ColumnWhen I was a junior in high school, two girls took their own lives. Twenty years later, I realize how writing about a friend’s suicide has shaped my outlook on storytelling.

Twenty years ago this week, my mom was standing in the kitchen and asked me a simple question: Do you know Mari Mannion and Liz Gallagher?

There was something about the way she said it, or maybe the look on her face, that sent a shockwave through my body. I did know them.

On April 30th, 1994, when we were juniors in high school, Mari and Liz took their own lives and everything changed. It seemed like the whole world was focused on our school. The adults did what they could to protect us from the media (two young, popular girls committing suicide in a nice Chicago suburb is news, whether it should be or not, and our school was bombarded).

The sense that outsiders saw our collective loss as “a story” was troubling and set the stage for how I think about writing today.

I worry a lot about whether some of the stories I share are mine to tell.

I hadn’t planned to write about Mari and Liz, or suicide, but today, I can’t think about anything else. I woke up and was instantly transported back to 1994 via Facebook. Old photos. Names popping up that I hadn’t thought about in years. I dug out a photo from camp and a cartoon Mari gave me when I was sad after a breakup in high school.

Liz had been an acquaintance of mine. I didn’t know her well and don’t mean to diminish the impact of her loss by focusing more on Mari. Hundreds of other people have Liz stories.

Mari and I met in grade school at a girl scout camp and I instantly decided she was the coolest person ever. We went to different schools, and so didn’t really reconnect until a year or so later when we were in a production of “Little Guys and Little Dolls.” Mari was thrown into the chorus as a Hot Box girl and I was cast as General Cartwright. A role I got because it involved not singing and not dancing. Basically, I marched.

Our parts left us with lots of downtime. My biggest memory of that show was during one rehearsal, the director saying, “Libby and Mari, if you can’t stop talking you might as well just leave.” So we left.

While we hung out with different crowds in high school, we chose to be dance partners in a gym class called Dance of the Decades — which shockingly few boys signed up for — and worked on the school newspaper together.

I write all of this for context, but also, I recognize, as a self-conscious way to legitimize my relationship with Mari. To give myself permission to write this story. Which is exactly what I felt I needed to do in high school when I wrote a profile of her for the school newspaper.

Because I was a junior, the profile should have been written by one of the senior editors. But, as my friend and I remember it, I basically freaked out at a staff meeting and said that I would be writing the profile. I don’t know if I cried or just looked so intense and scary that someone said yes, but I was the one who went to Mari’s house and talked to her mom about Mari’s life.

As I walked into her living room, I felt for the first time a very specific sense of anxiety that has resurfaced over and over again in my career: Fear that others might think I am using their pain for my own self-interest.

I felt an intense need for her mom to know that Mari was my friend, even though I wasn’t in her close circle and she probably hadn’t heard my name in years. I wanted to be recognized as someone who loved her, not seen as another asshole reporter chasing the Oak Park Suicide Story.

My only goal was to to write something her mom, family members and her closest friends would like.

I was intensely conscious of the fact that her best friends might be like, “Who the hell are YOU to write about Mari?” It was high school; she was popular, I was a grunge kid. While the social divides weren’t pulled from a John Hughes movie, people did tend to have school friends and friend friends. We were school friends.

I was consumed with the idea that people would think I was trying to act like I was closer to Mari than I was. It’s highly possible that no one gave a shit and that, as a 16-year-old, I was only at the center of my own mind, not anyone else’s. But try telling a 16-year-old that.

It’s a fact that nothing that happens to me and me alone is worth writing about. So, even when I’m writing a personal essay, I’m almost always telling someone else’s story — whether they agreed to let me or not.

Years later, I read David Sedaris’ story, “Repeat After Me,” and thought: “Oh god, yes. That.” In the story, Sedaris writes about how no one is safe around him. All of his family’s stories become his. There’s a parrot involved. It’s a wonderful story.

At the time I read it, it resonated because I was writing about my grandmother’s suicide attempt and wondering what she would think if she could have read the story.

The answer, for some, is not to do this — to leave these stories unwritten. But I can’t.

So, I have decided that if what I am writing is true, and if I am writing a story because, like today, I cannot imagine not writing it, I have to trust that my intention will be felt by readers.

In all of the back and forth on Facebook, a close friend of Mari and Liz’s posted a comment: “Libby, I just re-read the profile that you did on Mari. I’m not sure how you were able to do that back then, but I’m so glad that you did.”

How much that comment means to me is impossible to explain. All I know is that 20 years ago, I felt consumed by the need to write something true, which is exactly how I feel now.

