Reality, Made-up Memories and Memoir Writing

This summer, I have plans to work on a new book. This one will be centering on my experiences living in Hong Kong, my life as a tai tai (a largely literal, yet somehow derogatory, term for a wife), and the demise of my so-called marriage.

In the past, I have frequently thought about writing a memoir, but it seemed strange to try to categorize my life experiences in literary form. Real life, it seemed, did not often translate well into book form. Plus, I had a basic uneasiness with converting my strange life into readable nonfiction. The deaths of my brother and both my parents, while bizarre, seemed too easy fodder. I felt guilty even thinking about capitalizing on their individual stories, and through them, my own.

In addition, too much time had passed. Did I really remember everything? The things I did remember were fuzzy. Was I embellishing to make myself, or others, look better or worse? Did anything really happen the way I remembered it? Or by writing a memoir, was I just going to be pulling a James Frey by making shit up? In the end, did it matter? A good story is a good story, despite its truthfulness or accuracy in relation to reality.

Partially made-up memories, it turns out, are more the rule than we might otherwise believe. Our brains seem inherently pre-programmed to imagine or create reality. Our memories are not, in fact, entirely what they appear. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:

This general finding – that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event – has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things. First, the act of remembering involves “filling in” details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.

In other words, people are prone to remembering things incorrectly. Except that the same people will go to their graves swearing that they remembered an event exactly as it happened. I’m sure that both the Hatfields and the McCoys thought that they were right in remembering that the other family had started all the trouble in the first place (for an interesting ‘tale’ of how it all began, check out  http://www.wvculture.org/history/crime/hatfieldmccoy01.html) . And we all know what happened to them; a lot of them ended up dead.

So, as I sit down and attempt to write out the story of my relatively short marriage, I find myself wondering exactly how much of it is realism, and how much of it is my own idealism. As I write, I will try to remember another quote from the same chapter of Gilbert’s book: “Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.”

In the end, my memoir can only reflect my own reconstructed memories, hopes, desires, and misimagined future. My ex-husband, I’m sure, will remember things much differently. His brain, no doubt, filled in different details than mine. Such is life, memory, and the foibles of memoir writing.

The 10 Things that Track Running Can Teach You about Life

After having spent two weeks on the road, eating and drinking whatever I wanted, I came home only to find that my digital scale had turned on me. Perhaps, I thought, I shouldn’t have had all those sticks of beef jerky. Or that McDonald’s strawberry milkshake. Or those biscuits and gravy. Or all of those yummy, local beers. In short, my road trip was filled with poor, irregular eating and no exercise. Oh, I ran while I was home in Indiana, but my runs always seemed to end up at the same place – the famous downtown bakery with daily fresh, homemade donuts. It sort of canceled out the benefits of 30 minutes of good exercise.

My bathroom scale, instead of acting like a well-meaning old friend, acted like a regular jerk. It had the indecency to tell me the bare truth of it. My pants were tight for a reason, people. The scale weighed me in at a plump 132. Now, I know that for the average American, 132 is nothing. 132 is the dream weight of a lot of rounder-than-me people. But, I did not work in fashion for over 8 years without drinking the proverbial no-calorie kool-aid (it was one of the only things we were, in fact, allowed to consume without guilt). I haven’t weighed this much since high school, when one of my best guy friends confirmed that my butt was, well, ‘kinda big’.

In an effort to stave off mid-life spread, I am on a new schedule of yoga and running. There is a dirt track at a middle school not far from me, which I have taken to frequenting. While running there the other day, I pondered the other people lapping me and being lapped, and it hit me. Running on a track is a lot like life. Here are some of the things that I theorize:
1. Younger people run faster, both in life and on the track. However, they don’t seem to pace themselves very well, or consider how they will feel at the end of their run. Instead, they try to run as fast as they can straight off the bat, and end up tiring out after a few laps. The consolation is, they tend to look cuter and more stylish, even when they’re pooped.

2. While the sheer youth of younger people’s bodies is daunting to everyone older than them, producing a nostalgia for lost physical prowess, older people on the track should take note that they tend to pace themselves better. They’ve been around the track a few times now, and they know better than to push it too much in the beginning.

3. Much older people tend to know that finishing a long run happy and healthier is the goal, not sheer strength or speed. It’s not your pace, but your perseverance that counts.

