New Blog Site

I'm afraid I've moved 50 Tries to another blog host. All the original content is there.

I just couldn't create the configuration I wanted at Blogger.

Please visit http://kiersten.connersax.com if you'd like to continue to read what I'm doing.

Thanks,
Kiersten

Why I Chose the New Yorker

Gina Smith, who keeps an incredible blog on a broad range of subjects, also keeps a record of great excerpts from recent New Yorker articles. It definitely helped remind me why I'm doing this.

My Version of the Mainstream Media

It's sad how much more accurate I find the Onion and The Daily Show than, say, the Today Show or CBS News.

Hmmmmm.

This survey is from 2002, but it doesn't bode particularly well for me. Or something.

08 - Democrats Anonymous: The 12 Steps

I really amused myself with this, anyway. Premise: the election went the wrong way, and we can’t can’t can’t get over it.

So now for the bigger question: who am I? Should I be two people? Should I try replying to the rejection message that I received?

It’s a different e-mail address.

Can’t believe I haven’t done this until now, but I just spent some time googling to try to figure out who the Shouts & Murmurs editor is, or anything about submitting. No dice.

I think I have to try the new e-mail address, as me, and just believe that they meant that thing about “evident merit.” I’ve got that Groucho syndrome, and never believe that my writing is good enough for any publication that I’d actually be willing to read. Whatever; all they can do is be really mean to me in e-mail, which has already happened from strangers on account of this blog.

So…do I then submit this essay to the regular e-mail address, as well, perhaps under another name?

Enough of my whining. I’ll try the new address first. Then decide about the standard address in a day or two.

Ugh, I want to crawl into a hole and die.

Rejection as Recognition

Came home from chemo today to find this in my inbox:

Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 17:17:59 -0500
From: "Shouts, TNY"
Subject: RE: Submission, re: Modest Proposal for GWB's re-election

To: Kiersten Conner-Sax
We are unable to accept your submission, despite its evident merit. Thank you for allowing us to consider your work.

Of course, my first reaction upon seeing the sender and subject line ( Shouts, TNY, Re: Submission, re: Modest Proposal for GWB's re-election) was one of excitement, mixed with dread. Dread immediately proved the right choice.

However, this is the first time that they have contacted me, so perhaps my evil plan is working, and they're getting to know me, getting to know all about me. Although that response sounds an awful lot like boilerplate.

Which brings me to an overwhelming question: do I change personas now?

My first reaction was yes, now they're aware of you. But Adam pointed out that they say you can send two per year. So what does it mean that they haven't responded until the sixth submission? Should I assume this is the first they've noticed, and continue with my plan of not changing until 10? Why do I feel like I'm talking to a delphic oracle?

Anyway, since I'm jacked up on steroids and the whole house is asleep and the leaves are falling outside, I'm going to choose to see the rejection as recognition and keep on going. Though maybe seeking that particular kind of recognition has always been my problem...no, that sounds really good and insightful, but I think that's someone else's problem. I'll try to come up with someone later.

07 - Stranger Things

Oh, I screwed up. Really really screwed up.

I was using the last e-mail message I sent to the New Yorker for the e-mail address, and forgot to change the subject line. Editors HATE it when you resubmit. I once submitted a short story to a big deal editor at the Atlantic, who actually sent it back with encouraging words and a few criticisms. I revised it and sent it back, but I must have accidentally re-sent the same cover letter or something, because he sent back a scathing note about how I’d already sent it.

So, I just sent this submission twice, once with the old subject line, once with the new! Fantastic then.

Other than engendering more hatred from what I suspect is only an e-mail filter sending anything sent to the shouts@newyorker.com address directly to the trash, it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t feel this is my best work, and it’s late, and it’s about the Red Sox, and strangely, no one actually seems to think that them sweeping the World Series is a big deal. I doubt it’s going anywhere.

But I still firmly believe that the Red Sox winning was a truly historic event! They gave me hope, which I’ve had more and less of lately. A few weeks ago, Adam saw that I’d bought a Red Sox hat, and asked what happened to the Yankees cap I wore two years ago. I told him that maybe I’d bet on the wrong horse last time and (just to really mix that metaphor) that the Red Sox seemed like the patron saints of lost causes. So if there’s hope for them, there’s hope for me.

