Respect The Tech

I recently took an excellent class at a writer's center in suburban Maryland and learned that my blog, Cry Laugh Heal, needs a technological overhaul.

 

Today's title, "Respect The Tech" is wise advice from my savvy and humorous teacher, Mary T. McCarthy, who currently is an editor at Splice Today (www.splicetoday.com), and founded and writes for her own popular humor website called Pajamas and Coffee (www.pajamasandcoffee.com).  She's the mother of four children and I'm not sure where she finds the time or energy but she also has a book coming out this summer called "The Scarlet Letter Society".  Whew! McCarthy is one busy and very smart dynamo.

 

Basically "respect the tech" means to get your blog or website set up correctly and technologically right.  And if you personally can't get it right, then you must find someone you can trust to keep you on the tech straight and narrow.  The tech is too important to be ignored.  Take it from me, ignoring it brings unwelcome consequences.  I didn't mean to ignore it, I just got overwhelmed by it and other things going on in my life and I thought everything would be okay. NOT!

 

I think I was spending so much time on the writing and the writing and the writing that I took my eye off the tech.  I am now trying to catch up as best I can and I hope you will be patient with my project currently under construction.

The software I have been using is woefully out of date and there are many, many updates that need to be installed.  Patience and calm are my current watchwords as I transition from one site to another and I must admit that I am learning a lot which is a good thing right?

 

I'm not going to go on and on and about what I need to do but I would like to give my wonderful readers a heads up that change is in the making and I am busy trying to make sure that all is in place before I launch a new and improved Cry Laugh Heal.

Any feedback you want to send me is definitely welcome.

Thank you!!

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, a celebrated and grand Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, sadly died yesterday in a hospital in Dublin at the age of 74. 

Irish Poet And Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney

To say that Heaney had a way with words is an understatement.  His powerful verse transported readers around the world to Ireland and sometimes to its rural landscape and the grind of its daily responsibilities.  To me, his phrasing always felt magical and lyrical no matter what subject he addressed. 

As a tribute to Heaney's great talents, here is Digging, one of my favorite poems that Heaney wrote in 1966.  Every time I read it, I feel as though I am right there with him in the bogs, smelling the wet dirt and watching as turf is cut for fuel.



Cutting Turf In Ireland

Digging

By Seamus Heaney 1939–2013

 

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

 

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

 

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

 

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

 

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

 

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

 

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

 

 

Seamus Heaney, "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist. Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: Death of a Naturalist (1966)

College Rejections Are Not The End Of The World

It's that time of year.

 

You know.  College admissions and rejections.

 

You are either laughing with joy from the news of your acceptance or crying because you got rejected.

 

If you didn't get into the college you wanted, it feels as if it's the end of the world, doesn't it?  But guess what?

 

It's not.

 

You don't know where life is going to take you; who you're going to meet and where you're going to go.  Life is full of the unexpected and the unplanned.

 

I am in a place I never thought I would be but it's still good!  I think I could ask my friends the same questions about college, careers and life and they would agree that life does not always unfold the way we think it will but it ends up working out.

 

In one of my former lives many, many years ago, I was a reporter in Washington, DC who wrote for The Boston Globe.  I covered the Massachusetts delegation on Capitol Hill.  I worked very hard, learned a lot about how things really work and also had a ton of fun.

 

Part of that fun was getting to know a group of stellar reporters and writers who were considered to be in a category all by themselves.  Their work was untouchable.  They were not only great reporters and writers but they were great people outside of work.  David Nyhan was one of those guys.

Below is a classic story that Nyhan wrote in 1987 about keeping life and the whole college admissions thing in perspective.  And The Boston Globe continues to reprint it all the time because no one can say it any better.

Please read it and you will discover the special way that Nyhan had with words and more importantly, that his words still ring true today.

David Nyhan

Did You Get A College Rejection Letter?  Here's Some Sage Advice?

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff

Former Globe columnist the late David Nyhan wrote the following column in 1987. Since then, it has been reprinted in the newspaper and online many times around this time of year. Nyhan died in January 2005.

THE REJECTIONS arrive this time of year in thin, cheap envelopes, some with a crummy window for name and address, as if it were a bill, and none with the thick packet you'd hoped for.

''Dear So-and-so:

''The admissions committee gave full consideration . . . but I regret to inform you we will be unable to offer you a place in the Class of 2012." Lots of applicants, limited number of spaces, blah blah blah, good luck with your undergraduate career. Very truly yours, Assistant Dean Blowhard, rejection writer, Old Overshoe U.

This is the season of college acceptance letters. So it's also the time of rejection. You're in or you're out. Today is the day you learn how life is not like high school. To the Ins, who got where they wanted to go: Congrats, great, good luck, have a nice life, see you later. The rest of this is for the Outs.

You sort of felt it was coming. Your SAT scores weren't the greatest. Your transcript had some holes in it. You wondered what your teachers' recommendations would really say, or imply. And you can't help thinking about that essay you finished at 2 o'clock in the morning of the day you absolutely had to mail in your application, that essay which was, well, a little weird.