4. It doesn’t really matter what you wear. When you sweat, when you’re concentrating, when you’re looking at the road ahead of you, you never really notice fashion anyway. In fact, dudes in headbands and goggle glasses tend to make people smile – in a good way. And ladies in matching outfits kind of make people giggle, and also make people wonder just how hard they’re working.

5. You need good shoes to get through it. Good shoes are absolutely necessary.

6. If you concentrate on how tired you are the entire time you are running, you’ll never make it to your goal. It’s better to concentrate on the now.

7. Some people lumber along. Some people’s elbows jut out at weird angles as they pump their arms. Some people’s legs go all akimbo. Some people pant loudly. Some people mouth breathe. Some people sweat a gallon and some people don’t seem to be sweating at all. In the end, and from a distance, we are all pretty much indistinguishable.

8. If you are running the track with someone else, you can spend a long time running together at the same pace. But eventually, someone will want to stop running, or want to go faster or to go much slower, and you’ll have to run alone. This is just the way it is.

9. Don’t get too cocky if you are faster than someone who looks younger, or older, or better-looking, or wealthier, or in better shape than you. At some point, someone else will lap you, too.

10. Remember to stretch. If you don’t take some time to stretch, you’ll be sore. And if your side, or leg, or ankle or hip starts to hurt, stop running. There’s always the next run and you’re not proving anything to anybody by pretending you are not hurt. No one is immune from pain.

The Negative Side of Having “Potential”

Summer is stretching its long arms out in a near mind-crushing expanse of potential. Classes are over, the days are longer, and I have a summer stipend which means I have nothing but time and sunshine in which to write. I have no deadlines and no one expects me to show up for work at 9am. I don’t have any reading or writing assignments, which means that I ultimately get to choose what I read and what I write. I am absolutely free of constraints.

This sounds nice, I know, but really it is crushing. There is nothing as depressing as having “potential”. If I were to die tomorrow, my epitaph would most certainly be, “Here lies Theresa Marie MacPhail. She had so much potential.”

po·ten·tial (pə-těn’shəl)
adj.

1. Capable of being but not yet in existence; latent: a potential problem.
2. Having possibility, capability, or power.

n.

1. The inherent ability or capacity for growth, development, or coming into being.
2. Something possessing the capacity for growth or development.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the quality collectively known as “potential”. I believe it was my second grade teacher, Mrs. White, that first officially labeled me as “having potential”, and she was quickly followed by my mother and other various members of my family. Teachers, it was true, loved me. I was (and this is taken directly from my report cards, which my mother saved in a special folder): bright, eager to learn, a good reader, above grade-level, a pleasure to teach, and perhaps a bit too talkative. I was good in math, science and English. In sixth grade, I was the first girl to win the math award (which is, surprisingly, not as cool as it sounds for a gawky 11-year-old). My first year in high school, I was the only freshman in a sophomore geometry class (again, they didn’t think I was half as kick-ass as my father did for this accomplishment). I got placed in an advanced English class my senior year – there were only 10 of us. Unsurprisingly, I was ranked 9th in my class (and I went to a high school with a campus – so you can do your own math here). My chemistry teacher tried to convince me to become a plastics engineer (seriously), and I wanted to be a journalist (past English teachers were all-too ready with the “potential” comments). I was a geek. Better yet, I was a geek with potential.

I still am. Clearly, since I am a graduate student with a summer reading list that includes Kant and Baudelaire. But, that damned potential keeps lingering over me like a dark cloud, ready to burst open. And yet it doesn’t. Down here, at my computer, it remains the Gobi desert. Each year, the potential encroaches, taking more space and reducing visibility. Some days, I can’t even see one week into the future, it’s that thick with potential disaster.

While at Stanford the other day (a place brimming with potential), I picked up a copy of a book by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, called “Stumbling on Happiness”. I was feeling depressed because I was in a bookstore filled with literally tens of thousand of books and I was thinking about my own stalled writing career. I was in the China section, reading the back cover of a book about China by a journalist who was at least five years younger than me and it was his SECOND book. In addition, he was the China correspondent for the New Yorker. Did I mention he was five years younger than me? I felt like crying. Here I was, with all of my POTENTIAL, and there he was, out there in the world, with all of his fulfilled book contracts.

