I was on T.V. (kind of)
February 13, 2014:
I saw myself differently yesterday and deduced two things: 1) I have a really deep voice for a female and 2) I am in desperate need of a haircut. My first visitor,@oliviakoski, is here and I was a guest on her weekly broadcast, Creatavist Live!
We listened to some John Denver; chatted fireside about the 5 things healthy people do before work; and volleyed a bit, trying to figure out how to remain inspired to write. I’m on screen around 10 minutes in until the show’s end—or at least until I get up mid-sentence to answer the doorbell and Olivia yells, “This is live, people!”
But if you listen to one telecast on the Internet today, make it this one. It’s the late David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon in 2005. I wrote what follows here the other day—but after having listened to DFW again, its reference to his words completely misses the bigger point and won’t make it past this newsletter. If nothing else though, it’s proof that I do sit in front of my computer and fill up some blank space.
Be well, my friends!
I was once the leggy girl at recess, who sweated and ran faster than any mama’s boy in the fourth grade. When it came to getting to first base, I was a sure thing. I had no regrets about that. Not once did I apologize.
When we moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, I read a lot by myself that summer until I met Amy. She was a tiny sprout of a thing, but she was my age and pretty fast on her feet too. We’re still in touch today, and we like to joke that our lives peaked when we were nine. We were blonde, and both intuitively pretty smart, which seemed to be an attractive quality back in those days. I was sassy and she a bit more soft-spoken, but we made a great duo. We got voted the two most datable girls in the fourth grade in a secret boys’ bathroom poll. Turns out that’s not a predictor of much.
I grew out of what must have been my perfectly athletic proportions around 11, when I passed through an angsty devotion to never again wearing white t-shirts that showed bra straps. When I got moved into the advanced math class I distinctly remember my teacher, Mrs. Costello, warning me to speak up when I knew the answer. She said the boys in the class were loud and shamelessly aggressive. A difference in voice volume had never occurred to me; I had never even noticed it until she said something. It was like in David Foster Wallace’s This is Water, the young fish don’t even realize what was always around them, sustaining their environment, until someone points it out. And suddenly, it was always there.
By Abigail Ronck, from Diamonds in the Dustheap