That Happened is Libby Lowe’s weekly column for EcoSalon. Here, she shares personal stories, and analyzes news and pop culture through a feminist lens. Keep in touch with Libby @LibbyLowe.

Images: Libby Lowe

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ColumnFour years of Foodie Underground means a lot of column writing. Here’s a look back.

Something last week made me go and search for the first Foodie Underground ever written. I remembered that it was around springtime, but couldn’t remembered the month. As it turned out, my first column devoted to my vision of good food was published on April 9, 2010 and it was titled “Amateur is the New Black” – this was back when I liked mysterious headlines. I read through, partly cringing, partly laughing. Reading your own writing from several years ago is a good way to induce these kinds of reactions.

Four years. That’s how long I have been writing this column. Four years, especially in the world of internet, is a long time. It’s like Foodie Underground is a toddler (and nowadays it even has its own website). Mostly well behaved, sometimes a little obnoxious, especially on those deadline days that I feel like I am grasping for a subject. Sometimes I simply feel like I am repeating the same thing I say every week, “Eat real food. Cook your own food. Don’t buy processed. Think about where your food comes from. Be creative in the kitchen.” But eventually it comes together, and the following Monday, it pops up once again.

It has been four years of writing about good food, exploring questions of food politics, all with a good dose of snark here and there. And while a weekly deadline sneaks up on you every single week, it’s a pretty fun thing to write. So in honor of Foodie Underground’s 4th birthday, I figured I would pull together a list of some of my personal favorite columns (in no particular order). A little Foodie Underground retrospective so to say.

I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.

1. Formulating the Foolproof Foodie Menu

Hint: it involves mason jars and beets.

2. The 10 Types of Foodies and What to Do With Them

Because everyone loves defining themselves.

3. Things You Wish You Had Overheard a Foodie Say

“I name all of my fresh eggs before I eat them. I find that when my food has a personal identity I enjoy it more.”

4. Fast Food, Fast Fashion… It’s All About Choice

“If we expect change in the food system, we have to demand it, and that means making a choice every time we eat.”

5. The Summer Bucket List

There’s the 2012 version and the 2013 version.

6. Why Do We Love Markets?

I think I like this one purely for the photos.

7. Everything in Moderation

Including moderation of course.

8. The Beauty of Eating Outdoors

Because eating outside is always better. Always.

9. 50 Pick Up Lines for Scoring a Foodie

“You’re as intoxicating as a home distilled liquor.”

10. The Secret Diary of a Foodie

Dear diary…

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

The post 4 Years of a Column About Good Food: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnDear headline writers. This is not Spinal Tap.

Made you click! Quite a task, it seems, in today’s hyper-competitive online media marketplace. After all, this story is just one of dozens, maybe even hundreds, that will compete for your attention today. And the truth is that some of us will use any trick in the book to get at your precious eyeballs, including cry-wolf, volume-to-11 headlines.

We all get snagged this way from time to time. Evidently, some—let’s say quantifiable lots—more than others. In many ways, we seem to have come full circle back to the days of the penny press and its yellow journalism, with an omnipresent din of hawkers on every digital street corner: Extra! Extra! Every single word guaranteed to be over the top!

But really, is everything an extra? Is there nothing interesting that remains appropriately under the top? Apparently not much.

The noise starts early in the day, for some even before we get out of bed, our smartphones serving up morning copy that promises to be “truly unbelievable!” and photo stories that are nothing short of cap-S “stunning!” and cap B-“breathtaking!” Yes, the a.m. rush isn’t complete without being informed that today—every day, in fact—is the best of times and the worst of times, the end of something as we know it, and the magnificent start of something new. Do we dare miss out?

Here’s one from Upworthy, a good site with a lot of compelling material: “This Is Not A Joke. You May Laugh, But You Shouldn’t. It’s Quite Horrifying—It has to be seen to be believed. But you still won’t believe it.” Really? This is about a bizarre napkin designed to cover the mouths of Japanese women while they eat hamburgers. Insanely weird and sexist? Yes. Warranting a headline that would make a civil defense air-raid siren blush? Maybe not.

Moving on, how does (did?) this grab you: “Antibiotic resistance will mean the end of just about everything as we know it.” Right. That’s from Salon, a way-too-frequent flyer on click-me-now air, and purveyor of other gems such as “Psychopaths: Some are just like us!” (Are they?!) and “Embrace your small penis, men: Everyone else is lying anyway!” Mmhmm. Thanks.