But my hair hasn’t fallen out yet, so I’ve only worn the hat once, while gardening. I don’t know what that means.

I’m five days behind with this submission, due to a wedding in Chicago and a nasty cold. The nasty cold is still in effect, but I’m going to try to get caught up. It’s just that right now I’m trying to neither pass out nor have “bukies,” as Kylie likes to say.

I'm a Bad Person

I was excited to see that Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist had cancer, until I read Dahlia Lithwick's report that "thyroid cancer is both treatable and eminently survivable." The guy's 80 years old! I wish him ill. So long as Kerry wins.

Work in progress

Just read a Times Magazine article on Alice Munro that made me feel like a complete hack. I remember when I wanted to write emotionally compelling dramas that left you feelink like someone had just ripped your heart out, examined it very closely, and then shoved it back in.

Instead, Adam, Kylie, and I went to Crate and Barrel today to look for new kitchen furniture! I want to say something sarcastic now about abandoning my authentic artistic aspirations for a bourgeois life full of mass-produced furniture, but it was a cold gray day, and it was bright in the mall, and Kylie threw pennies in all the fountains. If watching your kid make wishes isn't one of life's great joys then I don't know what is, and soon we'll have comfortable kitchen furniture.

06 - Modest Options to Consider if George W. Bush Is “Re”-Elected

Okay, at least I think the writing is going better. I might even be proud of this one. Even the word count was where it was supposed to be.

Still no e-mail message saying “Stop sending us submissions, you ridiculous hack.” Maybe that address is just a black hole no one ever reads, so it’s just some kind of “Waiting for Godot” sort of thing. I could write something about Russia; then maybe David Remnick would read it. If I hear nothing after ten submissions, I’ll create a new personality. I guess something that sounds like a middle-aged man would be good.

I’m not as disappointed every week, though. Now, this is just what I do. Sort of like going to chemo and not liking my hair.

Anyway, the premise this week is that if GWB is “re”-elected, things will be so bad that a lot of people will want to flee the country. Which I think is completely true.

Had a second opinion from a renowned oncologist on Wednesday. He didn’t have a magic bullet, and I didn’t realize how much I’d been hoping for one until I realized he didn’t. He said that the whole thing is game theory: sometimes the cancer advances, sometimes we push it back, but we just have to keep me on the field because it’s plausible that they could have a cure in the next five years. I’m not sure he understands what “game theory” is (he seemed to be talking about football, and I was thinking more like prisoner’s dilemma), and I don’t really agree about finding a cure that soon—maybe within ten or fifteen years. He had a lot of advice, both about non-toxic treatments and keeping MSK honest. But he seemed like a very kind man.

We came home to a message to call my GP, and I knew he was about to tell me exactly what he told me when I got him on the phone: I’m positive for BRCA-2. My GP has ADHD (I’m serious—he wrote a book about it) and so he started talking and talking: “So what does that mean? Should you get your daughter tested? Yes. Should you get your ovaries removed? Yes. Should you have a prophylactic mastectomy on the remaining breast? Yes.” Normally I let him go, both to be polite and because he’s usually entertaining (once he told me about how his friend tried Viagra and was up having sex all night, then paused and said, “Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have sex all night. I’ve got kids, I’ve got patients…”), but this time I cut him off with questions, and just kept thinking, Kylie, Kylie, Kylie.

I’m trying to decide whether this was the worst moment of my life, but there’ve been three, four, five standout really bad moments now, still including my junior prom, so it’s a hard choice. While Bruce was talking, all I could picture was bashing the phone receiver against the desk until it broke. I hung up the phone and told Adam I was going for a walk. He asked to go with me and I said no. I was only gone a few minutes. It was cold, and I saw a family coming toward me, with a kid on a bike, and I wondered whether anything awful had ever happened to them and turned around. Adam tried to talk to me when I came back in, but I collapsed in a corner of our room with the phone, still wearing my coat. I told him that I needed to call my shrink. He said I could talk to him, and I told him no, that I needed to say things that I never wanted him to hear.

