Numbers become more abstract the bigger they get, and we are a country awash in big numbers. Exorbitant sums are mentioned so often in our culture– Tyler Perry made $130 million in 2010, and maybe owns an island!– that at a certain point conceptualizing the reality of that kind of money becomes as difficult as actually owning an island.  So when Mitt Romney released his tax return, and the country learned that he pulled in $21.6 million last year, the number initially seemed like just another absurdly ambiguous sum, the kind of money that makes someone really, really rich (and we already knew he was rich). That number and the way in which it was earned and taxed floated like a huge, context-less bubble above the heads of those of us without a firm background in economics. Even when we see or hear the amount of money Romney makes every year on “unearned” income (never was a financial term more loaded), it’s difficult to make it concrete.

Which is why the widget my husband, Dan Check (let’s just get that out there right now– I am in no way a disinterested observer), created yesterday is so brilliant. He built a fairly simple, interactive tool for calculating how long it takes Mitt Romney to make as much as a user earns in a year. In an ideal world, our work is valuable and valued. In reality, most people are fortunate to hold employment that is even one of those things, and only the very lucky can claim both. Still, key to our American Dream is this conviction that the hard work we do is important and/or getting us somewhere financially, which is why the widget is so jolting. The average American may not be able to understand the reality of a $21.6 million income, but they know exactly what went into the money they made, and what that money afforded and denied them.  To see months of labor– often hard, unappreciated, stressful and difficult– equal a small, cold number (4 hours, 51 minutes…21 hours, 2 minutes) in the scope of Mitt’s immense wealth is depressing and infuriating in equal measure.

In the time it takes me to get my son to his pre-school, have a cup of coffee, try to write something, and return to pick him up at noon, Mitt Romney has made my yearly income. But I don’t ‘work’ full-time, so perhaps it’s not a fair comparison (I’m not going to get into the exhausting labor involved in child-rearing, as I don’t want to awaken the ‘take it to Babble’ trolls). Let’s compare, instead, the most rewarding , difficult and stressful job I’ve ever had. When I was teaching special needs students (English and Language Arts for dyslexic and LD kids, grade 5-12), designing a curriculum from scratch, talking to parents every day, working late to create lesson plans, grading essays, advising teenagers, directing school plays, making yearbooks, chairing the humanities committee, presenting at conferences, writing constant reports, and breaking down at least once a month from the emotional toll of feeling personally responsible for giving children the quality education they deserved, my yearly salary, at its highest (after 5 years), pre-tax, was a few hours’ shy of Romney’s day rate.

I’ve read the comments on Slate about how hard Romney worked for his fortune, how all comparison smacks of class warfare, how the left simply wants to criminalize the prosperous. This is not the issue. I do not like the way that Romney made his fortune (dismantling businesses for profits), but I do not doubt that he is industrious and hard-working. The question is whether his work– and the work/lineage of others in the hyper-wealthy class– is so valuable that it warrants not only an outsized yearly income but an undersized tax rate.

This is the point that the Obama administration has been trying to make for months– the talking points for extending the payroll tax, for instance, centered on the entirely reasonable notion that if you make more than million dollars a year, you could pay more in taxes than someone making $24,000– and which he hammered home in last night’s State of the Union. Unfortunately, just talking about these huge sums is often too abstract, and too often feeds into that wonderful/terrible aspirational quality in Americans, the part that says, ‘I wouldn’t want to be taxed that way, and though I don’t make anywhere near that amount now, I no doubt will in the future.’ But approaching that little widget armed with your annual income– the number that, justly or unjustly, is the sum of your year’s labor– and seeing how paltry and inconsequential it is in the face of Romney’s wealth? The widget trumps talking points, rhetoric and rationalization to show the reality of $21.6 million dollars in all its stark obscenity.

