Let the fandom begin…

Thank goodness I'm not in the unpopular arts.

Visited the TARDIS! (And geeked out, clearly.)

Battled the Lord of the Nazgûl. (Seriously. Armor.)

Enjoyed some awesome milling around in the exhibitors' hall.

Stumbled on Jim Butcher, author of one of our faves, The Dresden Files.

And just when I think we might be *too* dorktastic, this guy appears!

Last but not least, just in case you’re wondering if any work actually got done,

I hosted a raucous panel with the cast and producers of Syfy’s Being Human

that may or may not qualify, if the video’s any indication…

On a screen.

Playing in a loop.

In all its giant, HD glory.

I should say, first, that this was a fantastic event featuring major speakers (and yes, me). So the event coordinators’ fine judgment was not in question. They were just being current, and I seemed to be having an existential crisis about it.

It might’ve been Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl version of the anthem playing, but I was so thrown off by the whole display that I couldn’t really focus on it. The point of view in the video was swinging and swerving, as though the cameraman (or woman) was doing one of those glamor shoots where he runs all around getting different angles and shouting things like “Yes! Right there! Just like that!”

But this wasn’t a Real Housewife we were watching; it was the flag. The Stars and Stripes. The old Red, White, and Blue.

Now, it’s possible I’m biased. We said the pledge and sang “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” every morning at Stillmeadow Elementary School. And I did play Columbia, “Gem of the Ocean”—the heroic female representation of the United States immortalized in song, in case you aren’t from the 19th century—in the third grade play. So I do have some long-held love for Old Glory that’s only deepened by the fact that I’m a naturalized citizen. But while I may know all her nicknames, I’m hardly one of those people with an American flag in every window; patriotism is like godliness, I think—the more you talk about it, the less I believe you.

Why, then, did this video bother me so much? The image was still majestic, and we were all experiencing it together. But it felt like watching the President on The View—it’s cool that it’s possible, and you get why it’s necessary, but it just feels wrong. As Americans, there is perhaps no greater symbol of our connection to each other and to our country than that piece of cloth, and if it’s too much now to find or produce a real, live flag, well, why even say the pledge or sing the anthem at all? Let’s all just like America on Facebook and get on about our business.

If that sounds like Chronic Tech Fatigue Syndrome, it probably is. Sometimes I think if I hear the word “technology” one more time, I’ll die of boredom—it’s good, it’s bad, it’s social, it’s advanced, it’s exploding, it’s exploding our brains, it’s…taking over the world! Whatever it’s doing, it’s here, and I’d venture to say, for the most part, it’s positive. Some aspects have flourished so fast that we don’t yet have a handle on them—we may soon decide, for instance, that iPhones aren’t proper pacifiers for toddlers—but that’ll come.

There are some things, though, that technology shouldn’t mediate—a few special parts of human existence that I hope will always be best experienced in real life. We all have our own list, I bet, and mine’s simple: first meetings, baseball, and believe it or not, the flag.

Today’s photo is courtesy of the U.S. Embassy Montevideo.

First, full disclosure: If there’s a vampire, werewolf, dragon, hydra, or otherwise monstrous creature from occult lore or ancient mythology in it, sign me up. This probably harks back to my mother telling us ghost stories from her childhood on her parents’ rural rice farm in Guyana and reading us such children’s classics as “Perseus and Andromeda” before bed. Truly, it’s a wonder we seem as normal as we do.

So I was somewhat predisposed to digging Being Human, a witty, pretty, and often intense drama about a vampire (Witwer), werewolf (Huntington), and ghost (Rath) who wind up roommates in a Boston rife with sinister supernatural goings-on. But throw in all the twentysomething angst—new romances, old romances, the trials of living together, and the omnipresent “What am I doing with my life (or afterlife)?”—and this was instant destination viewing.

