2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America

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As predictors go, Albert Brooks is a lot more convincing than that guy who told us the world was going to end last week. Basically, Brooks predicts in 2030, a dystopian novel that came out a week or so ago, that if the boomers take a really long time to die and gobble up all the money in the United States while they do it, then the country’s going to go to hell. Plus, if there’s a big earthquake in L.A. — like a 9.1 earthquake — L.A.’s going to go to hell first. Which makes sense, because Brooks lives in L.A., where he writes, directs and acts in pretty good movies, and is known to be cranky about the place.

It’s funny how a book that’s so interesting — and this one is — and occasionally witty — as this one is — can also be a bad book. I did enjoy 2030, but I spent at least half the time reading it thinking, “what’s wrong here?”  and “Why is everything so FLAT?” So, after I found out what was going to happen to the United States, I figured out what was wrong with 2030.

Basically, this isn’t a novel — it’s a summary of a novel.  By that I mean you don’t see events play out;  Brooks just tells you that they occur, which allows a lot of huge things to happen in very few pages.

Dialogue’s another problem. In books, as opposed to summaries, when people talk to each other, you learn something about them. Usually, that’s because you see what they’re keeping back or what they’re angry about or how they disagree with each other. In 2030, people talk to each other to — you guessed it — help Brooks summarize what’s happening, in case you missed it, or because he needs to move things along.

The book is full of characters — the first half Jewish president of the United States, who’s not even really Jewish because his mother’s not, and the first woman Secretary of the Treasury. There are plenty of cranky old people. Brilliant inventors. Financiers. Chinese whiz kids who know how to run a health care system and build a city. Powerful senators and their sexy daughters. The thing is, though, that not a single one of these characters has a secret that’s kept from you until it’s worthwhile to reveal it and not a single character is any different at the end of the book than they are at the beginning. The one character who does change, changes as a result of doing a lot of drugs which, in my book anyway, just doesn’t count.

In the end, Brooks isn’t really interested in characters, he’s interested in talking about what’s going wrong in America and how it’s going to end up if we don’t do something about it. As a result, the book’s really one long plea to fix entitlement programs before they bankrupt the country and leave kids with nothing to hope for.  It’s a plea made through unconvincing actors dressed as helpless presidents, clever Chinese, scared angry old people and scared angry young people and clueless rich people and middle-aged hopeless poor people. The thing is, most American adults with a pulse already know that we’ve got to do something about social security and medicare and an aging, long-living population that votes in large numbers and, at the end of 2030, we don’t really know anything different. But at least we were entertained while we were told what we already know, which is a lot better than reading an article in the New York Times Magazine, which probably wouldn’t have been even occasionally funny, as 2030 is.

So here’s my assessment: Because I read novels to be surprised, to see something I didn’t see before, this book isn’t much of a novel. To the extent that I read novels to be entertained, this book accomplished that about half the time. If you’re in the  market for a monologue by a cranky, funny, thoughtful, worried guy, this one’s for you.

Should You Go to Law School?

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Bonus points if you can guess who this is

My answer:  probably not.  Here’s the e-mail I just sent to a kid who asked me for advice about whether he should apply to law school.

Dear Young Wanna-Be Lawyer,

Thanks for your note! Teach for America sounds like such a good program — good for you for doing it.  As for law school, here’s my advice: the market is incredibly tough for all kinds of entry-level jobs, from law firm jobs to government positions.  The days of people with English degrees going to law school, doing well, and getting whatever job they wanted, are long gone.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  After all, if it’s THAT hard to get a job, maybe it will make you wonder, as it’s making you wonder, whether this is something you REALLY want.   If I had to do it again, I’d only go to law school if I loved the law, or thought I did — or if I had something I really wanted to accomplish as a lawyer and felt driven to do it and saw the law as the proper instrument for that.

I don’t know if you’re the person whose destiny it is to be a lawyer, but I think it’s worth spending some time really thinking about what kind of work you’d do for free because you love it so much. That’s the kind of work you should pursue. And if what you love doesn’t come in job form at all, because maybe what you love pays nothing, then you might want to consider getting a job that allows you to pursue the thing you love, a job that isn’t going to demand all your time (which is very much what being a lawyer requires, at least in the beginning.)

The truth is that being a lawyer in the wrong job is hell. Being a lawyer doing work you really believe in and enjoy is heaven. The latter is a rare situation, but if you’re that person you WILL find a job — a job that doesn’t pay much, but a job nevertheless. But whatever you do,  stay out of debt, keep your expenses to a minimum and do the thing you’re pretty sure you love.  I wish someone had told me this when I embarked on my own legal career, which is why I tell it to you.