Flavorwire’s listicle of literary couples, while juicy (“I weep for the eight years I spent…worshipping his image with him, and I weep for whatever else I was cheated of due to that time-serving”–Martha Gelhorn on Ernest Hemingway), doesn’t even scratch the surface. Where are Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their detail-sharing open relationship (pro-tip for young existentialists: this rarely works out). What about bisexual addicts & Morocco fetishists Paul and Jane Bowles? Drunk commies Dashiell Hammet and Lillian Hellman? And where are today’s tempestuous writer couples, hurling drinks at Paris Review parties?

Oh, they’re buying luxury brownstones and worrying about how they love their husbands too much. Blech. Today’s offensively private and healthy inter-writer relationships rob us of the gloriously drunken, sexually dysfunctional liter-romances of yore. Why have writers’ relationships gotten so boring?

• Not enough letter writing. Consider this mash-note from Rebecca West to H.G. Wells: “You’ve literally ruined me. I’m burned down to my foundations.” Yikes. While the torrid love lives of today’s writers might be uncovered by future biographers, emails are easy to delete, and lengthy love/”you’ve ruined me” letters are a dying art.  (Though $10 says Franzen’s got some.)
• Gay Pride. Fine, yes, it’s essential that society progress from the shame and judgement that kept gays and lesbians in the closet for centuries. But what about the great literary marriages of convenience? Everybody is so open now, they don’t make fraught, sexless contracts with other similarly tortured writers. And literary gossip suffers.
• Not enough alcoholism. The common denominator in so many of history’s most passionate writer-couplings just isn’t as common these days. Raise a glass to our bygone friend, crippling addiction.
• Psychopharmacology. Many of the “eccentric,” “tortured” writers of yesteryear were probably “mentally ill.” Now that bi-polar, depressed writers can be treated, they might not have such dysfunctional relationships. Or they do, but the pills lessen the risk of scotch throwing and revenge-sonnet writing.

But perhaps there is drama brewing behind those staid Brooklyn walls? One can only hope, for the sake of literature.

What? Two posts in one day? Be careful, lady, you run the risk of maintaining a blog like a responsible blog-maintainer (technical term, FYI).  What’s that you say? This isn’t a real post, just another self-promoting link? OK, well then I think you’re safe.

Here is my Social Media Rules For New Parents piece, which has had a long and tortured path to publication.  I wrote it over a year ago for The Awl, who wanted it, sat on it, then finally changed their collective Awl minds and dumped it. Poor, sad, dumped piece. But then came Babble, and they pay (do not ask how much; that might temper the happy ending aspect).  And here it is, in slideshow form!

This one seems to have gotten some traffic, and some hilariously indignant, sic-heavy comments. It’s amazing how much easier it is to dismiss critics when they cannot spell or assemble correct sentences.  This one was my favorite:

“first off for all of you who are bashing new mothers for posting about there babies GOD gave them to us to brag about and our families like to see new pics. and if i want my profile picture to be of my son and you dont like it dont look at it. and if you dont like my profile picture because you cant find me because it isnt a picture of me you probably arent that important to me. i personally think that if you dont like us befriend us and you are probably just jealous that you dont have a sweet baby to brag about ]”

NAILED IT.

I got the chance to talk to Sarah Vowell, and then I got the chance to write it up, and then it was edited by my awesome friend and editor, and then she went on vacation, and then the other editor decided to make it totally different! Oh well. Here’s the changed version, which I wrote maaaaayyyybe 15% of: http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2011/03/sarah-vowell-unfamiliar-fishes-politics-prose.php

And here’s mine (edited by the first editor), which I like more, and which has the HILARIOUS SUCCOTASH LINE:

Wow, the internet and I are in such a huge fight! A piece I wrote for The Hairpin, something I thought would be read as satire and summarily ignored, has ignited a war in the comments section.  The last time I checked it had garnered 186 comments (I stopped reading them for the sake of my will to live), which makes it the most commented piece on the site right now, ahead of the truly astounding “Ask an Abortion Provider.” That’s just absurd, especially since over half the people have logged on only to say how much they hate it, me, the kind of mom they think I am, the kind of piece it is, and the very fact that it was published.  I’m not going to dwell on the irony of internet traffic here: that by getting up in arms about how much you hate something you are only driving up its popularity. Instead, despite the part of me that thinks I shouldn’t have to explain myself, I wanted to just write about my intentions with the piece.