It is Mr. Gilbert’s interesting opinion that we are, and have always been, bad predictors of what will make us happy. We also, interestingly enough, think about our futures for approximately 12% of our waking hours. This is not the future as in “What will I have for lunch, tuna or chicken salad?”, but the future as in our potentials. Will we have enough money for retirement? Can we afford a house in two years? Should we have a baby? Will we be fat and wrinkled at 60 unless we go to the gym today? Potential, it seems, is something that human beings are programmed to bear. Potential is, however, not what we think it will be.

Now, I am only on chapter one of this book, so I can’t claim to know the end or explain the details of Gilbert’s point. However, I have already felt a bit relieved to know that I am not in this “future” boat alone. Misery really does love company. I worry. All the time. About everything. So does everyone else, it seems. Even that guy in China who has published two successful books. Right now, he’s in Beijing wondering if he’ll ever fulfill his potential. The potential that his 8th grade English teacher told him about; the potential that his wife is always bragging to her friends about; the potential that he knows he has inside of him, sitting there like a flame ready to ignite.

How to Survive a Road Trip

Having just completed the long journey from New York City to Berkeley, California, in a car, I can tell you that road trips are difficult. You see a lot, you do a lot, you are stuck in a space that is four feet by four feet for hours at a time. Some of it is mind-blowingly beautiful, some of it isn’t. Some of it is interesting and quirky, some of it isn’t. Sometimes you love the person you are with, sometimes you don’t. The truth is, road trips test the mettle of relationships. Any relationship – family, best friends, lovers, coworkers. You cannot be in a car with someone for that long and not get to know things about them that you never would have otherwise. Like the fact that refried beans give them gas. Or that they really, really like taking pictures, which requires you to pull over the car. In light of this, I’ve decided to try to compile a list of do’s and don’ts to help others who might be considering a summer road trip of their own.

1. DO decide ahead of time what the stereo rules are. For example, you might decide that the person driving is in charge of the radio selection or that you share time 50/50. Do not leave this until you are sitting in the car listening to banjo music for a six-hour stretch.

2. DO decide ahead of time how much you will drive. Are you sharing it equally? Is it a rental car, so everyone can get a go? Or is it someone’s baby, which means that you are far less likely to have a turn at the wheel? And when (and if) you do, you will be nervous the entire time that you will somehow be responsible for a scratch (or worse). I drove less on this trip, but it wasn’t my car. This made both of us happier.

3. DO negotiate pit stops. Maybe the person/s you are with do not want to see the famous Corn Palace. Do not assume that everyone else is as interested in checking out the “largest ball of yarn on earth”. However, be aware that if you make someone stop at the ‘1800s town’, you might have to go on the ‘old mine’ tour. It’s a give and take.

4. DO NOT eat five times a day at scary fast-food restaurants and highway dives. Also DO NOT eat everything that you think you want. I promise you that the rules of basic caloric intake still apply on a road trip. If you do not follow this rule, you will end up approximately 5 pounds heavier per/1000 miles.

5. DO NOT play “Do you know what is wrong with you?” in the car. Ever. I guarantee that for every bad thing you discover about your driving partner/s, he/she/they have discovered at least one about you.

6. DO NOT have outrageous expectations. Plan on being disappointed at least some of the time. The truth is, Mount Rushmore is neat, but kind of boring. The Midwest is flat and the desert is only exciting for about 20 minutes, give or take. DO leave room to get excited about the things you discover along the way that you didn’t count on. It turns out that the 1800s town was actually pretty cool.

7. DO spend more money on a good hotel room. A good, clean bed is worth the extra $20. Trust me on this one and look up bed bugs on wikipedia.

8. DO plan on spending more money than you thought. You never calculate the beef jerky you buy at the rest stop, the $25 entrance fee to Yellowstone, or the $20 mug you buy to commemorate your experience.

9. DO NOT go anywhere without having GPS, two maps and a book of Holiday Inn locations. You never know where you’ll end up.

10. DO maintain a zen approach to everything. It helps to mumble “I’m zen” to yourself as you bring your hands together in Angeli Mudra. As a suggestion, do this at least once after every comment that starts with, “Well, I’d rather . . . .”

