Sandi Kahn Shelton

I go along mostly feeling as though I’m pretty much keeping up with modern life. Or at least make a passable pretense of it.

After all, I have tweeted. I have visited tumblr. I can (usually) upload and download photos. Recently I’ve learned to work not only my television set but also the DVD player and the VCR without even looking for the manual. I can program the GPS to get me places (although I often argue with it.) I even go on facebook whenever I think of it, which isn’t all that often, but still. Facebook is a well-known time suck. You could go on there and between farmville and what-Jane-Austen-character-are-you and sending and receiving little green plants, you could lose years of your life, and emerge crazier than when you went in.

But today modern life soared out in front in an effort to confuse me. I found out that I’m actually an app. Or rather "What Comes After Crazy" is.

(What Comes After Crazy is my first novel, and I still feel very protective about it, since it took me a ridiculous number of years to write, and so it lived in my head longer than most children live with their parents. And now it’s been out in the world since 2005, but, like any good parent, I still try to keep up with where it hangs out, you know. Part of that keeping track of it means that I have a google alert on it, so that whenever anybody writes anything about it, google tells me about it.)

And google has reported today that it’s an app.

Aren’t apps like when you have an iPhone and you want to know what restaurant to go to, and there’s an app for that? Or you want to check the sports scores, and so there’s an app for that?

So, here’s my question. Are people, you know, going to read a whole novel…on the phone? Is that what this means? Come on now. Do people seriously want to read on screens that are the size of their fingertips? Or does this have something to do with the iPad, which as Bloglily pointed out, may be the worst name of a product ever.

I have no idea. I’m just here, making my way through winter, leading writing workshops and working on a new novel—and every now and then, going out to once again do battle with technology: arguing with my GPS, wondering why tumblr doesn’t have an E in it, and following some tweets.

Is there an app for any of that?

I have to admit that I’ve been in something of a gray funk lately, a mood which I always think can be fixed somehow if only I would Try Harder. You know, apply myself. Join my fellow citizens at the gym. Take up line dancing. Start meditating or eating right. Sign up for a marathon.

That actually may be the very worst part of gray funks, you know–the sinking feeling that if you only had a little bit more ooomph to you, you could manage to pull yourself out of it. So you go about lecturing yourself.

Take it from me: this does not help.

So instead, I have decided to stop trying to make things better and simply give in to complaining. Here’s a list of the things that are currently bugging me.

1/ It’s March. And it’s Connecticut.

Need I say more? As I overheard a guy say today, “March is the month that can break your heart.” I suppose it is possible that I have had my heart broken by March. The weather–at least here in New England–is abominable in March, and not merely because it’s cold and gray. We’re accustomed to cold and gray; hell, we’re four months into cold and gray at this point. For a true full-blown depression, you have to look at January. That’s when it’s not only colder and grayer, but you know you have months and months left of it. But now that it’s March, it knows and you know that things could be so much better. An example: last weekend the sun shone and the temperature struggled into the low 60′s, and people rejoiced in the streets. On Monday, it snowed.

I knew why. Just because it is March and it can.

2/ I have a low-grade cold.

Sore throat, loud coughing fits, sneezes, sinus headaches, sleeplessness. You name it. The house is filled up with crumpled up tissues.

3/ Also: to deal with the low-grade cold, I’ve had to take Nyquil at night before bed. Nyquil tastes sooo bad (and don’t try telling me to take the capsules because we all know the capsules are just a hoax, they have never helped anyone!). So to get myself through the bad-tasting Nyquil, I’ve had to eat a piece of chocolate cake each night after I take the medicine. Trust me: it is the only thing that can kill the taste. And how unfair is it that now I have gained approximately 35 pounds from eating a piece of chocolate cake for five nights in a row!

4/ Therefore, none of my jeans fit without hurting.

5/ We’ve had, in the last few weeks, the following domestic horribilities: a foot of snow, frozen pipes, a broken washer on the water pipes over the furnace which caused water to leak into the motor of the furnace, a blown-out tire, two cars with CHECK ENGINE LIGHTS that will not go off, illnesses, infections, clogged drains, a toilet that wouldn’t stop running water, and a flooded porch.

6/ There are about 6,000 little tiny things I have to do that involve calling up insurance companies, computer anti-virus services, human resource directors, cell phone people, bursars, credit card companies who have charged things automatically to our account, things that we do not want and did not authorize–or didn’t KNOW we were authorizing, and which now will take up four hours on the phone pushing buttons and listening to bad music.

