My airport day

After meeting my brother's baby (whose adorable self can be seen in my previous post) with my parents and then spending a few relaxing days playing on a beautiful beach, I'm currently spending a not-so-relaxing day at an airport waiting to go back to New York City.  And my flight's been delayed three hours (and counting), and New York's LaGuardia Airport is shut down due to inclement weather systems.  My parents, leaving for their home, left hours ago and are already at their house.  I have three books to read with me, but since flights are getting cancelled left and right and I need to be ever ready to book myself on the next flight tomorrow, I've opted instead for people watching....  So here's what I see:

There's the very pretty, slim, early-40s woman opposite me wearing a green mini dress and strappy gladiator sandles, her hair perfectly coifed and blown out and hairsprayed, her skin bronzed, her makeup flawless.  Her ring finger is bare, and she's smilling and giggling as she texts with what I would wager is a new romance, playing with and tossing her perfect hair, biting her lip and sparkling when she gets a text she is particularly charmed by....  She sends a text and then watches the screen with anticipation, eyes lighting up as she sees the dots that mean her guy is typing, then trying to bite back the broad grin that wants to steal across her face as she reads the text.  She reminds me of Ann-Margret singing "How Lovely to be a Woman" in Bye Bye Birdie.  Do people ever look like that when texting their partner of twenty years, I wonder?  I hope her man always makes her feel so lovely and sparkly and feminine and wanted, and I hope she shakes her hair out and uses less bronzer and loses a little control and lets go and still feels like the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, just like she seems to right at this instant.... 

There's the middle-aged man who insists that the chair next to him is taken, though I've had my eye on it for the last 15 minutes and no one has sat in it that whole time, while I sit on the dirty floor....  Is it me he objects to?  Does he really have some traveling companion who's off on some airport adventure?  Or does he have an imaginary friend?

There's the goat.  I don't see a goat, but I hear a goat.  Maybe it's the man's goat.  I'll definitely save a chair for a goat.

There's the cluster of young women, including me, who have somehow all unintentionally wound up gathered around the same phone charging station and are now welcoming a new member to our group.  The new girl has been waiting seven hours and is hoping to wind up on our flight... which has now been indefinitely delayed.  We're all dressed casually though, and the newcomer is wearing a slinky dress.  She chats with us for a bit and then slinks off to join the more elegant ladies and men who are standing rather than sitting crosslegged on the floor.  The young woman next to me slouches down against a pillar and yawns loudly.  We're not feeling very slinky dressy right now.

There's the hipster across from me whose khakis are six inches too short and rolled up an extra two inches.  His grey athletic socks are pulled high.  I think this looks silly, but I suspect that might be the point.  I wonder if he would say he's dressing "ironically" (not a correct usage but a popular one), and I also wonder if the giant headphones he wears actually have any sound coming out of them....

I look for anyone reading a book.  In scanning a couple hundred people, I find one.  Its cover is pastel blues and greens, and I wonder if it's women's fiction in the present tense.  I also wonder how airport bookstores stay open.  I also realize the hypocrisy of me writing a blog post in the present tense after I lambasted it two posts ago.  But you see, I actually am typing this as it happens, so that just underscores my problem with the mechanics of present-tense fiction, because the characters in those books aren't doing that.... Okay, moving on....

Every time I look up I catch too-short-pants hipster guy looking at me before he looks away.  This makes me aware he is sitting perfectly still like a Buddhist statue.  Who sits perfectly still when listening to music?  Those headphones are definitely silent.  Or else he needs to be exposed to some new music.

I spot a second book.  And it's old and hardcover, which makes me miss the smell of my hometown's library, which makes me wonder what exactly makes old books smell like old books, which reminds me that writing in the present tense really does lead to rambling.

Two more women are doing the "I have a beautiful secret" smile while they text.  But no men are doing this.  Do men not do that?  I wonder what the men on the other side of these text conversations look like as they text.  That makes me think of all the times my fiancé has told me my texts almost made him laugh out loud at inappropriate times at work (well, ya know, maybe don't glance at your phone during a meeting and then I won't make you laugh), and I think it would be delightful to be a fly on the wall to see that expression on his face.

