The stack of magazines I'd dragged outside under the umbrella was formidable.

We fully intended to do more today. But when I got done with my workout and my husband and daughter returned from the grocery, there were three small children waiting under the tree, one of them wielding an umbrella. Ever since our neighborhood barbecue, the children of our street have been playing a bizarre game involving umbrellas as houses and curtain rods as swords every chance they get. This girl with a golf umbrella was a sign from the universe to abandon the plans for the Labor Day fest and just chill out.

So I did. I dragged my magazine pile outside and also the boombox I got as a senior in high school way back in 1992.

Three or four magazines in, I learned what Sarah Palin actually did do for the citizens of Alaska.

On the fifth, I learned that Amy Chua's publicist should have a nice fat promotion, because in the no-ink-is-bad-ink category, this author was getting more press than I've seen in years. At least half of one magazine was dedicated to whether or not she should be lauded or imprisoned. And article after article devoted itself to this generation of mothers and children -- how the mothers are too fixated on extreme parenting after becoming so well educated ourselves and how kids, dagnabbit, don't know how to play. They're so used to structured time and toys that talk that this poor, poor generation of Carly-loving zombie-heads is doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU, and maybe Amy Chua is right.

I looked up once while reading that article to make sure the child using a curtain rod as a sword didn't impale the other four on bikes festooned with my daughter's stuffed snakes as protection.They seemed to have negotiated fair use of a curtain rod, in fact deferring it to one another at certain points, so I returned to my reading.

Two more magazines later, I learned that the state of education in America is in a terribly state, largely because we won't fire any teachers in New York City. And how nobody can get into Harvard anymore because there are a certain number of seats that need to go to legacies and a certain number that need to go to under-represented minorities and the seats that are left require an IQ of eighty gazillion plus an aptitude for restructuring small countries and OHMYGODAMYCHUAWASRIGHT. Literally, I was shocked at how often since March Amy Chua was mentioned in the intellectual news media. I think she freaked out writers for these highbrow magazines more than she did anyone else in the country -- perhaps because the rest of the country (which I also learned in another article) isn't college-educated in the first place, with only 30% of American adults possessing a BA, let alone one from the Ivy Leagues. The gap, the middle class, is doomed. And also, apparently, the middle class doesn't read The Atlantic.

Existentially questioning subtext: Maybe we should all teach our kids the violin and withhold slumber parties, because oh my Lord, we are certainly going to hell in a Dora-driven handbasket.

I looked up at this point as a child I'd met two weeks before when her family moved in behind us handed me a hand-copied recipe for the chocolate chip cookies her mother had brought over an hour earlier. She left the cookies on the floaties in the middle of my yard, because they were homebase from the Pretty Pony squadron, who had now taken to scooters. Or something. This child was also covered in fairy glitter and face paint, which I fully admit to having given the lot of them.

I returned to my magazines. I'd plowed through about half of them, skipping any article dealing with Iraq or terrorism (so tired of it) and focusing mostly on the 2012 election, literature, education, parenting and the economy.

Literature is still the bright spot. And I can't believe I still haven't bought Mark Twain's autobiography. I was going to, and then I forgot, probably because I'm a distracted working mother 67% more likely to spend more time with my daughter than a mother in 1972 and therefore completely neglect my own marriage and personal time because I have, oh, a full-time job, which, according to another article, it is truly an anomoly that I was not attending to there under the umbrella because I should be chained to my smartphone at all times thanks to the economy.

I chucked that magazine onto the pile for recycling.

All in all, the children appeared at noon and ate the lunches their parents had packed them under the birdfeeder tree, then played until five pm when I kicked them out under extreme duress so we could eat an early dinner. I read thirteen magazines in five hours. And I learned a lot about the state of our union, about the state of myself. I value these long-form articles so much because they really get me to think about my own life and the state of Rita, and I do want to spend time pondering the economy and education and the arts as they pertain to my life, and if I had even one moment of concern that I was letting the kids play with pointy objects, it was allayed by the articles telling me that children these days? They don't know how to play. They've forgotten, or they never knew, or something.

It's not true.

They do need each other. They need small groups of kids with no game plan, and a lot of space, and an adult close enough to bail them out of a pinch but not so close as to interfere with the spat solving and game rules.