Of course, nothing screams like good sex—or rather, porn. Lots of porn. “Food porn.” “Ruin porn.” “Nature porn.” And, for the more bookish, here is a related, sexualizing the unsexualizable trend that won’t seem to go away: I call it “A Million Shades of 50 Shades.” Politics: “Israel’s 50 shades of dismay over Iran nuke deal.” (GlobalPost). Science: “50 Shades of Grey (Matter): How Science is Defying BDSM Stereotypes.” (Huffington Post) Literature: “You Want Erotic? The Countless Shades of Anaïs Nin.” (Yeah, well, that last one was mine. At least I went for book on book.)

Of course, there are easy pickings on both our Left and Right. Obamacare: “Worse Than Slavery.” Debt ceiling: “How to prepare for the… apocalypse.” The cacophony in this category is truly beyond the pale. Even down-the-middle CNN (I know, if CNN represents the middle, we’re in real trouble) recently offered us this, just in case tornadic destruction wasn’t enough to grab our attention: “Grandma’s Last Words: ‘Get Me Out.’” Thank you, CNN.

Want more? Just Google something. Anything. You’ll find a headline to suit your most highly caffeinated, info-active mood about all things est—biggest, baddest, worst, best. The hunt for something incredible (in the strictest sense of the word) is like shooting fish in barrel. In fact, you don’t even have to search. It will come to you. (To avoid piling on, let’s pass for now on deliberately misleading headlines, a story unto itself: accuracy as collateral damage.)

Yet strangely, it doesn’t seem too long ago in Webville when superlatives more or less meant something, and an Onion headline was an Onion headline, and not mistaken (at second blush, at least) for real information.

Step Right Up

In a past lifetime, when I was a first-year Journalism grad student in Chicago, headline writing was part of a fearsome, nuts-and-bolts J-school boot camp. (One prof was a formidable ex-marine, in fact, boasting a handlebar mustache and a hair-trigger red pen.) The effort was like puzzle-solving—and not everyone was good at it. Limited space, limited words, a story to represent and (just as with the lead) a promise to be fulfilled if a reader should take the time to engage. And, yes, eyeballs to grab, too. All told, creating a headline is like wrestling with a mini Rubik’s cube.

The idea of selling your story often taps into a different side of the brain than actually covering it. Indeed, in most editorial worlds, headlines are not written by the writer of the piece itself, but by talented copy editors and, increasingly (online), by editors themselves. Writers who have been around will tell you of the countless times they opened their paper (or magazine, or laptop) and saw their copy under some weird words that made them think hmmm—or, more likely, “oh god, no.”

In any case, no matter who’s behind what’s on top of a story, there’s nothing wrong with selling copy with snappy headlines. They can be fun and creative and (hopefully) expository—an art form unto themselves. And no one, myself included, wants you to pass over his or her work for want of intrigue. (Kudos, by the way, to someone in these pages who recently walked the line and came out shining with “The Universe is So Weird! There’s Plastic on Saturn’s Moon?”)

Moreover, facts (and there so many of them) are facts: In the not-too-distant past, each day we were confronted with a limited number of “stories”—a newspaper or two, maybe a magazine or three, some TV to choose from. But today, we’re hit with thousands of them during our waking hours, most of which come to us online, as for-profit media outlets scratch away and beg so very hard for our mindpsace. Let’s be honest: no one should expect a publishing effort to be okay with simply fading into the background.

But as readers, many of us need to do a better job considering the cry-wolf factor as we scan our screens. (Face it, there’s not going to be an uprising anytime soon that says to HuffPo, Salon and all the others, “keep pulling that crap with the headlines and you’ll lose market share.” It sure would be nice though, huh?) Maybe it is just one breath of awareness before we offer up our prized click. That nanosecond when we can say: “Wait. Really? Am I really going to reach for that bright shiny thing?”

Finally, consider that subtlety isn’t dead—it’s just, well, subtle. Noise isn’t the key to good copy or truthful news. In fact, it might serve to tell you that what follows is not as advertised. Discernment is what it’s cracked up to be. The more game you bring, the better gems you are going to find.

I guess it’s like anything else in the days of the horrifying, unbelievable, incredible Information Age—it’s our job to consume wisely and be on lookout for what is real and true under the sea of hype. That said, headline writers, please stop screaming at me! On a scale of 1 to 10, even for the sensational, 10 is enough. This is not Spinal Tap.

(As I write, this just in: “Man who stripped naked and stuck a fire extinguisher hose up his bottom in a hotel corridor walks free.”—The Independent. Seriously?)

Scott Adelson is EcoSalon’s Senior Editor of HyperKulture, a monthly column that explores opening cultural doors to initiate personal change. He is also the author of InPRINT, which reviews and discusses books, new and old. You can reach him at scott at adelson dot org and follow him @scottadelson on Twitter.