And now I'm back at my brother's house where I started several days ago, because my indefinitely delayed flight has been delayed until tomorrow.  I am thankful for family, and I am thankful for my mom telling me to make sure my carry-on always has clean underwear, and I am thankful for not flying at night during a thunderstorm.

Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get on a plane at the airport.  Wouldn't that be a novel idea.

A princess's rules for happy days

This is my big brother and me many, many, many days ago:

He had recently gifted me with chickenpox, from which he was recovered by the time of this photo but which I was still suffering through. Still, I was dressed in one of my princess costumes, and everyone knows that princesses don't bear grudges. Plus a princess costume makes everything better... though I do think my brother looks awfully gleeful about the whole thing here....

And this is me with my big brother's little baby for the first time yesterday:

When I'm not depriving him of chewing on my hair, which he so very much likes and thinks belongs in his hands and mouth, he's also a very gleeful and joyful little baby, just like his dad.

Days go by quickly.  So my advice to anyone reading this, regardless of your age, is to play in a sprinkler, hug a baby (preferably not just a random one on the street, 'cause, ya know, that'll probably wind you up in jail), tell someone you love them, play dress up and make believe whenever you can, climb all over the furniture, let your kids destroy a velvet green couch, go barefoot, wear pink shoes, and do like a princess and never bear a grudge.

My week in literary likes and dislikes

Things I dislike from this week:

1.  Books in the present tense
 I hate books in the present tense.  Why do they exist?  Why is this an acceptable and seemingly now common way of writing? In fact, it seems to me it might be the only way of writing women's fiction currently.  I've checked out three of them from the library recently by accident when checking out well-reviewed women's fiction.  Is this just a women's fiction thing?  It's been since a 5th grade visit to my school's library that I picked up a book to find it was written in the dreaded present tense, and now I can't find a single women's fiction book not written that way. It reads to me like stream-of-conscious ramblings in a diary.  And yet, books outside of women's fiction are still written in past tense. Are we saying that women and only women want to read rambling thoughts rather than the complexly crafted work facilitated by past tense?  Because if so, that's just insulting.  Third person present tense is obnoxious enough to me, but first person present tense is also baffling.  It pulls me out of the story entirely and makes me question the mechanics by which the narrator is recounting the story, which should never happen unless it's a plot point or story tool. Is the narrator speaking into a recorder as things happen? Unlikely.  So that means we're just getting her internal monologue, which is generally how the examples of these books I've unwittingly checked out read -- every single thought that passes through the narrator's head like she's a 14-year-old trying to fill up her diary as quickly as possible.  And reading them makes me want to scream.  (I will say present tense can be used properly when it serves a very specific purpose, but the only instance of present tense fiction in a novel I have ever read that makes sense to me and I enjoy can be found in several chapters of Dean Koontz's The Husband.  There is such a specific reason for it being written that way and it serves the story.)

2.  Poorly written books that sell well

This week, this item seems to go hand and hand with what I consider an insulting portrayal of women. One of the aforementioned women's fiction, first person, present tense books that I checked out was a #1 New York Times bestseller.  In the first two-and-a-half paperback pages, the author has 28 paragraphs (all of which are non-dialogue, which means the paragraph breaks read like the character is jumping from thought to thought in rapid succession), 7 "Gods"  (as in "Oh God, oh my god"), 11 all-caps words, 9 comma splices, 11 uses of "like," "okay," "I mean," or "you know" (again, not in dialogue), and one misuse of "irony."  All in two-and-a-half pages!

I'm sure there will be people who say I'm being a literary snob, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who will say this is good writing because it's accessible and conversational.  I like conversational, and I'm not asking for staid and formal writing, but this character isn't a teenager.  She's an adult woman, and strong adult women characters shouldn't speak like a 14-year-old girl hanging out with her friends at the mall trying to fit in, unless it's a plot or character point that the woman speaks unusually beneath her age.  It's not cute, it's not funny, it's not flattering, it's not empowering, and I would hope it's not honestly that relatable.  Also, this specific character fails to recognize someone she's known for months because she's disgusted by that character's clothes on this particular day. I certainly hope that's not relatable. I would like to think we as a gender are capable of more than recognizing a person by their fashion.