I don't know what to say about Obama or Sarah Palin or the state of the economy or of education, but I learned a lot today that I wouldn't have learned had I been checking my email or reading Twitter. In order for me to bring a 360-degree self to my work and my writing, I have to read, and often it's stuff that doesn't appear on a backlit screen. I have to read 8,000 words in order to fully process the issue. I have to spend six days with a person to know them, as the reporter doing the interview for a magazine did. I love you, old media, I do. When I read the article about Gawker headquarters and existing only for traffic and how there should be no verbs in the headlines and how we have to stop force-feeding stuff Americans don't want to read just because it's good for them, I was a little sad. I hope there is always an outlet for the kind of articles that stir my heart, the kind that are well written enough to demand my attention for five hours straight when I get the chance to read them. I may very well have to pay a lot of money to keep some of these magazines in circulation. I may, in fact, need to renew my subscriptions even though for some reason they keep sending me the magazines for free. 

I need to put my money where my mouth is, I see now. Because I feel smarter for having spent today doing what looked like absolutely nothing.

I interrupt a swiftly-turning-boring conversation about raccoons (you're right, I should just take the birdfeeders in, even though that means the racoon won, dammit) to turn to what blew up the Internet yesterday and how it relates to other conversations I've been involved in that are way, way more important than raccoons.

So yesterday there was an incident with a ridiculous JC Penney t-shirt about girls being too pretty to do their own homework and giving it to their brothers. Shannon did a great job covering it at BlogHer, and Liz Gumbinner -- who works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- said better than I could say -- because she works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- what I believe about capitalism and also about racism and sexism. She wrote:

Messages are sexist because people are sexist.

Messages are sexist because people are lazy. They fall back on stereotypes because it’s easy to get a laugh, easy to get an idea approved, easy to move onto the next thing on your to-do list.

I know because I’ve done it.

Liz wasn't talking about racism, she was talking about sexism, but it strikes me that all isms are isms because they are buried so deeply in our unconscious that we don't even realize we are doing it.That's why it's so hard to eradicate. It's one thing if someone says something sexist or racist on purpose, but it's something entirely different and so much more dangerous if the person saying it doesn't even realize he or she is doing it. The power humans have to believe their truths is strong. We'll die for our truths. It's very difficult for us to change our truths. It takes generations of conversations.

Liz's comments about the t-shirts and how she has caught herself making sexist jokes struck a nerve with me, because it reminded me of something I commented on Kelly Wickham's race post a week or two ago about my own growth when it comes to my awareness of cultural attitudes about race. I wrote:

The defensiveness comes from not realizing it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to hurt someone with your thinking and actions and not realizing it doesn’t make you an evil person, but it does make you unaware. And when you’re unaware, you participate in institutional racism without realizing it. And when you do that, you teach others by your example that it’s okay.

I used to tell my daughter there was no color until I realized it was total bullshit. There are colors, we have history, and the world is not perfect yet nor will it probably ever be — which is why race is such a dominant theme in science fiction. She knew there were colors — she’s not blind. She doesn’t care, nor does she mention it in descriptions, which is more than I could say for myself until I started noticing I did it. I still catch myself doing it. Here’s an example.

Kelly describes herself as a tall woman with icy looking eyes.
We already know Kelly is black.

You just met Kelly. How do you describe her so someone can find her in the crowd?

a) Kelly is a tall woman with curly hair.
b) Kelly is a tall black woman with curly hair.

Now, you’re describing me so someone can find me in the crowd.

a) Rita is a blond woman with blue eyes.
b) Rita is a white woman with blond hair.

(I know for a fact there are women who are not white with blond hair.)

I almost never hear anyone describe a white woman as a white woman. I almost always hear anyone who’s not white described by their race.

This is institutional racism, making the “other” before we even meet someone. It’s not necessarily intentional, but look what we’ve just done with what to us is an innocent description. This is the level of blindness white people have, and it’s why we’re getting nowhere fast trying to change things.

I watched Battlestar Galactica a while back and was at first shocked that both men and women in exec roles were referred to as “sir.” I spent about three days thinking about it. Finally, I decided I loved it, because it took gender out of a title of respect so it could apply unilaterally without indicating gender. But it took me three days to figure it out because the idea that men are usually in the position of authority is so ingrained in my mental model that I had to question what the word “sir” really meant.

When you start thinking about race in that context, it becomes much easier — for me — to talk about it. Am I evil? No. Do I need to question how the world works? YES YES YES.

At my Own Your Beauty panel at BlogHer, several white women talked about becoming invisible after they passed a certain age. It was surprising to them when they realized ads were no longer being targeted to them, that they saw no one representing their age group for anything other than vitamins and denture cream. And it was so surprising to no longer be targeted because they had grown accustomed to being the norm, to being what everyone else is supposed to be like: white and young.