Related Reading:

HyperKulture: Dear Oprah, Please Tell Us Who We Are — Atheists, Feminists And Other ‘Others’ Need To Know

HyperCulture: From The Sanbox to Syria – Tribe, Ego and Decision Making

HyperKulture: In Swoon’s Way – Time traveling and Staring Down Florence Syndrome

InPRINT: You Want Erotic? The Countless Shades of Anaïs Nin

InPRINT: Albert Camus and the Biggest Question of All

Images: Cory Doctorow (top) and The Library of Congress

The post Read this F*&%ing Story! — Spinal Tap Headlines and You: HyperKulture appeared first on EcoSalon.

A letter (of love?) from Jack London to fellow writer Anna Strunsky.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? In turning to author and journalist Jack London, we are faced with a question – where does close friendship end and love begin?

Dear Anna,

April 3, 1901

Did I say that the human might be filed in categories? Well, and if I did, let me qualify — not all humans. You elude me. I cannot place you, cannot grasp you. I may boast that of nine out of ten, under given circumstances, I can forecast their action; that of nine out of ten, by their word or action, I may feel the pulse of their hearts. But of the tenth I despair. It is beyond me. You are that tenth.

Were ever two souls, with dumb lips, more incongruously matched! We may feel in common — surely, we oftimes do — and when we do not feel in common, yet do we understand; and yet we have no common tongue. Spoken words do not come to us. We are unintelligible. God must laugh at the mummery.

The one gleam of sanity through it all is that we are both large temperamentally, large enough to often understand. True, we often understand but in vague glimmering ways, by dim perceptions, like ghosts, which, while we doubt, haunt us with their truth. And still, I, for one, dare not believe; for you are that tenth which I may not forecast.

Am I unintelligible now? I do not know. I imagine so. I cannot find the common tongue.

Large temperamentally — that is it. It is the one thing that brings us at all in touch. We have, flashed through us, you and I, each a bit of universal, and so we draw together. And yet we are so different.

I smile at you when you grow enthusiastic? It is a forgivable smile — nay, almost an envious smile. I have lived twenty-five years of repression. I learned not to be enthusiastic. It is a hard lesson to forget. I begin to forget, but it is so little. At the best, before I die, I cannot hope to forget all or most. I can exult, now that I am learning, in little things, in other things; but of my things, and secret things doubly mine, I cannot, I cannot. Do I make myself intelligible? Do you hear my voice? I fear not. There are poseurs. I am the most successful of them all.

Jack

Is this the voice of an eloquent man overcome with passion? Clearly. What kind of passion? Good question. At the time of writing, London was a willing participant in a loveless marriage to his first wife, Bessie Madern – a union designed to create stability and children. It would falter, and a divorce would follow in 1904. Through this marriage ran the close friendship he shared with Strunsky. Both writers were fascinated with the nature of love, and would collaborate on The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903), a fictionalised exploration of two philosophies of love with Strunsky taking the romantic view, London the scientific.

So is this a letter exploring a friendship and foreshadowing a piece of academic enquiry – or is it the work of a man who can’t contain his romantic feelings? We may never know.

Images: Wikimedia Commons & JackLondons.net.

The post The Love Letters Project #9: Jack London and Anna Strunsky appeared first on EcoSalon.

The top stories of the week at EcoSalon.

Remember that thing people used to do with pens and paper? Managing Editor Amy DuFault ponders the joy of the written word.

If getting “back to basics” for you means “the shape you were in before the traditional Christmas bloat-fest,” here are 20 foods to skim that unwanted belly fat right off you.

For ex-prisoners keen to reconnect with the outside world, the California Reentry & Insight Garden Programs in San Quentin show how sustainability can lead the way for rehabilitation.

When water is an increasingly precious global commodity, how can the water-guzzling clothing industry respond? Writer Kestrel Jenkins looks at fashion outlets swimming against the mainstream current.

And if you’re waiting impatiently for spring to have sprung, feast your eyes on these 30 gorgeous photos of farming & agriculture.

The post The Friday 5: Back To Basics Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Two-Volume Novel

The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.

– Dorothy Parker

My daughter came home from school the other day with this Dorothy Parker poem scribbled in 11-year-old penmanship down her palm and onto her wrist.

“I got in trouble for writing on myself,” she said.

“It’s that ink. They think it’s going to poison you,” I told her.

“Will it?” She asked.