3.  Sentences. With. A. Period. After. Every. Single. Word.  What. Is. This. About.

4. Pages with a new paragraph every. single. sentence.

5. Improperly titled and marketed books

I read an excellent book this week titled The Husband List. Its cover is white and adorned with pink hearts and pink and red writing and lots of flourishy designs.  It looks like the kind of book I would pass by without giving a second glance and like it would have lots of passages about heaving bosoms and other pulsing body parts and what-not.  Its title suggests it's about a character trying to get married and find a husband.  In fact, if I were to take a wild guess at the main character without even picking up the book, I would guess that she's a romantic who dreams of getting married and is determined to do so, working her way through the list of men she's set her eye upon.  That's not really the kind of lead character I'm interested in reading about. In fact, none of what this book appears to be from the cover interests me.  What does interest me is Janet Evanovich's name on it.  My Nancy Drew books as a little girl turned into Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books as a teenager.  To me, Stephanie Plum is the perfect heroine -- someone who dreamed of growing up to be Wonder Woman, loves adventure, is as plucky as they come, never leaves home without pepper spray, has a gun in her cookie jar at home (sometimes even with bullets), is 100% independent and does no man's bidding, and is equally at home in jeans, sneakers, and a flannel shirt as she is in a low-cut dress with three-inch heels.  And did I fail to mention she's a bounty hunter?

Before Evanovich started writing her own brand of plucky adventure stories, she wrote romances under a different name.  After her Plum books hit fame, her romances were re-released under her own name.  The book The Husband List is a post-Plum novel that's a co-write with another novelist, Dorien Kelly, who appears from a Google search to be also known for romances.  So it makes sense to market this book to both authors' romance fans.

A search of it on online seems to confirm that those fans, however, think it's boring and "nothing happens."  I found it to be anything but boring, but it is about character development rather than a complex plot.  In reality, I think the book falls prey to the unfortunate fact that most authors write in a single genre and are known for that genre, making it hard for them to break out of it.  Is it an adventure book that would work well being marketed to Stephanie Plum fans? Probably not quite, though its main character would certainly like her life to be an adventure story, and she gets her wish towards the end. And she probably would be Stephanie Plum if she lived 100 years later.  Is it a romance book? It certainly has a romance at its center, and even a couple heaving bosom passages (though the authors word it so much more gracefully than that -- and I have to add that those passages are actually in support of character growth), but to me the book is most similar to Louisa May Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl about a young woman crossing the threshold from girl to young woman as she deals with the way she was brought up and how that conflicts with what she wants and the world around her.  Not every book with a romance IS a romance or should be marketed as such.  And the title is all wrong.  It's about an incredibly strong 21-year-old in 1894 who is trying to avoid her family's demand for marriage -- the list of the title is her mother's, not hers, and it serves as an obstacle to her desire for independence and personal growth, both of which are more important than any romance in this book.  The character dreams of going to Oxford and Yale more than she dreams of a man, and she sneaks out for museum lectures and speaks at least three languages, and yes, she has a gun, just like Stephanie Plum, though hers is fully loaded.

What should have been marked as a humorous and character-driven Gilded Age women's fiction book about a young woman's search for independence was instead marketed as a hearts-covered romance book about looking for a husband, failing to reach one audience and disappointing another.  And that makes me sad.  Because of #1 on the below list....