7/ I thought I wanted my hair to grow long, but now I realize my hair is stringy and shapeless. This, even though I just went to have my hair cut two weeks ago. When I was there, I was apparently in a jaunty, I-can-have-long-hair mood and so I only let the hairdresser take 0.00006 of an inch off, but I now need to go back and pay $44 more to have a REAL haircut performed.

8/ I cannot figure out how to get songs I no longer like OFF my iPod and put songs that I really love ON the iPod. Because the iPod is filled up. With many unlistenable songs (what was I thinking??) This makes me feel stupid and inadequate. It’s my iPod. Why can’t I make it work?

9/ Okay, and while I’m grouchy about technology, let me then make this confession: I cannot for the life of me figure out how to watch a simple DVD in my own house if there is not another person present to operate the two remotes. These remotes make no sense to me whatsoever. Okay? I can’t even waste time watching movies!

10/ A new book is whispering to me, yet the part of my brain that feels so overloaded by having just finished the old book is saying, “WHAT?!?! Are you crazy? You can’t start a new book now! You haven’t even cleared the million little scraps of paper off your desk that have to do with the OLD book. You haven’t even returned the phone calls you didn’t return while you were working on the old book. And vacuuming: have you vacuumed since you finished your book? No, you haven’t. SO NO NEW BOOK UNTIL YOU HAVE FULLY CAUGHT UP FROM WRITING THE OLD BOOK!”

Update: I was just rummaging through the piles of paper on the desk, when I came across this quote from Lee Smith, a wonderful Southern writer whose books I adore. It was just written on a piece of paper, waiting for me to discover and re-remember it. It says:

“When stuff in life gets really rough, I would just die if I was not writing a novel. Once you think it up, it’s like a whole other city with a little door, and every time you sit down to write you just open the door and there you are–a wonderful vacation for two hours.” 

That’s what I have been missing: my wonderful two-hour vacations away from March and paperwork and my iPod and my yucky hair.

Life has been simpler since I have accepted certain things about myself. I know, for instance, that I will never understand how the electricity comes out of the walls, nor will I ever know exactly why it takes TWO REMOTES to run my television set, and why it is that even then you have to press a series of buttons in rapid succession and if you make a mistake and miss one, then someone (not me–oh God not me) has to get out the manual again and reprogram the whole thing from scratch. But there are certain things I CAN do, even things with technology. I know how to work my iPod most of the time, and I can operate my cell phone and write emails! Almost 100% of the time they actually go through.

Okay. So I have this book coming out. I may have mentioned this. KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD. Comes out on Election Day.

I decided that I should use my skills to write to my family members about this book. I have a far-flung family–lots and lots of cousins I hardly ever see, an uncle or two, and an aunt–and I decided that I should, you know, TELL them about the book.

So they could, you know, BUY IT.

I made up my mind to write them an email, a humble, informative–okay, BEGGING email. In it, I pointed out that I have hardly ever whined about a book coming out before, but that I had chosen to whine to them now because the economy has gone to hell and these days people hardly have two $10 bills to rub together…but if they DID have two $10 bills, I said, maybe they would like to pre-order my book on Amazon. You know, in the name of family love and values. I even humbly mentioned that Publishers Weekly had said the book was an "absolute treat, filled with realistic twists, complex characters, and a moving conclusion."

And then came the whining. I said that according to the publicist for the book (who would, I’m sure, have me go stand in Times Square in my underwear if it would sell even one more book!), pre-orders are very important to the life of a book these days! Could be the difference between a book that is gingerly tended to on life support and one that is tossed into the scrapheap of history, she said.

I gave the link to pre-order. It is here, if you are interested. And I signed it with love and hope that we would all see each other again soon.

Then I did something I never did before. I gathered all their email addresses and put them together in one file that I called "sandi shelton." I have always admired that other people send emails without everybody’s addresses showing all over the place. How elegant, I have thought. How technologically savvy such a person would be who did something like that!

I pressed the SEND button with no regrets.

But then, as always happens, there came the middle of the night. I was up late, blogging away about blonde chicken chili. To make the entry interesting, I decided to search the internets for a nice picture of a chili pepper and perhaps some spices. I found one and emailed it to myself and then I found a picture of spices on a spoon, and sent that to myself as well.

And then I realized what I had done. I had sent all my relatives (some who barely even know me as an adult) a begging email, followed by a wordless picture of a hot chili pepper, followed once again by a photo of spices on a spoon. Would they see this as a warning? A definitive sign that I have gone crazy?

Clearly, I had to say SOMETHING reassuring to them. So I wrote them another email, this one at 2 a.m., insisting on my own sanity. I tried to explain about the problems of emailing.

Readers of this blog, I have to report that mostly they have not answered me. Oh, my aunt wrote back and said simply, "fascinating." My mother’s brother said, "I was wondering where your mother’s genes had gotten to."