“Not if you wash it off tonight,” I said, but by dinner time I could see only faint traces of blue ink swirls where Miss Parker had made her mark. I’ve never asked my daughter why she loves this poem, but she recites it out loud while walking, has written it into her own stories, and uses it as a reference point when talking about love to me.

What are these mantras we carry with us throughout life and how do they become personally significant? We all shoulder them, greet the new day and sip coffee with them, yet most of the time they stay buried and secret. You don’t have to be a writer, be well-read or even be an appreciator of the written word to have a phrase or two tucked away. You can learn them through other people, through song, through family blessings, through oral stories that seep into your being. We all hold a life language.

I started writing poetry seriously when I was around 16; my first time being published was in the high school literary magazine. By 25, I was published in three literary journals and had taken to carrying a Moleskine in my back pocket alongside my silver, monogrammed Drum cigarette case. I thought I was invincible. I’d been writing poems and short stories for as long as my hand could remember letters formed into words and sentences. What did I want to be when I grew up? A writer, always a writer. I was going to be a poetic boxer to knock people flat with visions of life they’d never seen. Bam.

American short story writer Raymond Carver described the writing profession as being a “witness” to life.

We do need them, don’t we?

When my son grows violent as his way of making a point, I say to him: “Always remember, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.'”

When I leave a place behind and watch it turn tiny in a side mirror I hear Kerouac’s calming ending to On The Road.

I hear Ippolit all the time, talking to me from the pages of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, telling me we can never get to the core of what it is we truly want to say.

Walking in cities, I silently recite:

I have seen him in the markets of Africa,
and on the shores of New Orleans,
And though he wasn’t there,
I saw him in my dreams.

I wrote it when I was 19 and had just started traveling the world and I to this day walk in stride to the word beats. I remember those places and that I was stronger then. Even having found him, I search still for that place. Do you understand what I’m saying?

I can’t help but compare my own words with my daughter’s beloved Parker mantra and wonder: Is it biological for us to feel powerful from a lack of love, or is it the intangible soul searching for the power of the written word? Something that curls up comfortably like a cat in our hollows?

I asked my daughter later that night, “Why do you like that poem so much?”

“It symbolizes my life right now,” she said.

Looking at her snuggled there in bed, with her quilt pulled up to her ears, I knew I didn’t need to know anything else.

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: APM Alex

The post Between the Lines: The Power of the Written Word appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnThis could be your reader. She deserves better.

Did you hear a funny sound or see smoke trickling out of your computer last week? That was the sound of lady website XOJane blowing up the internet by publishing a post by said site’s health editor on how using birth control such as condoms or the pill is, like, totes the pits, which caused just about the entire int-her-net to clutch our pearls and foam at the mouth.

I’m not so terribly offended that an adult woman writing for a professional website in the capacity of health editor would claim that only fat goody-goodies take the pill. What really offends me is that apparently this is what passes for good writing on the internet these days. THIS.

“Yup, on my bad days I am the glowering, self-critical too-much-eyeliner-on nightmare that terrorizes every workplace setting I choose to inhabitate with the kind of toxic insecurity that destroys … well, it’s not particularly compelling to anyone else or powerful in any way, so it doesn’t destroy much except my own self-worth and happiness, from hour to hour, until I hang out with a friend or something and the self-obsession and negativity recedes and I feel normal again!

(Does this stuff ever end? Do I have to hurl myself into a mirror? Why didn’t I watch that movie more carefully so I can reference it better? Jesus, mang. I’m so BORED of being UNHAPPY.)”

Is this good writing? Jane Pratt – she of Sassy and Jane – says it is and that it’s why her website is awesome. She says it’s “riveting and raw.” But really, is it good? I’m asking honestly. I’d form an opinion myself, but I have no goddamn clue what’s going on in that paragraph.  It was supposed to be about eye liner, and I’m confused.

As those of us who do it for a living know, writing for the internet can be challenging. We contend with a lot of prejudice, both from people who assume we’re not good enough to get into print (not the case) and from those who assume we’ve never heard of spell-checking (sometimes the case). But in our defense, online articles go from pitch to publish really fast, and humans make typos and mistakes. Very few websites have the leisurely pace or the proofreading staff of The New Yorker, is what I’m saying. We already have a bad rap, so writing professional stories like a teenager scribbling in a diary Does Not Help. Not to mention the fact – you read it here first – that readers don’t read dishy, confessional blogginess and think, “Wow, what a raw and edgy personality!” They read it and think, “Wow, that girl should book some extra therapy sessions.”