That could also be why the prospect of sitting down with the cast seemed so much like the best possible kind of research. Maybe it’s just the wishful thinking that anyone who’s supposed to be home writing does to justify the time spent out doing things that are infinitely more fun than writing. But I’m in the midst of doing a book about Generation Y, and Being Human is, after all, about being human at what can be the most complicated, trying, changing, upside-down time of life, even for non-monsters: our twenties. (Actually, Aidan, the vampire, is 257 in an undead twentysomething body. So he’s been a young man for, like, 240 years. Which, as they say, presents its own difficulties.)

With that in mind, I expected this panel to be a happy hour of chatting about fantasy, monster make-up, character motivations, and modern life, with a few of those Inside the Actors Studio-style anecdotes that fans would enjoy retelling forever. What I got was all that, some near hernia-inducing laughter, and a perfectly timed reminder of what makes work awesome.

Of course, actors on a hit show have every reason to love their jobs. But what’s far more striking about this cast of characters is how much they love each other. In fact, Stern told the audience, they hit it off so famously from the very start that network execs worried they wouldn’t be believable as new roomies in the show’s early episodes.

And that chemistry showed. Preparing for an event like this, I usually do research, write questions, and try to think through as many angles as I can in an unreasonable attempt to control all possible outcomes. But within five minutes of getting these guys onstage and listening to them banter—without, I think, a real question even being asked—I put my notes down and gave in to the tomfoolery.

Topics ranged widely, from addiction (as in, how Witwer models his vampire), to Mario Kart (Rath does impressions of Yoshi, Toad, and the whole Nintendo crew), to physical fitness (Huntington ends up in his birthday suit most times his character goes wolf). They laughed at each other’s jokes, poked lots of fun at each other, and didn’t miss an opportunity to praise each other’s work. It felt—and I think this shows in the clips—like that hour after the meeting of your very favorite college club or a day at your awesome barely-paid scrappy start-up job, when everybody sits around, hopped up on some exciting project, driven to giggles by overwork, and brimming with each other’s energy.

I love that feeling. And I loved seeing everyone in that room feel it. And most of all, I love that we live in a time when it isn’t reserved for the super-rich or the super-lucky. We’re all allowed to look for some joy, success, and balance in work and life, and increasingly, we’re privileging that above much of everything else (such as, say, gobs of cash or the “right” business card). And that—and how great organizations respond to it—is exactly what I’m writing about in this book.

So all that to say, in retrospect, this totally was work, in the very best possible way.

Photo, courtesy of the Paley Center, features (l-r) Being Human cast members Sarah Allen, Sam Huntington, Meaghan Rath, and Sam Witwer. For more on all today’s folks, check out syfy.com or follow them on Twitter at @Syfy, @stern3000, @meaghanrath, and @SammyHuntington. And if you’d like more video from me, get your fix here.

Or maybe that’s just me. But since I did spend lots of time in undergrad studying poetry instead of myriad more practical subjects, it’s a pleasure to put that into practice every once in a while. This one’s still a work in progress, like everything, but hope it’s worth a smile.

*****
Cruise

it creeps, it crawls, it slithers
what is it Eliot says? it slouches
no—no, not really
it…stalks
a white city of ship coming up the Hudson
like its long ago, gone below
brethren

but those never sailed past my winter views window
and the natives at play could hardly have seen
from their groundlevel galleys
this outsize nightmare made of pop culture predators—
King Kong, megalodon, a tyrannosaur
(that scavenged tall, not hunched the way its physics says)—
stalking through the trees,
raking through the muck,
boring through the buildings that would challenge
its primacy

no, they could not have known
a man named Henry would become
a fleet called Royal
to this day obliterate a state of simple mind
(or New Jersey)

but I do

and had there been an inkling,
not storied beads, nor storybooks,
not even long, long memories
would have been enough
to give up
that dirty, sweet, and overgrown past
for this electrum future.

*

Today’s photo—with the fantastic title, “move over, lady”—is by Kai Schreiber.

But every once in a while, a standby surprises you. That’s what happened recently when, after speaking on Gen Y at the Kohler Distributor Conference, I listened to Vice President of Sales Frank Windsor’s closing remarks. In the midst of discussing product and process innovations, he quoted something old and lovely: “You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

It’s an Irish saying, apparently, that’s also been attributed to Abraham Lincoln. And Frank was using it to both honor Kohler’s 130-plus years and encourage the some 200 people in the room to help build on and beyond that history.