Adam was trying desperately to do the right thing this whole time, but he finally left. I took my coat off and pulled it over my knees and called my shrink on his cell phone. I talked to him, sobbing uncontrollably, for about half an hour. He said a lot of true and useful things, then said that he wanted me to take some Xanax and write down a list of things I’d done for Kylie or good things about Kylie or something (I wasn’t really listening because he should know by now that I don’t do the earnestly writing things down* routine), and call him back in fifteen minutes. I told him that I’d be all right, but he said that he’d appreciate it, so I said fine.

I hung up the phone, curled into a ball on the floor, pulled my coat over my head and sobbed. It may seem strange or overdramatic, but when I was a kid I liked to hide in closets or behind the Christmas tree. Or not so much hide as just sit. It was quiet and private and no one could find you, and I liked the fabrics of the coats and the smell of cedar.

I looked at my watch after crying for a while, since I didn’t want my shrink to freak out, and realized that I kind of liked it under my coat. It’s an expensive and stereotypically Westchester suburban mom kind of coat that I bought after the second or third chemo treatment, when I was high as a kite on steroids. My theory about these kinds of things is that they’re like a secret handshake. Most people don’t recognize them, let alone the authentic from the fake, but for some reason it’s important to get it right for the five percent of people who do, as a silent signifier that you understand the norms and belong where you are. All of this flashed through my mind as I stared at the plaid lining and felt kind of comforted by it, even though it hadn’t offered me any protection. If you’re wearing the soccer mom coat you’re supposed to have the soccer mom life, right? And the soccer mom’s life is full of babies and dogs and mommy and me classes, not doctors and catheters and scarred veins. It’s like I got the heroin addict’s life only without all the yummy heroin.

After another few minutes I got up and took the Xanax and called my shrink back and told him I was all right (I was scheduled to see him the next day). Then I curled back up under the coat, and eventually went downstairs and pretended that nothing had happened.


* Yeah, I know, I’m writing about it now, in a postmodern meta-memoir David Foster Wallace kind of blah blah blah way.

05 - John Kerry, Feel My Pain!

Well, it’s done and sent. Too short. I could only get up to 510 words. While physically I’ve been all right this week, it’s been VERY difficult emotionally, and my friend Jen’s daughter stayed with us Monday and Tuesday, and then on Wednesday I had to have a heart scan, culminating in chemotherapy yesterday. Today, my mother chose to make lasagna with meat sauce. Sometimes I feel like the support I’m getting is just phenomenal.

I’m seeing the oncologist in Brooklyn next week. Read lots of depressing things about cancer today. Drugs or not, it’s no wonder I feel like throwing up.

Work in progress

This once a week thing is hard.

Obviously, I haven’t heard from the Times. I was convinced, again, that I’d nailed it. I can’t believe that I’m only four pieces along, feel massive rejection, and yet am terrified of anyone reading any of this.

There was good news, of a sort, last week. I met with Dr. C— , who looked over my scans and my charts and felt that I needed more personalized attention. He said he would call his contacts around the world and ask whom I should speak to. Apparently, there’s an oncologist in Brooklyn who makes up custom concoctions, and doctors at Columbia working on vaccines. He also confirmed that Sloan-Kettering just puts you on whatever protocol they’re working on and hopes for the best. He said he would have information and to call him tonight, and I have, but didn’t speak to him.

I’m a little bit nervous about what his recommendations will be. He said they could burn the tumor off my liver with a laser, but that some cells had also traveled up to my skull. That the disease progressed like this in only two months continues to baffle me. At the end of the visit I asked whether I could still be cured, and he said yes, and I asked if I were cured, if I could still have children, and he said “yes, but let’s get you well for your husband and the one you have first,” and I felt relief for the first time in about three months.

He also didn’t charge us. “When you’ve reached a certain age, you just want to help people,” he said, and while normally I’d be cynical about that, I believed him. Maybe it’s because Dr. R— sent us. Whatever the reason, I’m no longer planning to buy gifts for Kylie up through her eighteenth birthday, so that Adam could give them to her once a year after I’m gone.

Anyway, I’m working on something about how raising taxes on the top two percent of Americans would be hard on them. I think it’s funny, but only about a third as long as I need right now.