All the best to you,
Lily

So, here’s my question, dear readers — are you doing what you love?  If so, how did you get to that point?  What advice did you get that got you on that track?

And if you’re not, how come?  I could write volumes about my own twisting trail to becoming a lawyer and THEN a writer, when maybe I could have skipped the lawyer part altogether and gotten right to the writing part.   But this morning, I’m really interested in what you have to say.

Beds! Beds! Beds!

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Some Bed

Yesterday,  I bought three beds.  I know.  That’s a shitload of beds.  Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much coffee and increased my dose of antidepressants.  Still, talk about good deals.  I bought them all on craigslist, which I think is not capitalized, because it is the invention of 30-something people who don’t capitalize anymore.  They also end declarative sentences with question marks.  A tentative bunch,  don’t you think?

Well, I’m here to tell you that, under the influence of caffeine, antidepressants, and a tax refund, I bought three bed frames and two mattresses for $900.  Total.  Not tentatively at all.  Now, that’s a lot of money, but I will tell you that if I’d been insane enough to buy those beds in the actual stores they come from, I’d have paid $4,000.  Also, the people in this family have not slept on real beds and/or beds that fit them for YEARS.  It’s time for some changes around here.

As it turns out, there’s a trick to this kind of shopping — and you can scale it down, if you don’t happen to be under the influence of the above-mentioned stimulants and/or all you need is, say, a bike you can ride around town with, a bike for which you have, say a $100 budget, and your eyes on a $500 bike.

I give you this information totally free, although I really should be selling it on the internet.

Get yourself on craigslist.  You have to live in a big city to do this, by the way, although if you have friends in big cities, they could act as your agents, although how you’d get your new bed to your small town, I’m not sure.  But it would definitely work with a bike.  Your friends will, without a doubt, be coming to visit you in your small town, which we all know is mellower and more beautiful than a big city.  And they will schlep your purchase to you.  In fact, if you live in a charming small town I can reach in a car without a ton of trouble and you would like me as a visitor, I’m happy to be your craigslist agent.  For a bike, or a bike-sized piece of furniture (aka ottoman, desk, and/or chair).  Maybe not a bed.

Step one:  Know what you want.  The name, the retail price, or at least the style and type of thing.  Know how much you’re willing to spend.  Don’t deviate too much because you think you’re getting a great deal.  It’s not a great deal if it’s something you don’t need.

Step two:  Scope out the sellers.  The best sellers are people who (a) have suddenly come into a lot of money (software startup people,  recent biz school graduates with no family,  college students, whose families have decided — wrongly, in fact — to give their kids a lot of cash to buy stuff to furnish their first apartments and people in jobs that require them to leave the bay area to go to some other metropolitan area to work in a soul sucking,  but money producing job), (b) have to leave town fast (because they, just for example, sold their startup to google, are moving to Manhattan to further destroy the world’s economies, got  kicked out of school and have to return home), (c) never liked the stuff they bought anyway.

You don’t necessary have to have all of these things, but it helps if you have two.  I will also say that I don’t mean to sound cynical or snarky about craigslist sellers.  The three people I bought my beds from where (a) a charming and generous Italian software startup guy who’s moving back to Italy; (b) a very patient, business-like, thirty-something guy with great taste who’s moving in with his girlfriend and doesn’t need his BEAUTIFUL bed, and (c) a very hip guy in the Castro who was incredibly sweet and is moving into a less noisy, but smaller apartment.   One thing these people have in common is that they are all (a) guys and (b) on the move and (c) without a family.

Step 3.  And then you find what you want, waiting until you do, and then you offer immediate cash and immediate removal of the item.

Step 4.  Safety.  I like to think of this as recycling, in which objects do not have to continue being made just because somebody’s moving to Manhattan.  I also like meeting new people.  Sure, occasionally I think I am going to be murdered, or someone tells me I am (bargains can be dangerous!) but really, it’s so much fun that I’ll take the risk.   (Plus, I google the people first, and/or visit them in public in the daytime or with a bodyguard, aka, the husband.)

Now, here’s the real safety tip:  I have one inviolable rule, one that has turned out to work beautifully in my craigslist adventures, which I have obviously lived to speak about.  I only buy stuff from people who can write a decent e-mail.  They must know how to punctuate and spell.  They must write in complete sentences.  For some reason, I just don’t think that somebody who knows how to write a good e-mail, one that doesn’t give off a whiff of  ”I’m nuts,” will kill me when I show up to buy their Room and Board bed.  I could be wrong.  I’ll have my heirs let you know if that happens.