There’s wonderful writing on the internet, and it’s not all about the quote-unquote important stuff. I’ve read slideshows on the Top 10 Celeb Booby Shots and captions to cat videos that were so hysterical they made my eyes bleed. Great writing has nothing to do with being formal or stuffy or serious or even appropriate. But I think it’s fair to say that to be called “good writing,” something should meet a basic standard of mechanical proficiency, readability, and clarity. To call this kind of sub-grammatical apunctuated word salad “riveting and raw”… well that kind of chaps my ass on behalf of all of us who try every day to form complete and coherent sentences – maybe even good ones that make you laugh or make you think.  Because we do try. Very hard. “Inhabitate”? I mean, really. Come on, now. Just because it’s the internet doesn’t mean you get to make up words.

Lo, our beloved English language, it changeth even as we speak. And that’s natural. But it’s under enough siege already, what with the all the textin n stuf. Must we now consider this acceptable, nay, better-than-average? Is this the future? A lazy future in which every professionally-written sentence sounds like a text from a thirteen-year-old girl who got hold of some Ritalin and marabou heels? (OMG you guys it’s SO awesome! Like, FOR REALS! HAHAHAHAHAHA I’M SO EDGY!)

As much as I feel bad for English-speaking humanity, I also feel bad for the writer herself. Because that’s another tough thing about the web: when you have a bad day, an uninspired day, and you churn out some junk because you’re on deadline and you have other stuff to get done (which happens to all of us), it lives forever. A clunker story doesn’t just disappear into the ether as soon as the next issue of the magazine hits newsstands. Nowadays, it’s always just a Google away, and that writer will forevermore be known as That Girl Who Wrote the Ridiculous Thing. It’s rough.

But maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe in twenty years we’ll be analyzing the sub-grammatical apunctuated word salad the way we analyze ee cummings or James Joyce or David Foster Wallace, even though now it seems like the unholy love child of LOLcats and Twitter. And if that happens, I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I can haz cynanide?”

Editor’s note: This latest installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life, is penned by the fabulous Ms. Ford.

The post The Insider’s Guide to Life: On Writing Good appeared first on EcoSalon.

There are a lot of people my age who yammer on endlessly about the demise of snail mail. These people love to wax nostalgic about the superiority of old-timey letters written on paper –  as if the simple act of using a Bic ballpoint automatically imbues writers with the eloquence of Charlotte Bronte. I could not disagree more, but I happen to love email – it’s fast and practical and also paper-free, which is good news for the rain forests.

And email is better than ever now, thanks to a new program that lets you know if your email message is projecting a negative tone. This program will alert users if their emails sound angry, insulting or unfriendly. There are those who will object to this software, and rail against it as censorship or corporate control, or some such nonsense. But I think it’s a great idea. Writing is hard and people need all the help they can get – if using this software means you’ll antagonize fewer friends and colleagues, then what’s the harm?  Similar software has been developed to detect sarcasm in outgoing emails; again, this is terrific, but why stop there? I think technology should help us all it can – the following are other ways computers should be rigged to save us from ourselves:

• If you are over the age of twelve and you attempt to make a smiley-face emoticon out of punctuation marks, your computer should seize up and turn itself off in protest. The same holds true if you try to forward a video of cats playing the piano.
• If you are bragging endlessly about your kids, your job, or your beachfront property, a scolding message should appear on the screen, warning you that no one wants to hear it.
• If you are breaking up with someone via email, your computer should sadly inform you that you are simply not fit to live.
• When you’ve wasted an entire day playing Solitaire or Googling people from high school, a pop-up image should appear on your screen, sternly advising you to get a life.
• Computers should come equipped with some sort of virtual sodium pentothal that prevents people from blatantly misrepresenting themselves on eharmony, Match.com and other dating websites.
• If you are married and you try to contact an old boyfriend on Facebook, an ominous stick-figure of someone playing with fire should appear and warn you that you’re about to ruin your life.
• If you attempt to forward an email chain letter, a hand should reach out from your keyboard and bitch-slap you till you come to your senses. If the letter warns that breaking the chain will result in bad luck, illness or monetary loss, the computer should deliver a quick but intensely painful electric shock.
• On the other hand, I think all email providers should embed in every single email message this video by comedian Merril Markoe. It is a two minute clip (which is entirely in French for no good reason) and shows Markoe faking a heart attack while her dogs look on, sweetly and stupidly oblivious, happily depositing chew toys on her limp and lifeless body. The video is goofy and subversively warmhearted, and if everyone watched it several times every day, the world would be a happier place. Now that computers rule the world, they should be obligated to spread cheer wherever they can. Really, it’s the least they can do.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: Ed Yourdon

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ColumnAll the words in our language, and you have to keep using these?