When you're in the majority, you don't see the isms.

When you're plugged into the matrix, all you see is the matrix.

We are plugged into sexism and racism so completely that we have no idea we're even participating in it.

Kelly wrote recently about a comment her secretary made to her about her hair looking more professional when she straightened it:

It was one comment from one person, but the damage that this way of thinking does to young girls who are constantly trying to look like they fit in with white hair styles betrayed to me what she really thought. I’m no less professional because of my hair, but if my secretary thought that (and felt comfortable enough to say it to me) then what about the parents of my students? I pray to God that they don’t see me as less accomplished or proficient or respected in my job just because of the natural way in which I wear my hair.

And yes. I totally DID just make that all about hair.

I see these things as being connected, because they are all unconscious manifestations of institutional sexism and racism that we have to fight to make ourselves aware of. We have to fight to see the racism and sexism in our own thinking, correct it, call it out, teach our kids it is wrong and have those conversations over and over for however many generations it takes to make a change, to remove male connotations from words that really mean respect and white connotations from what someone's hair should look like and stop our culture's ridiculous obsession with young white women.

It's hard to look at yourself and realize you're part of the problem. It makes you feel icky and guilty and sad -- I know -- I've been there. I got past it by realizing it wasn't conscious but that I could consciously make a decision to stop. I could unlearn my truths, change them for the better, and I could teach my new truths to my daughter.

We can change it, but we have to vote with our dollars. This is capitalism. We have to stop voting for politicians who ignore sexism and racism, we have to stop listening to radio shows that spew hate, we have to stop buying Rolling Stone or whatever magazine it is when some female celebrity is naked on the cover, we have to refuse to let our young girls wear anything broadcast across their butts, we have to demand to be taken seriously and we have to allow change to be reflected in our media, in our programming and most importantly, in our schools.

Because it's not okay.

This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.

On the first day of our family vacation, my husband rented a boogie board and my daughter dug holes in the sand.

I lay faceplanted on a towel for two hours, stress radiating off my body and seeping out my pores. 

As I lay there, scenes from the previous few days played out. Thoughts of things I should've done at BlogHer -- people I should've met, things I should've said, posts I should've written -- rattled around. Every once in a while, my husband or daughter would come up to me, puzzled at my muteness. I'm normally an energetic person. Instead, I just lay there like a beached whale. Every once in a while, tears trickled out onto the sand.

After the beach, we drove an hour and a half up the coast and I fell asleep somewhere near Miramar, the hard, shuddering, paralysis sort of sleep, the sort I had every night during my vacation. Did you hear the people next door slamming doors? No. Did you hear the storm? No. I heard nothing. I slept the sleep of the dead.

Last week, I built a levee: No email. No Twitter. No blogging. No Internet.

I kept it up all week long, even after we came back home. I took my daughter shopping for school supplies. I went sailing with my husband. I sorted through the clothes I'd worn at BlogHer as though they were someone else's from a different lifetime.

While I was faceplanted in that sand on the beach, I asked myself why modern life is so much, why it all never ends. Maybe it's laptops, I thought. No, maybe it's email on our phones. Or the economy. Or the flexible nature of modern work, yes, that's it!

Maybe. But I don't have to have a blog. I don't have to write a novel. I don't have to volunteer on an arts board. I don't have to work beyond forty hours a week.

I don't have to have any friends.

As we were leaving San Diego, I asked my husband about the sea walls. They seemed pretty short to me, fairly useless against an ocean. He pointed out how far they were up the beach. I thought about the flooding along the Missouri River, how difficult it is to contain surging water.

I have shitty levees in my life.

Yesterday I picked back up the reins after a week away. At five I picked up my daughter and took her to meet her new teacher for second grade. We went to dinner. I gave her a bath, complete with a Wizard of Oz Celebriducks singing contest. I called my parents.

I didn't look at my laptop or my cell phone even though it literally made me nauseous not to do so.

I know from looking at my inboxes this morning that the email piled up against that levee last night. Even now -- by taking the time to take my daughter to summer camp and write this post -- it's threatening to spill over.

Should I move it farther up the beach? Build it higher? Take it down and let the world overwhelm me the way it did right before vacation? My sandbags never seem to hold for longer than two days, and I often grow weary of rebuilding.

I'm sitting here typing in my Grateful Dead t-shirt and glasses. I should be in the shower. I need to leave for the airport soon.