Yes, I am aware that buying beds raises the dreaded bedbug issue.  I’m going with unlikely on that one, but I’ll tell you if it happens.  Although, would you want to know?

Finally, in news unrelated to beds, my agent sent me his notes on my book.  Great ideas.  He’s such a smart guy.  And I’m working through them.  They seem to require that I change the ending and give characters slightly different motivations and fears.  It’s fun.  It’s also terrifying.  Plus, I gave a couple of characters new names.  I enjoyed that — it’s sure not something you can do in real life.  I just hope the people I know who happen to have those names don’t get mad at me.

Genre Queen

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It could, of course, be Genre King.

I am not an ambitious woman.  Well, not any longer.  It  is true that, at one time, I wanted to be either the pope or the president, career paths I am clearly unsuited for, one by reason of biology and the other by reason of being utterly unskilled at making any kind of enterprise involving more than one participant run well.  Very briefly, I also thought I might become a partner at the big law firm where I landed when I graduated from law school, but the work was so soul suckingly boring, and I was so spectacularly bad at it, that this ambition ended ten minutes after I hung up from my first phone call with a lawyer on the other side.  ”You’re unethical,” he hissed.  ”You lied to me.  Where are my documents?  You said I’d get them all.  I didn’t get them all.  You’re unethical.”  It went on and on and on.  At some point, I should have said, “You’re an asshole,” but I didn’t.  Instead, when the horror was over, I hung up the phone, put my head on my desk and moaned and vowed that I would never again harbor any ambitions of any  kind.  I would be an underachiever.  People would be pleasantly surprised when I managed to do anything of note.

But you see, it’s also true that for my entire life — ever since I knew this particular job existed — I’ve wanted to write stories.  And it turns out I do indeed have an ambition.    It came to me the other day when I was reading an article about a kerfluffle in the literary community involving a woman who writes literary fiction.  Her advice to young writers?  Aim high.  Do not write derivative crap.  For some reason, this made people who write genre fiction mad because they felt insulted and made people who write literary fiction mad in her defense.  And me?  I just thought, “Okay, then.  I  will write the BEST genre fiction there is.” I will never be a literary innovator because I am not interested in literary innovation — but I can certainly aim high enough to write really terrific genre fiction.  So, that got me to thinking about whether there was such a thing as excellent genre fiction, and that got me to thinking about the day when fiction was not divided into genre and literary.  Wilkie Collins, for example, just wrote fiction.  It was mystery-type fiction, but it was shelved in Victorian libraries (if they even shelved things in any kind of order), relatively close to Dickens, who wrote just fiction too, fiction which also often had secrets and mysteries at its heart.  Like, who’s my real mother?  Who’s my father?  And what happened to all my money?

Really, all I want is to write stuff that’s so entertaining and so beautifully written that people will close my book and think,  ”Wow.  That was worth the money.  Plus, what a nice cover.”  I do not want them to close the book and feel sort of bad, the reading equivalent of eating a big mac, plus fries, plus some frozen dessert thing.  That is what it feels like to read crappy derivative fiction and we all know that that sort of stuff is filed both in the genre section and the straight on fiction section.

Genre Queen.  That’s what I want to be.  And how do you achieve THAT?  Well, first you write the things you love to read.  If you happen to love genre fiction, as I do, particularly spy books and mysteries, then you write that.  And you learn how those stories are structured by reading them carefully.  And then you write one of your own, but you tell your own story, the one about a place you lived when you were a child, or a man you loved once, or an event that has never left you.  And you ask questions you’re afraid to ask, and then you go ahead and try to answer them, all the while using the form you really like to read as a way to answer them.  That’s what I do anyway.

It turns out that the great thing about becoming Genre Queen is that you don’t have to marry Genre Prince and wait for his grandmother to die in order to achieve your goal of being Queen.  Also, you will never have to worry that people will find out what your wedding dress looks like before you show up in your Rolls Royce and step out to the oohs and ahs of the world.  (Gack.  Who ever would submit to that kind of thing?  Crazy.)  It turns out there can be a couple of Genre Queens and Kings.  PD James is one.  So is Dorothy Sayers.  Eric Ambler.  Sometimes John LeCarre.  Me, I’m a Genre Scullery Maid at this point.  I’m aiming for Genre Lady in Waiting next.  After that, who knows?  There’s a lot of room on that throne.