Fresh. Fierce. Fabulous.

Smoldering.

Curated. Edited.

The New York Times, smarting from such journalistic inanities, has compiled a list of the most overused words and phrases in fashion writing. (The Times suggests “culled” as the curated of 2011. I vote for “distilled.”)

In addition to those words listed above, the Times takes umbrage at “DIY fashion,” though they must be all right with upcycling (alas, better luck next year, Etsy).

Also popular in a paragraph near you, everyone’s favorite suffix: [Insert noun of choice] -ista. At this point, we’re pretty much anythingistas. Retroista, travelista, foodista, fashionista. It’s surely a bittersweet irony for Scrabbleistas.

Meanwhile, the paper says prefix aggravation came to us in 2010 by way of eco-. Eco-kill me. Ecoista? Now you’re really smoldering, hot pants.

The gray lady is probably right: it’s all gotten a bit redonk.

What are we, Cosmopolitan? When not even Vogue can spell Lafite correctly, I fear for the future of fashion media. (In September Vogue‘s defense, the misspelling was just a hop skip and a bullet point down from a sentence that actually, swear-to-Tyra, contained the words “freshly fierce”, which is clearly to blame for the subsequent “Lafitte.” It’s hard to recover from stupid, even if it is for champagne. I can’t confirm without risking yet another debilitating episode of PTSD, but I am 99% sure there was a certain other f-bomb in that sentence, as well.)

To wit, most holy loathing goes to the most overused word in fashion: Fabulous.

Whenever I hear the f-word oozing from someone’s mouth, I cringe. Lately it’s escalated to full-blown wincing. I’m like Powder; I can pretty much psychically detect when it’s about to be uttered, and I shudder in spasms of editorial pain. You can imagine the situation following the release of Kimora Lee Simmons’ book, Fabulosity.

No really, that scarf is fabulous? An organic diaper is fabulous? Biodegradable picnic plates are fabulous now? Pumpkin. Let me tell you about fabulous, and how not fucking fabulous scarves are. Fabulous is a nine-carat cocktail ring. Fabulous is a trip to the Caribbean on a private jet with the Italian guy you’ve known for five minutes which you’ll never tell your father about. Fabulous is gloves that aren’t safe brown, shoes that aren’t bunion comfortable and dinners that begin at 10 o’clock. That’s a fabulous life. I’m not saying it’s a good life or a moral life or that I’m living it, I’m just saying a scarf by any other adjective is still a square of fabric you wrap around your throat when it’s kinda cold.

Fabulous is not a new tea strainer. It is not a pair of “stylish” comfort shoes that look marginally acceptable enough for public display on weekends with cousins from the weird side of the family. I’ll tell you what else fabulous isn’t: fresh. Used improperly, which it always is, fabulous more closely resembles flab, or flan, or fanny, and bloat and lousy and other words with too much saliva for my tastes. Unless it’s being used to describe something stunningly not normal in any way, you’re just making everyone think the word “bulbous”. Please let’s quit ruining fabulous.

Fantastic isn’t much better than fabulous, but at least it has the advantage of being accurate. You could genuinely find a scarf fantastic, if you’ve just spent the last seven hours freezing your tears out in New York because the airline lost your luggage and you foolishly forgot to stuff that scarf in your carry-on, for example. It’s pretty fantastic to be warm. It’s still not fabulous, though.

There are other words, and classes of words – whole families and clans, in fact – for which I suffer my craft. Portmanteaus reside in a very special tundra in the Arctic-most nethers of my icy heart. For the recent admission of “shopitude,” I apologize to humanity. Someone let the cockles out on that one, and we’ve put them back in the cage where they belong (the cockles!). Portmanteaus are especially insidious; they’re the puns of our time. Let’s stop aggregating syllables and calling it original content. “Refudiate” and “strategery” can be forgiven because they were invented by special people and are only baby portmanteaux anyway, but grellow? Not a value-add.

There are some very nice words out there, like spectacular and lovely and brilliant and modern (as long as it’s not thoroughly or bracingly modern). But so far, deletion hasn’t come to nearly enough worn words. In honor of a new year for new media, and also because this is my post, I’ll start.

Vacay. Die. Die a blunted backspace death right along with info, meds, mod and delish.

Douchebag. Douche. Douchey. Wait for it: Douchebaggery. Every time someone says this from now on, I’m going to respond with “Yeah, what a tampon.” “So tampony.” “Hey guys, I call tamponigans.” (Breaking the portmanteau rule there, but I believe it’s justified.) Think about it, people. Jon Stewart dropping the d-bag every other sentence is not only sort of disgusting, it’s misogynistic in a casual way that makes the “pussy” of 90s popularity seem downright affectionate. Women who can “hang with the boys” say it now, but so do moms. Wow, us.