Things I like from this week:

1. Books that appreciate character development as plot development

I'm a slow reader. I say each word in my head, and I see a book like a movie in my head. I savor the words (assuming it's a good book), which means it takes me a longer-than-average time to finish a book.  This week I read one (The Husband List) in three days, which is incredibly fast for me.  I couldn't put it down. I loved it. I loved the characters, I loved their personalities and their fire and ambition, I loved watching them grow and struggle, and I loved their conversations.  I loved the zippy writing. I loved how fleshed out side characters were and how they had their own arcs in addition to enhancing those of the main characters.  The characters were real to me, and I so appreciated that there was not just one female character who was strong and fiery and smart, but two.  I had never heard of the book before, so I looked it up, and I was shocked that many reader reviewers thought nothing happened for the first 220 pages.  So much happens.  Characters grow up and find themselves -- characters of all ages.  I like my adventure stories too, but let's please take a moment to appreciate a good character story.  I never reread a book because it had exciting stuff happen.  I reread a book because I love the characters.  And I hope there will always be an audience who loves books with wonderful characters who grow (written in the past tense), and that books like this never go out of fashion (though I certainly hope they get categorized better and get better marketing than this one did). 

2. Chapter 35 of Pride and Prejudice, which contains a five-page paragraph

I'm a lover of a nice long paragraph that breaks when it's good and ready to and not a moment before.  White space be darned.

3.  After rereading the first two-and-a-half pages of the book under #2 of my dislikes list in order to count all those things listed, I'm going to make #3 on my likes list the authors who write well-written books with periods and commas in the right places and fleshed out characters who don't riddle their speech with fillers and who speak believable dialogue and grow throughout the book. To you authors, I say, thank you.  Please don't ever stop writing.

The ick factor

My cat loves people.  He's extremely social, and he will run to the door like a dog to greet anyone who walks in (even complete strangers), sniffing their hand and looking for attention.  Not long ago, however, my fiancé and I saw a very different, very atypical reaction from him.  We opened the door to a potential cat sitter, who reached out to touch our cat (as he lets everyone do).  As soon as she touched him, he ran away from her down the hall and cowered there, hiding.  In the year we've had him, he has never once reacted like that to anyone.  He sensed something about her....  Something was off....  Something only he could feel.  Needless to say, she did not cat sit for us.

I completely understand his reaction. I'm not normally randomly judgmental, and I try not to form snap opinions about life and people.  Still, though, there have been a number of people in my life with whom I've felt something very similar -- inexplicable but strongly negative.  Some people, sometimes, just seem to exude (to me, at least) an overwhelmingly bad aura. There was a much-loved faculty member at my high school who, for me, fell into the category of “strange creepy guy,” but I was the only one I knew who felt that about him.  Many students, in fact, seemed to adore him, treat him as a mentor, seek him out for advice, hang out in his office, and generally view him as a wise older man.   He appeared to be gentle and soft spoken, and there seemed not a reason in the world to dislike him... but I did.

In fact, I instantly disliked him and got an “icky” feel about him.

It felt to me like he was fostering a cult of students who worshipped him rather than just being a nice old man.  He ran a program that was a rip-off of a nationwide program, but by renaming it, it stripped the meaning of listing that program on a high school diploma.  "My version is better," he said.  No.  His version gave him more control of his students. The students enrolled in that program tended to view him as the ultimate authority figure.  He could do and think no wrong.  His opinion was always correct. If the students' friends and family disagreed with this man's opinion, well, their friends and family were wrong. I felt he was anything but the innocent old man he seemed to be, and I thought he would love nothing more than to run a full-on cult, or worse. What I had was little more than a feeling combined with the fact that his tactics seemed isolating and like the perfect foundation on which to build either irrational worshipping or abuse. But it was a very strong feeling.  I refused to join the program, though on paper I was its target audience, and once I declined his invitation to join the program, I always felt like he was almost as wary of me as I was of him.

I was telling my fiancé about this man late last night as I was sitting on the floor in our living room petting our cat in his Chewy box (he prefers the box his stuff comes in to any of the things we actually buy him -- 'cause ya know, he's a cat). I asked my fiancé to Google the man to see if he'd ever been fired or wound up in prison or anything.  Nope.  Still honored and revered.  Maybe he was just a nice old man. Maybe I was wrong about him.  Maybe.  But he still gives me the creeps thinking about him, and if I were a cat, I'd still run down the hallway away from him. Then I looked out our balcony door window and saw a man across the alley taking a shower with the drapes on his unfrosted bathroom window pulled open, his face pressed against the window watching me as he cleaned himself. I shrieked, and my fiancé closed our drapes.