So now that I’m a known crazy person among my family members, I’m contemplating other, more daring, ventures. Perhaps I should start sending them pictures of different objects every few days or so: a bunny slipper, an eggplant that looks like Nixon, or maybe a Q-Tip. It might be a sort of ransom note: PRE-ORDER MY BOOK OR YOU WILL CONTINUE TO GET PHOTOGRAPHS IN EMAILS FROM ME!

Bwaaahahahaha!   

I am writing this on my assistant, back-up computer, and while I write this, I am watching my REAL computer delete every single thing it has in its memory.

This is not for the faint-hearted, believe me. In fact, next to childbirth and having my wisdom teeth removed and one bad day when I thought I was going to have to have a root canal but then received a dental pardon, I think this may be the hardest thing I’ve ever watched. This is because I know that I am losing all the music that I have so painstakingly downloaded from iTunes (and, yes, NEVER BACKED UP ON DISKS, because who would think a year-old computer would break down). I have had to sit here and know that this computer–this computer whom I have loved and polished and cooed over and dusted the dog hair out of and even VACUUMED (when I hardly vacuum anything)…yes, this very computer has betrayed my trust, and is right now losing all my emails, including the addresses of people I may never find again. And the list of all my Bookmarks on the Internet.

Sigh. If you never hear from me again, you will know why. I lost you when my computer contracted Technological Alzheimers. (Try me again–please!)

Anyway, I am not going to rant and rave. Before its spectacular death this time, at least, the computer was willing to hand me back: my novel, all the newspaper stories I have written since the last computer meltdown, letters and photographs, and a couple of videos I took from my camera. And beyond that, I’m not going to rant and rave because I had a splendid day today that included hanging out with little kids in a pumpkin patch, and then eating ice cream cones while we watched llamas saunter around and a goat climb onto a roof at the little farm near our house.

(82% of my computer is now erased. The program that is taking all this away has a very Orwellian name: Destructive Recovery, which the Tech Person on the phone did not seem to find ironic at all, even when I laughed.) (Really! Who THINKS of these names??)

To catch you up to date, though, the computer failed spectacularly a few weeks ago when I was at Starbucks ready to write many scenes of my novel. You know how it is: you sit down AT LAST knowing what you’re going to do with that character, and you’ve figured out the ending, and you also know that you need another secondary character and you know that her name is Lori…and then your computer refuses to turn on, just directs some angry-sounding beeps your way. The people in Starbucks turn and stare at you as if you’ve polluted the office atmosphere there.

So, after a few phone calls, the computer went off to visit with its makers at HP…and then it FINALLY came back home, all shiny and enthusiastic, and sporting a a new motherboard, a new fan, a new screen, and a sound card.

Then it wouldn’t boot up. And its only explanation was that it had error OOx0000008. Thanks.

(Ohhh! It’s now finished with the destruction recovery. It is saying, “Please wait…”)

At least it is very polite now that it’s been visiting its origins.

(Now it’s inviting me to restart my computer, and if I do not see the Blue Screen of Death, then I can go along on my merry way loading up programs again, but, as the technician on the phone said, if I DO see the Blue Screen of Death, then–well, THEN all hell will break loose, and I have to get HP to send me a new hard drive, and then I have to wait for days and days more. Weeks, even!

Isn’t the suspense here just palpable?

(ACK! The blue screen! But wait. It’s a different blue screen, a KINDLY blue screen. It says, “Please wait while Windows prepares to start…..” and then nothing happens for a very long, a breath-takingly long time.)

Anyway, it was a beautiful fall day outside, and last night we went to our town’s little country fair and saw the pigs and the cows and we rode on the rides, and it’s so much fun to get caught up in all that again when you are with an almost five-year old and a baby of 16 months. Although word to the wise: it is NOT a good idea to take a baby of 16 months on a Ferris wheel, especially an enormous baby who is fighting and squirming and screaming and trying to eject himself over the side, especially when the little swinging cart is at the very, very top. Just saying, for next time. No Ferris wheels.

(Windows is now thanking me for purchasing this computer, playing a very soothing lullaby-type song, and asking me to “spend a few moments here setting up my new computer.”)

And…and….by god, we have had a successful encounter, Windows and I! I THINK WE HAVE ACTUAL SUCCESS!!  It has set up the computer, it will agree to accept the thumb drive with my novel, etc., upon it. There is even a slight, slight chance it will remember me and restore my emails to me. And I’ll reintroduce it to the camera, the iPod, and my Internet provider, my bookmarks, my youtube favorites, my blog. All of that.

And I’ll start backing things up. I promise this time. No, really.