It’s Official. It’s official: We need to say this next to true things about as much as we need to say “literally”. Which is never.

Superlatives. The Strangest 23 Spoons Found in a Drawer! The 10 Wackiest Drawings by My Cat…This Week! The Boss’s Craziest Text Ever! Let’s give the -est a rest.

Fun with latinates. It’s converse and orient, not conversate and orientate. It’s delicious, not deliciousness. When did we start piling on the extra endings like an order of supersized poutine? How I yearn for six-pack verbs.

Jeggings. Oops, sorry! How on earth and the laws of physics did those manage to squeeze into this tiny little post? God only knows.

Pop of color. It’s simply incredible how good colors look on things. Walls, rooms, outfits, floral arrangements, websites, salads, fingernails, porches, bathrooms, cheeks, children, mantles, macarons, irises. A pop of color as opposed to no color really shakes up the sad ubiquity of blank, empty, invisible and clear we keep seeing everywhere, just running amok. You might wonder how we ever discovered that a pop of color is a good thing? Fact: we still haven’t, which is why we should be grateful to style writers everywhere, teaching us about this fabulously fabulous trick. Life looking a little bland? Spice it up with a pop of color!

Shortcuts by Rachael Ray™. She had me at EVOO – had me middling my brow, and I haven’t the Botox to face the show again. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ready-chopped garlic cloves is now RCGC and one large can of stewed tomatoes is now OLCST and extra handfuls of salt and cheese is a given is EHSCIG. You have to admit, using letters instead of words is a real handy shortcut, sort of like throwing four or five processed foods together instead of cooking a recipe. Sadly, EVOO pops up all over, from mommyblogs to foodie sites to recipe databases. When I had to ask my mother on the fourth time hearing it this Christmas what “The BY” stood for, and learned it’s The Back Yard, I wept and then I drank and then I drank the Nyquil, all of it and then I slept the artificial sleep of morose spearmint misery. I fear this is a battle we’re losing. Well played, Rachael, well played.

This is the first in your editor’s new column for 2011, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, politics, carbs and fonts. If she’s got the strength for it, there will be more to come. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: kennymatic

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There was a moment in time when digital watches came on the scene in a big way. Ubiquitous Casios faced down analog timepieces in the marketplace to the extent that conventional wisdom (read: what my parents were saying) had analog going the way of the sundial. There was chatter among adults, I recall, that “it won’t be long before kids can’t even read a clock anymore.”

Today, I sometimes wonder whether handwriting will soon be written off. I don’t recall seeing my guys actually handwrite all that much while they were growing up. I did spy their notebooks and scrawl here and there, and I think I got one or two letters from camp, but it wasn’t like when we were young and wrote on everything we could get our hands on. I do see them typing. At least I think I do; their fingers move way too fast for me to know what’s really going on between user and keyboard. They text, too. I get their texts. I do not get “notes.” In any event, I just read this story about why I’m so much smarter than my kids!

Turns out, writing by hand makes kids – and adults, for that matter – smarter. This, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article by Gwendolyn Bounds, who cites a numbers of studies, including one based on magnetic resonance imaging. The upshot of the research, she says, is that handwriting “helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.” This is the good stuff that we need to nail down early on if we’re going to know our ass from our elbows as we get on in years.

Speaking of getting on in years, we adults also reap benefits from putting pen to paper. Bounds points out that “some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.” The Week adds to the mix a number of specific benefits, including studies that show that writing by hand “can get ideas out faster” and increases neural activity, which is always fun.

And in the perception versus reality department, good handwriting makes you seem smarter, as well: “Several studies have shown that the same mediocre essay will score much higher if written with good penmanship and much lower if written out in poor handwriting,” says Vanderbilt University education professor Steve Graham. “There is a reader effect that is insidious”¦ People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.”

While this all could lead to an unfortunate bout of tech bashing, consider, says Bounds, that “new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.” I know that I got myself this little iPhone “paint” application that I read David Hockney uses, and I now find myself “coloring” again from time to time. Smarter me? Maybe. It makes me smile for sure.

So regarding my kids, I lied. My kids are way smarter than me. They certainly are when you put my 17- and 20-year-old self against where they’re at today. Beside their genetically endowed brilliance (had to), their access to and facility with information as they developed far surpassed mine in every way. The big question now is: Is information wasted on the young? Better jot that one down.

Oh, and neither of them even wears a watch.

Image: Caitlinator

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