11. DO bring sunscreen, a hat, and have a bottle of water in the car. Also, it helps to have a cup you can pee into in an emergency. When you see the sign that says, “Next rest stop 118 miles”, you can rest easy.

12. DON’T pack too much. You’ll be happier when lugging your shit into and out of the car every night. You probably don’t need those ‘dress shoes’ anyway.

13. DO try to remember you’re not perfect. Neither are any of the people in the car with you. On a long car trip, you’d probably want to shove Jesus, Ghandi and your grandmother out of the moving vehicle anyway.

These simple tips should help you to muster through any road trip. However, please note that these rules do not apply to traveling with children and/or teenagers. For that, you’re on your own and I wish you Godspeed.

Roadtrip Americana Style

My roadtrip has officially begun, although I haven’t actually driven anywhere yet. For the next two weeks, I will be writing daily, but posting less frequently. Unless there’s an update on the pig situation in Guangdong or I feel the need to share some reflections on Edward Said’s Orientalism, in which case I’ll post from east of Cornsville, middle America. (I can make middle America jokes, since I am a proud Hoosier.)

I flew into LaGuardia late last night and will be packing up the car and driving west on Saturday. I had a layover in Houston, which I am currently counting as part of the Americana experience. Having had a grandmother from Kentucky and a love for the FX show The Riches, I enjoyed the twang of my fellow airport goers and the cheesy cowgirl pinup t-shirts for sale in the gift shop. I nearly purchased one, until I came to the stark realization that I just turned 35 and there is a fine line between ‘ironic hipster’ and ‘holding onto her youth quirky dresser’.

Being back in the city brings out competing feelings for me. I consider myself a partial New Yorker, since I lived and worked here for over 8 years, but the more time I spent away from it, the more strange it becomes to me. The streets are the same, but the construction never ends. There’s always a new building, a new restaurant, a new bar. It becomes increasinly obvious to me as I get older that there is no keeping up with the trends. And the truth is, maybe there shouldn’t be. Chris Rock is right. There is such a thing as ‘too old for the club’. There’s a definite line there; the trouble is, you’re never certain if you’ve already crossed it.

This entire trip is like time-traveling for me. If New York represents the decade of my 20s, then Indiana represents the teens. Since I’m considering writing a memoir of my time in Hong Kong, this trip is eeriely appropriate. It’s an inventory, of sorts, before I begin the latest chapter of my life.

More from the road . . . .

Perception is Reality (and other tales from the trenches)

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

T. S. Eliot

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.

Cyril Connolly, “The Unquiet Grave”, 1945
(1903 – 1974)

 

The Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse famously wrote that there are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth. In today’s political arena, the same might now be said of reality. Reality is just a synonym for truth, anyway, right? And as anyone on the street can tell you, perception is reality. You make it up as you go along.

 

But it isn’t as though any of us are strangers to the concept of a fuzzy reality. Americans have been blurring the line between artful deception and truth for a very long time. If our country was once called the largest theater in the world – by now it’s a gargantuan soundstage.

 

As children of the eighties, we learned that reality wasn’t worth living if it didn’t have a great soundtrack to accompany it. We also became the first generation almost entirely weaned on a steady intake of MTV video clips, sitcom families, and movies where the dorky kid actually got the girl in the end. Looking around at our own dysfunctional, often-divorced, meager-income, mostly-boring families, we deduced that un-reality was decidedly better than plain-old reality. For awhile anyway, we were content to revel in the shades of our own self-created delusions of grandeur. Everything was neon, not just the clothes. Americans wanted bigger, better, faster, and we wanted it on our terms; that was our collective reality, crafted out of the clever delusions of Hollywood and our own dreams of a better life when we grew up.

 

Then, in the early nineties, in the midst of a first Bush-inspired recession, Americans became even more convinced that reality – or the “real world” – sucked. Better to lose oneself in the fantasy of one’s choosing than to brave living in the harsh, cool atmosphere of a poor economy and uncertain job status. For many of the so-called generation Xers, life was turning out as well as we had expected. For one, there were no snappy soundtracks. For another, the road to financial and qualitative success wasn’t as smooth as we had once been led to believe. It was a harsh awakening that led to a mass disillusion with the power structures at large. In a mirroring of the late sixties and early seventies, sarcasm and cynicism made a comeback. But was the darker side of things any more real than the sunnier, more optimistic side? Were we simply choosing to think of the glass as half-empty, instead of half-full? At any rate, gone were the days of the easy, blissful happy ending. If America was a soundstage, instead of teenage angst films, we were churning out self-reflective film noir.