But the strangest thing happened yesterday. Two phone conversations I had in the past six months turned into something. Not by me -- I just happened to be the person listening raptly on the other end to the aspirations, to the story -- but still. It is so cool to see plans unwind as they do.

So! First, see my friend and colleague Kim Pearson's mind-boggling post about how ankylosing spondylitis has changed her worldview and then back again. I honestly did not think she would ever write this post, and it is so inspiring and so humbling. I'm so glad she did. Also, I love seeing her doing the electric slide.

Second! I've gotten to know Kamy Wicoff over at She Writes over the past few years. I'm so impressed with what she's doing and what she's done, and this latest contest for fiction writers is such an incredible opportunity.

And now, um, SHOWER.

This week, some stuff happened that caused me great anxiety. As the stress washed over me, I tried to ride it out like a wave. I tried to put it in perspective. And actually, for one of the first times, it worked. Not to say I haven't gone back and forth a bit, but life is like that, and human beings aren't static -- nothing about us is static.

I talked to a few friends and family members about my reaction, which I have learned in the grand scheme of things is actually more important than the event -- the repercussions of my reactions last far longer than the crises. The general consensus seems to be that 2011 Rita is really handling things far better than 1992 Rita or even 2007 Rita. Wow, 2011 Rita, they said. You get down with your bad self.

I thought this morning as I was driving home from dropping off my girl at summer camp that great friends are like that: They are our mirrors. My friends reflect back to me not a glamorized version of myself flawlessly executing under any degree of pressure, but the real version, the version who sometimes wins and sometimes loses but is always someone they regard with love.

Because they accept me with all my flaws, it means even more when they tell me they are proud of me. Because they have seen every iteration -- in one case, every iteration since I was three years old -- they are even better judges than I am of my progress or lack thereof.

Having these people in my life -- my husband, my family and friends -- brings forth the best me, better behavior than I would exhibit left to my own devices in the depths of my psyche (which would far prefer a bag of Doritos and a stack of John Hughes movies or perhaps a baseball bat and some windows). I recognize all the time that wanting to show these people I love that I can do it keeps me moving forward most of the time.

It's weird that I was thinking all this before this latest series of events occurred when I wrote my review of Terry McMillan's Getting to Happy (it's the sequel to Waiting to Exhale) for BlogHer Book Club. Even then, I wrote:

And that's what I found with the women of Getting to Happy. You get to happy, then you get to sad, then you fight your way back to happy again. The triumphs don't last any longer than the falls, but the reverse can also be true.

Normally I would've tried to find some witty way to tie back this post to a review that I wanted to tell you all about anyway, but today it's so organic as to be shocking even to me. We are all trying to get to happy. And it, by definition, is elusive, because it, by definition, is relative.

The little angel pulled the shower curtain closed so I couldn't see her in the bathtub. Her voice held a very firm edge, the one she'll use when she's in upper management, I'm sure.

"I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO THE DENTIST."

"I understand that. I don't particularly like going to the dentist, either. But if you don't go, all your teeth will fall out."

"I WOULD RATHER LOSE ALL MY BOOKS THAN GO TO THE DENTIST."

"You have to go to the dentist."

Splash. Something that sounded like a bar of soap bounced off the tile.

"I WOULD RATHER HAVE TO LEAVE MY FAMILY AND LIVE IN THE FREEZING COLD WITH PENGUINS THAN GO TO THE DENTIST."

"I WOULD RATHER BE SUNBURNED ALL OVER MY ENTIRE BODY THAN GO TO THE DENTIST."

"I WOULD RATHER NOT HAVE ANY FOOD FOR A YEAR THAN GO TO THE DENTIST."

At this point, I was shaking with the exertion of trying not to laugh out loud and extremely grateful she'd closed the shower curtain. My stomach hurt from containing the giggles threatening to totally blow my cover.

"ARE YOU LISTENING?"

"Yes. But you still have to go to the dentist."

"OR ALL MY TEETH WILL FALL OUT."

"Right."

"THEN I WILL GET DENTURES."

I whipped the shower curtain open. She was laying on her stomach, glowering in righteous indignation up at me. Or as much righteous indignation as you can muster when your hair is clipped to the top of your head in two places.

"Child, WHO DO YOU THINK MAKES THE DENTURES?"