The moral of this story: Sometimes, creepy is subtle and lives in a grey zone with doubt.  Sometimes it sticks its nose against the window and says, "Hey I’m a perv."  In either case, it's okay to be creeped out, trust your instincts, and run down the hallway.

Spyscape through the eyes of one very competitive woman

I'm very competitive. I like to win.  I like to be better than my previous best.  I jump at the chance to prove myself.  And I relish challenges as opportunities to prove myself.

I also love to work under pressure.  My favorite stage management memories are the shows when sound went out, lights went out, actors skipped pages -- anything where I had to problem-solve to save the show.  Likewise, one of my favorite college memories is when (very very out of character for me) I somehow managed to forget I had a final paper due in what was for me an easy fluff course (so it had apparently zipped to the back of my mind as low priority -- a total tortoise and the hare moment), and I didn't remember it until my final exam in live television directing the period directly before the paper was due.  So I directed a live television show while simultaneously writing a final paper for another class.  And I succeeded in both.  I have absolutely no idea how I did that, except that I'm at my best under pressure.

And I've been a fierce observer since I was a baby (so I'm told).  I see thoughts behind aborted words and actions, I see controlled impulses, I see lies, I see attempts to keep secrets.... 

So, not surprisingly, when you put these things together along with my love of agility and physical tests and acting, I also like spy stuff.  When I was in college, I went to a recruitment event for the CIA.  In a lot of ways, it seemed like the perfect job for me: physical skills, working under immense pressure, acting, high reward and purpose, problem solving and brain power usage.  I still have a paper somewhere with the contact's contact info and name (which is of course not his real name).  In another life, I'd like to be a spy, but in this life, I don't want to risk my life every day.  

And yet, a lot of what I do still fits into that mold of the qualities that attracted me to that recruitment event. I still look for ways to get a pressure adrenaline rush, to observe things beyond the front people put out for the world to see, to problem-solve and find patterns, to have variety in my daily life, and to challenge myself.

So I was beyond excited to find out about Spyscape, the spy museum that just opened in New York City.  Part museum, where you can learn about Alan Turing and breaking the Enigma code in WWII, or the capture of Robert Hanssen, or The Limping Lady (Virginia Hall), the coolest part about it (to me) is that it also includes a series of tests and challenges that result in each participant getting a unique "Spy Profile."  After receiving a bracelet with a scannable tag when you check in, each visitor can complete IQ tests, personality tests, risk assessment tests, an encryption challenge, a deception challenge, a special ops challenge (with laser beams! Extra cool because I've always wanted to be Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment), and a surveillance challenge.

Now, to my fiancé, the museum was equally exciting but for slightly different reasons.  He's a huge James Bond fan, so while I was all about the tests and challenges, he was getting wrapped up in the gadgets that inspired Q's creations and the spy stories.  The tests were casually fun to him, while they got me all charged up ready to go like I'd had five espressos and was gunning for an Olympic medal (gold, of course).  When I heard him laugh loudly while we were taking the personality tests and asked him why, he said, "It just asked if I do well under stress." (He doesn't.)  Next it was time for the risk assessment test, a test in which you have six attempts to pump a virtual balloon that can break at any time.  You get $1 for each pump that it doesn't break, but only if you "collect" the money before it breaks.  After six "collections," you're done, and that's the amount of money you earn.  The second pump on the first attempt breaks the balloon, to make you scared of the risk and less likely to keep pumping on subsequent collection attempts.  So at the end, I asked my fiancé how much money he'd earned.

"Six," he replied.

"Six? What do you mean six?  Six on one attempt?  I mean all together.  How much did you have after all six attempts?"

"Six," he replied again.

"I don't get it."

"I got six."

"So... wait... you never pumped more than once?"

"Of course not. I collected after each pump. Because it might break."

"What did it tell you at the end?"

"That I should try taking some more risks -- like trying hot sauce."

I, meanwhile, went up to 50 pumps on one attempt.  I'm a bit of a risk taker, at least when it comes to virtual balloons.