I honestly intended the piece as satire. Here’s a pretty good working definition, which also sums up some of with the problems I ran into:

“In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.  Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon…A common feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm—”in satire, irony is militant”… This “militant” irony or sarcasm often professes to approve (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to attack.…Because satire often combines anger and humour it can be profoundly disturbing – because it is essentially ironic or sarcastic, it is often misunderstood.…Common uncomprehending responses to satire include revulsion (accusations of poor taste, or that “it’s just not funny” for instance), to the idea that the satirist actually does support the ideas, policies, or people he is attacking.”

My intent in writing the piece was to satirize both the outsized scorn a small but vocal pocket of priviliged urbanites express towards those who choose to have children, in addition to the self-righteous, harried mommy-warrior types of those same enclaves.  The point was to show the absurdity of both poles, to exaggerate the voice in order to illustrate the ridiculousness of these stereotypes, and to adopt a militant irony in the tone.  I understand that it is really annoying to encounter new agey mother-goddess types who seem to think their pregnancy makes them just a smidge less holy than the Virgin Mary, just as it is incomprehensible that some people get seriously angry when they see a woman walking with a stroller through their own neighborhood, as though she and her baby were criminal yuppie interlopers.

And yes, like all satire, it hews sharp, and mean, and reads as though it might be real.  In that way it was a success, I think.  And it’s (obviously) completely valid to think it’s not funny, or to think it missed the mark. I don’t understand how people don’t get that it was satire (the Editor definitely got it, as did many readers), but it’s not for me to guess at the hows here.

What I find really shocking is the amount of vitriol in the comments.  As a writer, it is completely bizarre to have a persona you created for the sake of a satire be completely mistaken for your own and summarily attacked by strangers who feel compelled to make sweeping judgements about your whole being.  This is not a pity party, and I’m not going to get into how completely needlessly cruel it is to log on to a website in order to write awful things you would never say to people in real life (unless you are a horrible monster), but God, the internet is nasty (OK, that was a little bit of a pity party).

But here, because I am trying to not let the bastards get me down, I will end on a positive note.  Along with all the misreading, insult hurling, and personal mean-messaging (I had one lady sign up for twitter JUST TO CALL ME A HORRIBLE HYPOCRITE! That’s dedication/an anger problem!), I have also heard from all sorts of people who got it and liked it, including some tremendously talented moms who write in a very real and far more sensitive way on the subjects I was joking about (like this one!).  I really hope that this doesn’t leave a sour taste in Edith’s mouth about bringing a parenting perspective onto the site; there are so many voices out there that I would love to see get more attention (and not just those of moms).  In the end, all those nasty Do Not Want comments actually succeeded in getting me more traffic, thicker skin, and a trial by internet fire.  My son also contributed to this– what kind of role model would I be if I let strangers and critics keep me from doing what I love? I want to be courageous for him, and  if that means drinking the haterade every so often, so be it.

I decided to hide out from the mama heat for a bit in the safe confines of sports writing, where no one ever gets irrationally upset (hahahahaha! I feel I have to add that now every time I’m being sarcastic/kidding). It was super fun to attend a game as a member of the press (did you know they give you free chili and sodas and sheet cake and donuts?! Members of the press eat very unhealthy food!).  Even though the Timberwolves lost and I wasn’t able to photograph any naked players in the locker room (prudes), it was a fantastic experience. Basketball!

Oh hello!  I wrote this piece about the seminal racist studio propaganda clip-movie, 1974′s That’s Entertainment!

A lil’ piece I wrote for The Express was run through Google Translator and posted on this here website, and I think it really deepens my writing.  This is my favorite line: “Conduct of riffs, a singer-showman noisy and lyrics about “book Queens” and “golf course, golf, golf, golf”  If only I could write like that.

I wrote this for The Awl. It’s a bit more serious than my already sophisticated Juggalo-analysis.