Maybe you could have pulled that C in sociology up to a B-minus. Maybe you shouldn't have quit soccer to get a job to pay for your gas. Maybe it was that down period during sophomore year when you had mono and didn't talk to your teachers for three months while you vegged out. What difference does it make what it was? It still hurts.

It hurts where you feel pain most: inside. It's not like the usual heartache that kids have, the kind other people can't see. An alcoholic parent, a secret shame, a gaping wound in the family fabric, these are things one can carry to school and mask with a grin, a wisecrack, a scowl, a just-don't-mess-with-me-today attitude.

But everybody knows where you got in and where you didn't. Sure, the letter comes to the house. But eventually you've still got to face your friends. ''Any mail for me?" is like asking for a knuckle sandwich. Thanks a lot for the kick in the teeth. What a bummer.

How do you tell kids at school? That's the hard part. The squeals in the corridor from the kids who got in someplace desirable. The supercilious puss on the ones who got early acceptance or the girl whose old man has an in at Old Ivy.

There's the class doofus who suddenly becomes the first nerd accepted at Princeton, the 125-pound wrestling jock who, surprise, surprise, got into MIT. But what about you?

You've heard about special treatment for this category or that category, alumni kids on a legacy ticket or affirmative action luckouts or rebounders or oboe players. Maybe they were trying to fill certain slots. But you're not a slot. You're you. They can look at your grades and weigh your scores and see how many years you were in French Club. But they can't look into your head, or into your heart. They can't check out the guts department.

This is the important thing: They didn't reject you. They rejected your resume. They gave some other kid the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that kid deserved a break. Don't you deserve a break? Sure. You'll get one. Maybe this is the reality check you needed. Maybe the school that does take you will be good. Maybe this is the day you start to grow up.

Look at some people who've accomplished a lot and see where they started. Ronald Reagan? Eureka College. Jesse Jackson? They wouldn't let him play quarterback in the Big Ten, so he quit Illinois for North Carolina A & T. Do you know that the recently retired chairmen and CEOs of both General Motors and General Electric graduated from UMass? Bob Dole? He went to Washburn Municipal University.

The former minority leader of the United States Senate, Tom Daschle, went to South Dakota State. The former speaker of the US House of Representatives, J. Dennis Hastert, went to Northern Illinois University. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, took a bachelor's degree from Jamestown College. Winston Churchill? He was so slow a learner that they used to write to his mother to come take this boy off our hands.

I know what you think: Spare me the sympathy. It still hurts. But let's keep this in perspective. What did Magic Johnson say to the little boy who also tested HIV positive? ''You've got to have a positive attitude." What happens when you don't keep a positive attitude? Don't ask.

This college thing? What happened is that you rubbed up against the reality of big-time, maybe big-name, institutions. Some they pick, some they don't. You lost. It'll happen again, but let's hope it won't have the awful kick. You'll get tossed by a girlfriend or boyfriend. You won't get the job or the promotion you think you deserve. Some disease may pluck you from life's fast lane and pin you to a bed, a wheelchair, a coffin. That happens.

Bad habits you can change; bad luck is nothing you can do anything about.

Does it mean you're not a good person? People like you, if not your resume. There's no one else that can be you. Plenty of people think you're special now, or will think that, once they get to know you. Because you are.

And the admissions department that said no? Screw them. You've got a life to lead.

Reflections of Nora Ephron's Son

 

Nora Ephron

Crying is unsettling.  Especially if you are watching one of your parents do it.

 

My son hates it when I cry and has said that when I would cry all the time immediately after his father/my husband's death, he would feel this mix of emotions that he didn't want to feel and so he would walk away.  I understand it and think his reaction was perfectly normal.  He was thirteen years old and dealing with something that adults find hard to handle.  He was just trying to survive.

 

Now, at twenty two years old, my son explains his reaction this way: "When children see their parents cry, it's like a wall being broken.  It messes everything up.  I wanted you to be my Mom but when I saw you cry, it's like you weren't my Mom anymore.  You were a person and I didn't want that. I wanted my Mom."

 

It makes sense to me and I love him all the more for his insight; as painful as it was, and sometimes still is, for both of us.

 

That is why Jacob Bernstein's long and loving story about his mother, Nora Ephron, is so powerful and compassionate.

 

It's a universal story of how children feel about their parents as children, and as adults, and especially sons and their feelings about their mothers.

 

But having an accomplished, high-profile, multi-talented mother such as Nora Ephron is a unique story. And Jacob Bernstein writes it beautifully.  I knew it was a long story so I only intended to read the first page and then come back to it later, but then I couldn't stop reading it until I reached the end.

His mother is proud.  He took good notes.

Please click on this link to read Jacob Bernstein's story as it appeared in the New York Times magazine this past weekend:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/nora-ephrons-final-act.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1362652331-n02tv3ThoWXX1qcUk6JoRw