Mother Ghost

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I’ve been doing a lot of writing, but very little writing here on the blog. I have been shy about discussing my writing career because I haven’t really known the rules about what you should say and shouldn’t say. Having never had any rules at all in writing this blog, it’s really shut me up to think there might be some rules I don’t know anything about.

This morning, I e-mailed my agent to ask him if there WERE any such rules. So, we’ll see what he says. I’d like to talk about The Secret War and the loooooong road to getting that book ready. And maybe I will. (I mean, how much of a surprise is it to know that it’s been a looooong road to finishing that book?)

For now though, I wanted to say that I’ve been reading a really fun book about creativity — it’s by Lynda Barry, the cartoonist, and it’s called What Is It. (Or is that what it is?) Because she is fun, she has invented a fun exercise for doing some image-based writing that I’ve really enjoyed. It goes like this: pick a word(don’t worry — she has plenty of words)/flesh out the word (asking the famous who/what/where/when/why questions you learned before you knew you didn’t want to be a journalist)/orient yourself in the word  by doing a very cool thing:  asking what was below you, above you, to the right, to the left, and behind you? Got all that down?   Well, then, write for seven minutes about the word.

I did this.  I did it mostly because I was so sick of typing and the instant I realized you could do this on notebook paper in a three ring binder, my heart was full of love for Lynda Barry.  Plus, you can use colored pencils if you want.

I figured out how to use our scanner (who knew we even HAD one? — but we did). And because it’s almost mother’s day, I’m going to start posting Mother pieces, because the word I used was “other peoples’ mothers”). Okay, it was a phrase.  Shoot me.  It’s about the mother of a boy I loved once. Don’t worry, though, this is not about to become a blog where I post my seven minute writing exercises. I wouldn’t like to read that (well, I would, actually, if the pieces were short and illustrated).

PS:  That first line begins “I was in her dining room.”  It might be mistaken for a sentence that suggests I was in some kind of herding room.  I was not.

Bask, dude

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If those boards weren't so hard, I'd totally be out there basking with archie

While Archie’s out there acting like there’s nothing to do (and there’s not.  not really.  He’s a DOG), I thought I’d record what’s happening here in the bloglily house at 2:58 p.m. today.

First, though, I thought I’d mention that I have, in fact, been reading.  A book called  The Information Officer.  It’s set in Malta during WW2.  Pretty good.  Every once in a while you get a couple of pages written from the point of view of the murderer, who’s very creepy.  I don’t think I’ve seen that ever.

Speaking of narrators, the novel I’m writing has a first person narrator so I’ve been thinking of who’s written a book that has a worthwhile (as opposed to creepy or, worse, boring) narrator.  Which means I read some of Huck Finn.  I love this, from the last paragraph of Huck Finn:  ”there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more.”

Me, I’ve got to tackle it.  It’s too late to do anything else.   I’ve written 30,000 words or so and there’s no going back.  This is all part of my goal this year which is to earn some money from writing, and I’ve got to SELL SOMETHING to do that. Stay tuned.  My agent is going to be sending me some notes one of these days (like soon, he says), and I’m going to make every change he wants (even sooner, I say), and then …. hold your breath here …. maybe he will SELL IT!

when they lit out for the territories, did they already know how nice it is here? Well, it is. It is spring, baby.

And at 2:58 I was listening to Shakira who is, in addition to being an ambassador of good will around the globe, wakes up 2:58 like nothing else.  Particularly, after Matt Nathanson who is so sad, so very, very sad.

2:58. Shakira. And right after that, the f* you song, which I love and will not apologize for loving.

Let’s see.  In addition to dogs, literature and music, we also have ART in the bloglily household.  Okay, not exactly art.  Decorative art.  (Isn’t that what they call rugs?)  So, my current big project involves making our house look relatively normal, a place where we can actually be comfortable, which, I will admit, we often have not been.  Presently, I am tackling the room formerly known as the-storage-closet-where-mom-and-dad sleep, a room I have now taken to calling “my bedroom.”  We have lived in this house for almost 15 years and I finally put curtains up.  Also, I ordered a rug.  And it came today.  And it is going in my bedroom.  Yup.  The same place where the stuff on a stick lives.

curtains on right; and yes, the stuff on a stick has so weighed down the stick that it looks like a safety patrol captain telling everybody to stop right there so the earrings can cross without getting hit by a truck

It’s now 3:16.  The river that is life continues to flow.  Only Archie knows how to stop it, because he lives in the timeless place where all dogs live on sunny days.