---

Tonight there's a free happy hour at The Writer's Place, 3607 Pennsylvania in Kansas City (on Pennsylvania behind the Uptown) from 6-8 pm. Free beer and nachos and the chance to hear about all the programming and perks of The Writers Place with a side of peer pressure from me to become a member. (Which is totally not required in order to schmooze with writers and drink our beer.) Door prizes! Win books, Spin! Pizza gift cards and more. Thanks to Muncharoo, Chelly's Cafe, KC Hopps and Spin! for their generous donations to feed starving artists.

My friend AV blogs about sex. She's a sex blogger. SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX

It doesn't seem like a job for the faint of heart, and fortunately, she isn't. She mentioned to me once that her family had asked her to adopt a pseudonym for writing because her writing embarrassed them. This week, AV wrote about it on BlogHer.

She wrote:

And if one thing I write makes one person feel less isolated, then my mission is complete.

Know, too, that I don't write about these things because I think it's safe or because I live with my head in the clouds and think it's perfectly acceptable to do so, but because I know it's not safe and it's not acceptable in this or any other society. This isn't a popularity contest -- it's a call to arms. This is the resistance.

In telling my stories I am liberating others to do the same, whether privately with me in my inbox, or in their own lives.

She wrote this and a lot more on her Facebook wall, in response to family members telling her they were embarrassed by her actions, telling her they felt sorry for her parents.

Then her mom responded:

Having said all this -- what do we think about our daughter? Allow me to express with pride that my husband and I find ourselves extremely satisfied in how she shares her own experiences and thoughts. You think we should feel ashamed but we fail to find reason to do so. We raised a daughter who stands firmly on her beliefs and values despite strong opposition. There is no shame in that.

Writing and family -- it's always a tightrope that every writer walks, and maybe more so every blogger. In telling our own stories, it's very difficult to not share someone else's. But AV is only writing stories of her own experiences -- if anyone should be upset, it should be the other individuals who were in the room, not her family.

I've had disagreements with my family over whose stories were whose, over whether or not I curse too much or have unpopular politics. I've often wondered if I embarrass my family on a regular basis with my words.

I think -- at least in American culture -- someone who writes about sex, not pornography, not erotica, but the actual act of sex as a physical, emotional, spiritual or not experience -- is literally and figuratively getting naked in a way few other writers do. Parenting bloggers write about guilt and walls streaked with poop. Food writers describe burning things, falling souffles, embarrassing mistakes. The ability to feel and express sexual desire is almost caricatured in modern society -- it often feels like there is only porn or tantric soul rocking -- nothing in between, but it is in the between that the rest of us live. Are we loved? Do we love properly? Is there a properly? If we don't have sex often enough, are we undesirable? Is sex as important as we thought it was? Is it more important than we thought it was? What is sex past twenty, past thirty, past when you look hot doing it? What is sexiness after the body starts to decay? What is sexiness when you're young and not yet comfortable with yourself?

I don't write about sex, other than the How to Get a Happier Marriage posts I did for BlogHer last year. It's not something I'm comfortable blogging about. But I did write about it a little in my novel, and in doing so, I started asking myself all those questions above. Sex is more and less than what we think it is. Perhaps it's the most vulnerable we can be.

I think as a people we're afraid to talk about actual sex for all of these reasons. We're comfortable with hinting at it, commoditizing it, using it to sell beer, acting as though we get it all the time, pretending we don't need it or we live for it, but heaven forbid we ever talk about it as the inherent part of the human experience it actually is.

Yesterday and Wednesday I was off from work to add a Part II to my novel (fingers crossed, it was a specific request). On Wednesday, even though I forced myself to ignore my work email, I checked my personal email and immediately fell down the rabbit hole of responses and responsibilities and lost almost two hours.

Yesterday, I took a complete and total Internet hiatus. No blogging, no email (!), no Twitter, no Yammer, no Facebook, no LinkedIn. I did text with my sister a little, but I also actually spoke to her on the phone for more than an hour. And last night I called my parents and told them a bunch of things I'd forgotten to tell them in the mad rush of email that is usually my life.

My life is email? Yeah, it kind of is.

At the same time, I'm reading Super Sad True Love Story in fits and bursts, which is a novel about a bunch of people trying to stay young forever who spend their lives completely immersed in little personal data devices that hang around their necks.

A while ago, the little angel asked me if I loved my phone more than her.

The last two days while I've been off, she's gotten off the bus at home instead of after-school care, and we've set up the sprinkler and invited friends over to run through it. The weather has been glorious.

Today I'm back online, back at work, back on email. And I'm determined to not become a Super Sad True Love Story character.

But it's hard, in this world we live in. It's hard.