When it came time for the surveillance challenge, my competitiveness (with myself, not with my fiancé) really kicked in.  This, after all, was basically what I did in college while directing live television.  The participant is encircled by the feeds from approximately 60 numbered CCTV cameras in a giant room while wearing a headset with a mic and has a limited amount of time to spot things on the camera feeds and answer questions through the mic about what's going on in the camera views.  Each station has several headsets, so several people can do the exercise at the same time.  A woman casually looked around her as she searched.  My fiancé looked with more decisiveness.  And I, hands on hips, did my best impression of Skyfall's young Q searching for Javier Bardem in London's subway system as I spun around the room and announced the answers with finality into my mic.  But then... then... blasphemy of blasphemies... my mic stopped working.  I kept saying the answer over and over, louder and louder.  The woman next to me looked at me like I was crazy.  But didn't she understand?  This was my greatest skill, and the system was recording my abilities incorrectly!  The recorded voice asking the questions over the headset announced I had run out of time on that question.  And then the next.  And then the next.  I hung up my headset and stared bleakly at my fiancé.

"My mic stopped working.  I got them all right, but it wasn't acknowledging my speaking.  It thinks I didn't answer three questions."

"It's okay, it's just a game," he said.

"Yeah, but it's going to have my profile wrong now. I got them right. And it thinks I got them wrong."

"Twelve out of fifteen's not bad."

"But I didn't get twelve out of fifteen! I got fifteen out of fifteen!"

He shrugged.  "Nothing you can do."

"Hm. I wonder if that's true.  I wonder if the system will let me do it again."

And so I did the whole thing over.  It still screwed up and didn't recognize that I knew where the man in the blue and white checkered shirt on the payphone was or the painting of the woman with the red lips (I know where both are, and I still remember their camera numbers), but at least I got 13/15 that time. I'd have done it again, but my fiancé would probably think I'm even weirder than he already does. And let's be honest -- that's already pretty weird.

I worked my way through the rest of the challenges and tests with equal competitiveness, but then I got to the part that two days later is still bugging me.  On one of the brainpower challenges is this question:

What is the next number in the sequence?

12    6    4    2    1    1/2

I was stumped.  Not just "I don't get it" stumped but "I don't get it and it's making me mad" stumped.  I wondered about it all day.  I decided it was unsolvable without more information.  I complained about it to my fiancé.

"It's about the experience, Jessica," he said, laughing and shaking his head and hoping I would give it up so we could watch Sherlock.

"No, it's about doing it right and the best and winning!  Do you think spies are cool with just doing it for the experience?"

"No, but they're spies. You're doing it for the experience of being a spy."

"Right. Which means the experience of doing it to win."

So I had to solve this problem.  So then the next day I sent it off to my parents, who came to the same conclusion I did.  Though there might be logic to it if it's two interwoven sequences, with the numbers provided there are at least three different possible answers if it's two interwoven sequences in the pattern A, B, A, B.  One possibility is sequence A is "divide by two" and sequence B is "divide by two and then square the smaller factor."  That gives the next number in the sequence as 1/16. (1/2 / 2 = 1/4. 1/4 squared = 1/16).  But another potential answer is that pattern B is "subtract (x-1)" where x is the amount subtracted in the previous link of sequence B (6-2 = 4; 2-1 = 1; 1/2 - 0 = 1/2), and so 1/2 is then the next number in the sequence.  Yet another possibility is that pattern B is "subtract x/2" where x is the amount subtracted in the previous link of sequence B.  In that case, 1/2 - 1/2 = 0.  So 1/16, 1/2, and 0 are all potential solutions if the sequence is two interwoven sequences, and therefore the question is unsolvable as two interwoven sequences unless more numbers in the sequence are given (specifically, the number before 12).  If it's only one sequence rather than two interwoven sequences, then I'm stumped.  As are my parents.  As is the math genius my dad sent it to.

So, in conclusion, I love Spyscape, I hate to lose, I really hate not being able to solve problems, and if you or anyone you know is capable of solving the above sequence, please please please tell me the answer.