Moving out of New York
Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be getting on a plane with all my worldly possessions and heading back north to Toronto. I’m moving because of personal circumstances that I won’t be getting into here, but I believe the move is the best thing for me. It’s not saying goodbye to beautiful NYC, however — I anticipate being back in town for business trips and the like, and hope to be able to make the Dirty Girls launch party in March.
With that in mind, here are two lists: 10 things I will miss about New York, and 10 things I will not miss.
10 Things I Will Not Miss About New York
1. Canal Street
2. Getting pawed in clubs
3. People who say “isn’t this city just so fucking amazing?”
4. People who say “this city is dead, it’s over“.
5. The unbearable crowds in all the good bars and restaurants
6. The terrible (terrible!) hot dogs from street vendors
7. $10 drinks
8. The three flights of stairs to my apartment
9. Being made to feel like a criminal at customs, even though I’m here legally
10. One dollar bills
and now that I’ve torn you down, New York, I’ll build you back up:
10 Things I Will Miss About New York
1. The food
2. The food
3. Cheap cab rides
4. The unexpected beauty, everywhere
5. Trader Joe’s
6. The Metropolitan Opera
7. In The Flesh reading series
8. The excitement
9. The subway system
10. My friends
How To Blog
With yesterday’s post being more personal and emotional than most on this blog, I’ve been trying to sort out what exactly I’m doing with this parcel of internet space.
The most obvious reason to have a blog, as an author, is to simply own the space, make sure you’re the first google result, and give people something to look at if they want to see what you’ve done and what you’re up to. That’s how I’ve been using the blog this last while, keeping it for announcements and updates and not including a lot of content not directly related to my writing.
The most interesting blogs, however, have another component, whether it be provocative personal confessions or sheer enthusiasm for its niche. Those are the kind I most enjoy reading, and when I think to myself, “I would like to have a blog” it’s something more like that, something that someone might find exciting to page through.
For some reason, writing on the internet is much more intimidating to me than writing for print publications. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s because the potential response is so much more immediate and unfettered - someone can write a vicious comment or email within minutes of any posting, and things said about your writing can be dug up so easily, even years after the fact. Perhaps it’s just that I have been obsessed with the internet for far too much of my young life, and have assigned it some sort of mythic importance. Regardless of the reason, it would be a good thing to tame my anxieties surrounding having my words on the internet.
So, maddystuart.com is what it is, technical issues and sporadic posts and all. I don’t imagine there’s a lot of interest in what I thought about the COC Ring Cycle, although my reference to photoshopped pictures of muscled baritones still gets hits. We’ll see what this blog becomes.
Update
A quick rundown of what I’ve been up to:
- I’ve moved from Canada to New York City.
- Publication of Second Skin has been canceled, but I’m working on finding a new home for my story Opera Gloves.
- After years of decorating my apartment with circles-and-stripes amateur paintings, I’m finally going to learn to paint for real.
Toronto Star on Tuesday
The other day I gave an interview to the Toronto Star, and they tell me the piece will appear on Tuesday January 16th. I talk a little about what life is like as a “computer programmer by day, erotica writer by night” sort of person. Watch for it! I will certainly be watching with trepidation, wondering how I will come across in print.
Are the public schools OK?
I had an interesting encounter in a coffeeshop today. I was enjoying the 19th-century part of Orlando and an overly-sugary fruit smoothie when a man approached me, asking if he could ask me some questions.
It came out that he chose me to ask because I looked like I was still in public school (my youth isn’t over yet, but I didn’t think I looked quite that young). He had a thick eastern european accent, and had recently moved to Canada.
“The public schools…are they OK,” he asked, “or should I put my kids in private school?” I assured him that the Canadian public school system is pretty decent. He shook his head and continued: “but what I want to know is, do they teach moral values?” I was confused and wondered about what he meant. They did teach me to share and play nice as a youngster.
Eventually it came out that what he was worried about was sexual education. He wanted to know the specifics of what was taught. “I don’t want them to learn that kids having sex is OK,” he continued.
My instinct at the time was that the program was probably a bit too liberal for his taste, and I think that a liberal sexual education program is a very good thing. I firmly believe that old-fashioned notions of the virtues of purity versus the sinfulness of sex are deeply sexist, repressive, and unlikely to lead to health and happiness. At the same time, I respect the right of parents to bring up their children within a certain value system, and I had no desire to engage him in argument. At this point I pulled a cop-out, saying that it had been a while since I’d taken any sex-ed in school (and that in a different province) and that he’d be better off asking a teacher or the school board about the specifics of the curriculum.
I continued to wonder afterwards how old his children were and what his worst fears about the program looked like. Was he conservative enough to balk at anything other than abstinence-only? Or was he worried that the program would tell his children something along the lines of “sex is lots of fun and everyone should be having it. Here’s how to perform a blowjob”?
I also wondered what is being taught in sex-ed these days, since the last time I encountered it was in 1996. I have a tough time differentiating between the stuff I was taught in school and the stuff that was in all the sex-ed books that my mother left on my bed at age 8. I learned about “the birds and the bees” from one of those books long before I encountered it in the classroom.
I also remember one video shown in school that stated, without equivocation, that homosexuality was both common and completely normal. That would have been a fairly controversial statement in relatively conservative Alberta, but it passed without comment in the classroom. However, when the teacher was asked via the anonymous question box how homosexuals have sex, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “your imagination is as good as mine.”
We learned that there are other sexual activities besides penis-in-vagina intercourse and memorized the definition of masturbation, but didn’t learn what an orgasm was. The clitoris was just a lump on an anatomy diagram, a diagram that the teacher apologized for having to hand out (”I apologize, girls…this one is very rude”).
Curious as to whether the curriculum now teaches that kids having sex is OK, I took a look at the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education. The following objectives appear:
“affirm that sexual feelings are a natural part of human life”;
“integrate the positive, life-enhancing and rewarding aspects of human sexuality while also seeking to reduce and prevent sexual health problems”
“[help students learn to] integrate sexuality into mutually satisfying relationships”
“sensitively address and resolve conflict that may arise as a result of differing values and beliefs surrounding sexual health and sexuality”
So, it would appear to be generally forward-thinking and pro-sex, which I am fully in favour of, but also find myself wondering where the gaps might be.
I also wonder if that man would have approached me if he’d seen I was reading a book with a naked woman on the cover.