But mostly, it struck me as a beautiful little encapsulation of something many of us have felt: It’s a blessing to grow up with the bar set high, but that doesn’t make it easier to reach.

And in some respects, it often seems even harder. We joke in my family that our mom’s bad for our self-esteem—a single mother of four kids, she managed to go back to school and rise to the top of her field, while also cooking us dinner every night, making Halloween costumes and party dresses from scratch, and still managing to be smarter and better informed than we were when we sat down for Sunday breakfasts that inevitably turned into heated political debates.

That upbringing was an incredible gift—and it’s also made all four of us neurotic, self-flagellating, sometimes insufferable overachievers. Luckily, we got our mom’s sense of humor, too, and the pride she takes in self-awareness. (She likes to tell us that, had one of us been an ugly baby, no amount of mother’s love would’ve kept her from noticing.)

So as we’ve gotten older and each faced our individual challenges, we’ve learned to do our own growing. But when she’s hanging with her four kids, Mom never misses an opportunity to remind us that, even in her stilettos, she’s still the shortest. Talk about pressure…

For more from Kohler, visit here. And today’s photo features my silly family—from left to right, me, Omar, Mom, Kamran, and Elizabeth.

It’s not because I hate technology. And not even because I hate people; real social networks are, after all, as old as humankind—and I love humankind.

But I hate social networking because I’m a writer. A really crazy writer. The sort of ridiculous person who can spend 45 minutes writing a three-sentence e-mail, reading it aloud to myself until I’m absolutely sure that the final comma shouldn’t actually be a long dash. I’m so prone to these tumbles down the rabbit hole, in fact, that I’ve established metrics to counter the bad habits: Over the course of an eight-hour writing day, taking into account all the false starts, long thinks, and sentences stricken from the record, I’ve calculated that I can write about 300 decent words an hour.

It took me 25 years to get there—and just a couple more to discover that, in the Twitterverse, I’m good for 140 characters in, oh, say, 20 minutes.

It was in this pitiful state that my friend Kim Thai found me when we began working together in 2009. I was editing the website of one of the premiere magazine brands, and she’d joined up to mastermind our social media presence. So imagine her surprise when she asked me to sign up for a Twitter account of my own, and I just about hid under my desk. The notion of agonizing over not just every idea (or sentence, or word), but over every character and piece of punctuation seemed like stress I just didn’t need. And sending these half-thoughts out into the wide world, well, that was bound to be torture.

To her credit, Kim only laughed a little. And then she started me on her very own 12 Step program—i.e., 12 Steps to Not Hating Social Media. It’s been a bit like conquering a fear of water. (I’ve been known to be afraid of that, too.) First, you put your face in the water. (Sign up for your Twitter handle.) Open your eyes. (Follow some people.) Eventually, you learn to float. (Send a tweet a day.) Then try a few strokes. (Retweet, reply, post a picture!) And before you know it, your morning cruise of The New York Times (website) has been replaced by half an hour soaking in your Twitter feed.

It’s a whole new world, and I have Kim to thank for that. It still has its scary moments, and there’s a ways to go—let’s just say I won’t be foursquaring it any time soon. But where years of mainstream writing—academic, journalistic, and otherwise—had at times threatened to take the joy out of words, some of the conversations, linguistic acrobatics, and just plain free thinking in these new spaces has actually put some of the excitement back in.

We’ll see where it all leads. I have a book in the offing, for instance, and it’d take quite a few tweets to make even a tiny dent in that word count. But already, there’s this site—something that just couldn’t have happened without Kim, her 12 steps, and the sparks they’ve set flying. (Never mind that she built it all, too!)

So it’s fitting, I think, to kick things off by saying thank you for all this, Ms. Thai. Without you, I might still be under the desk.

For your very own insights from Kim, follow her here. And today’s photo—of the Literary Walk in Central Park—is by the intrepid Elizabeth Hira.