 

It becomes impossible, in many ways, to discuss the conception of reality in America without dwelling on 9/11. That singular day, arguably the most riveting and shocking day since Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination, is said to have changed the way Americans thought about the world. It turned a nation of self-obsessed, insulated navel-gazers into a people that had to be more concerned with the world outside its own borders. Suddenly, Americans became more interested in things like Islam, Pakistan, morals, the effects of globalization on the disenfranchised poor, freedom, truth and justice in other countries – in understanding the “others” outside our doors. Or did it?

 

In fact, there have always been Lao-Tse’s three realities: ours, theirs, and the “real world”. The trouble is it’s never been exactly clear whose reality is whose. Even more difficult is the notion of which reality is the “real” reality – the Truth. Evolution has done wonders for the human race, but the one thing that we still consistently struggle with is our all-too-human obsession with knowing the absolute truth, as if there was one Truth out there to grasp. All 9/11 might have done is to shake up our notion of the boundaries, making us hungrier for that illusive reality that could make sense of everything: the planes, the smoke, the rubble, the people jumping from buildings; the disappearance of a certain faith in our own immortality, in the certainty that what we have built could not possibly end up no better than the Roman Forum, only bits and pieces left. It strengthened our resolve, not to figure out reality, but to escape from it ever further into our own ways of thinking, our own version of the truth.

 

The images of 9/11 haunt us. Five years later, it is still hard to watch the footage of the towers falling or see the searing blue lights of the memorial jettison into the night sky. But it is the constant replay of those pictures in our heads that makes any sort of reality hard to grasp. Most Americans were nowhere near the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or the stretch of field in Pennsylvania, but they felt like they were. Which is more real – standing on Church Street with ash covering your suit and your hair, filling your lungs, or sitting in your living room staring at your television screen and feeling a strange feeling of foreboding, dismay and horror spread throughout your body? Lao-Tse might argue that it doesn’t matter, that the reality in both cases is the same.

 

For reality to be real, it has to be personalized and felt and experienced by a human being. But no one person or nation’s reality is the right one, or the only one. We live in the modern age, with its I-Pods and wi-fi access, its internet and global commerce, its instant news and text messaging. The modern digital age is its own reality, distinct from everything that came before it and yet intimately connected to our past. The 50s, where the image of the modern perfect American family probably began; the 60s, where we learned that we could make our own reality or drop out of reality and make a better world; the 70s, where reality was confused and the idea of political truth was buried with Watergate; the 80s, where reality was personal and greed was good; the 90s, where reality bit us in the collective ass and we turned to conspiracy theories to make us feel better about the un-real state of the world. It’s all reflected in the reality of today – Americans in 2006 are the inheritors of a desire for truth, an effective “spin” machine which artfully turns out lies, and a dose of both naïve belief and unhealthy skepticism. These days, there are no middle roads. You have to choose what you believe in.

 

Americans love reality television and tell people to “Get real.” We say we want to be told the truth and are in love with plastic surgery, home makeovers, and the princess fairy tales. We lie about our age and our incomes. We tell lies about how good our friends look at age fifty, about how much we love our jobs, about how good we are in bed, and expect our good friends to lie to us about the same subjects. And yet, the reality that we have created seems to make some of us unhappy. We seek out gurus and health advisors and life coaches to teach us how to be happy, about how to change our realities. Over and over again, we get the same answers. Life is hard. There are no shortcuts. Get in touch with yourself, with your family, with your friends. Get real.

 

But the truth is we can’t handle too much reality. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, and it sucks – a lot. In a world of political spin, global warming, human trafficking, and the ever-present threat of bird flu, who could blame us for our penchant for escapism, for reality bending? Americans will always be dreamers, which is what makes us a great people and the United States a sometimes dangerously naïve nation. Perhaps the trick is balance. Every great actor embodies a part, but only a crazy one loses himself entirely in the role that he plays. The entire world’s a stage and Americans are only one set of players. Our truth, their truth and the truth – it doesn’t really matter. It’s all in the perception, anyway, right?