEI) had been waiting patiently for a flashpoint in order to demonstrate control over the academy.

DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is a series of efforts that organizations may make in order to increase diversity, advance equity, and promote inclusive atmospheres for everyone. DEI is not, as radical reactionaries would have you believe, a zero-sum game where white people are victimized. In fact, embracing and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion is not just the right thing to do (yes, I subscribe to the theory of the late Senator Paul Wellstone that “we all do better when we all do better”), it is also a strategic advantage. In The Journal of Infectious Diseases article “The Science and Value of Diversity: Closing the Gaps in Our Understanding of Inclusion and Diversity” on scientific research, for example:

The benefits of engaging individuals with a wide swath of perspectives have great potential to improve our capacity to innovate. Why? Overwhelming evidence suggests that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogeneous groups on complex tasks, including improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more-accurate predictions—all of which lead to better performance and results when a diverse team is tasked to approach a given problem.

This isn’t rocket science, though. Kids are better equipped for the real world if they were part of a diverse student body in school. Workplaces are better equipped to meet the demands of the market if they reflect the diverse communities within the market. And our civic institutions are most responsive and make their best decisions when there are a diversity of identities and perspectives represented.

I noticed over the past week both an op-ed in Washington Post calling for the resignation of Vice President Kamala Harris (because, supposedly, she is unpopular, though … isn’t it Biden whose unpopularity is the issue most of interest to the upcoming election), and another urging Justice Sonia Sotomayor to go. For the good of the country, supposedly. Naw. This is the same crap as all the other anti-DEI crap swirling around. There are organized conservatives who want to see all the women of color in leadership resign or be forced out.

Another piece of this anti-DEI crusade involves steps being taken to minimize, delegitimize, and take control over corporations and academic institutions, which in aggregate overwhelmingly do take steps toward DEI (because it is good for their bottom lines, and for the education they provide). Right-wing actors like Christopher Rufo. In his op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out,” Rufo writes:

While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning. If America is to reform its academic institutions, the symbolic fight over Harvard’s presidency must evolve into a deeper institutional fight. The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci called this approach the “war of position,” a grueling form of trench warfare in which each concept, structure and institution must be challenged to change the culture.

Let’s back up. The world is experiencing a shift toward authoritarian models, and the United States is no exception. There is currently a man leading in the polls for the presidency who has promised to be a dictator on day one, who has promised a “bloodbath” if he loses, and recently claimed immigrants are not human. In other words our own home-grown fascist leader. Democracy and the individual freedoms that imperfect model helps advance have never been in this level of peril in the history of the United States.

We cannot consider the anti-DEI crusade in a vacuum, as somehow divorced from the threat to authoritarianism in the United States. Rather, Trump-friendly forces are seeking to simultaneously gut higher learning and take control of the private workings of businesses. Seen in this light, the efforts become scarier still. This is about consolidation of right-wing authoritarian power.

The anti-DEI crusade taps into racist butt hurt as a pretext for kicking non-white men, and especially women of color, out of leadership positions and gutting our institutions at a perilous moment for our democracy. It’s terrifying.