Dogged Blog

Slow down you move too fast

This has been an odd week.

When I was sick, I told myself on an hourly basis that I had to slow down a little when I got better. Ever since February I've been going full throttle, burning myself out on the pet food recall and never really ramping back down to even something like my previous already-workaholic baseline.

Unfortunately, I had a few assignments I'd pushed back while I was whooping my lungs out, and they were sitting there waiting for me Monday. I took a deep breath and like the idiot that I apparently am, determined I'd do them and slow down, you know... later.

The next day Michael Jensen, my editor at AfterElton.com,  bumped one of the articles out two weeks. He was all worried that I would mind, and I pretended it was a huge imposition but I'd suffer through it for his sake. And then I hung up the phone and thanked any and all lurking deities for the respite.

I blogged a bit, worked on an article due next Wednesday for AfterEllen.com, caught up on a lot of email, blogged a bit more, cleared some backlog at Club Kingsnake, played with the new video embedding system at PetHobbyist, read a really brilliant book I'm reviewing for Pet Connection, blogged a bit more, and had a relatively easy first week back.

I realized yesterday that Monday is a holiday, and called Amy Moon, my editor at SFGate.com and asked if my pet column, which I usually file on the Monday before it runs, needed to be filed today. "Oh yeah," she said. So I stayed up a bit too late last night working on it, and got up this morning to do a final draft. I was struggling with a tough part -- it's a sciencey thing and I have a tendency to assume my readers have PhDs -- when the phone rang again. It was Amy.

"Er, Christie? Your column's actually running on Wednesday this week. You don't need to file until Tuesday. Is that okay?"

I heaved a big sigh and told her I'd try to live with it.

Okay that' s a lie. I had the file shut before I'd hung up the phone.

Usually the universe sends lessons in a negative form, things like chaining you to your bed with pneumonia to teach you that you need to take better care of yourself and intermix a little rest and relaxation with the compulsive workaholic thing.

I'm actually starting to wonder if I might be able to learn something even when the universe tries a kinder, gentler approach. Ya think?

What, me, jealous?

I suppose most people at some point in their life, while sitting in Starbucks sipping a triple shot latte and not moving too much because they might knock their laptop out of its wifi sweet spot, think to themselves, "I should write a book!" One day, they resolve, they're going to do just that.

I do this approximately once a week, and while I was sick, my attention would drift away from the endless stream of home decorating shows that are my life when I don't feel well and I'd let my mind play out the possible ways I might be able to find, you know, ten minutes a day to translate my brilliant thoughts and heartwrenching prose into book form.

So now, as I fill in my daily life again after emerging from my whooping cough sick bed phase, I'm thinking ten minutes a day isn't enough. I know this because my friend and editor Gina Spadafori keeps writing books, and as far as I can tell it's a full time job.

It pays off, though, because not only was one of her recent books, co-authored with my colleague at Pet Connection Dr. Marty Becker,  a New York Times bestseller and no, I'm not jealous at all, why would you say that? but now their  new books are featured in a big spread in Publishers Weekly no really, not jealous at all.

Gina blogged about it and mentioned that her pets are not impressed. Yeah. Well.  I am.

And, you know, jealous.

Blogging without a name

I was going to start this all balanced and rational and say I understand there is a tradition of anonymous commentary and of course, some people  experience political and cultural persecution and there are many good reasons to blog anonymously and all that's true, but the bottom line is this:

For god's sake, use your name.

I mean, unless you're going to lose custody of your kids or your job or be put in jail, all that blogging anonymously does it weaken your credibility and annoy people. It's pretentious and irresponsible.

I was chatting with my friend Rod McCullom, who blogs under the name of, ummm, Rod McCullom, on Rod 2.0. He told me that he met with a group of young bloggers, and one of them was irritated that a website I write for doesn't get comments from him for its articles the way it does from Rod. And Rod pointed out to the guy that he blogged using a screen name, and if he wanted to be considered a source for other people's articles, he had to fix that.

No less a source than Dan Rather expressed grave concerns about anonymous blogging at South by Southwest in Austin in March. He hit on the themes of credibility and accountability, and seemed to feel that the fact that there are so many anonymous bloggers out there hurt the credibility not just of all bloggers but of all new media. And I think he's right, at least in part.

It's perhaps easy for me to say this. I live in San Francisco, and far from getting my livelihood taken away by blogging openly, I make a living telling people what I think about everything from kitty litter to societal disapprobation of lesbian and gay civil rights.

But whenever I go to a blog or website and can't find out who the hell is talking, and it's not the site of a woman blogging in Saudi Arabia, or a political dissident in China, or a lesbian mom in Alabama... well, you get the picture.

Friday iPod Challenge, the "SHE LIVES!" edition

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: While I am indeed alive, I have no life whatsoever.

I don't even know how far behind I am on linking to stuff I've written, which I make at least some feeble attempt to keep track of here. I believe I wrote an article grading the cable networks on lesbian/gay visibility for AfterElton.com - I have the sole byline on it, but it was a collaborative effort with all the guys who are listed at the end as "contributing."

Then I boldy tread where no lesbian has gone before and wrote an article on the most groundbreaking gay male sex scenes on television. Apparently people actually like to read about sex, go figure.

So, I also blog over there on AfterElton... about the gaying of TV, about the glorious cheesy horribleness of Dante's Cove, about Hyatt Hotels not having the big gay love (I'm supposed to be following up on that story, but I had a three day headache and forgot),  about gay vampires on TV,  and a free movie about the history of queer cinema that you can download or watch online.

And next week I interview HGTV's David Bromstad.

So, that was the fluff. Now, for the substance. We had a live online panel discussion about the pet food recall with itchmo, petfoodtracker, thepetfoodlist, Gina, and me, over on pethobbyist.com. The transcript is here. It was wild, we had around 300 people come through.

If I listed all the blogging I've done on this subject at PetConnection in the last week, it would take up a lot of time I could spend more profitably shopping for shoes working, so I won't. Just believe me when I tell you, every time someone at the FDA speaks, my head explodes.

So, the iPod challenge. If you've actually read this far, well, just remember no good deed goes unpunished. Now I'm going to make you work.

You don't actually need an iPod. I just wanna know what you're listening to. I used to ask for a random playlist, but now I want the ten songs currently in heaviest rotation, or that you most recently played, on your mp3 or CD player, or heck, your tape deck or turntable, I am not a technological elitist.

Here are the last ten played songs on my iPod:

1. Baby's On Fire by Marc Almond (God, wasn't this on last week? I must like it)
2. Going to a Town by Rufus Wainwright
3. Caroline Says I by Lou Reed
4. Nessuno mi può giudicare by Caterina Caselli
5. Lover's Spit (Redux) by Broken Social Scene (this is the Bee Hives version with Leslie Feist singing)
6. Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys
7. Coming Back to You by Leonard Cohen (I have no memory of listening to those two songs back to back; I can't believe I would have forgotten that)
8. Madam Butterfly (after "Un bel di vedremo" from "Madama Butterfly") by Malcolm McLaren
9. Glenview by Pansy Division
10. Boy (Acoustic) by Erasure

So, whatcha listening to these days?

Sunday afternoon crashing

If I had known on March 16 when Gina and I were talking on the phone about some of the horror stories we were hearing from vets about pets sick from eating recalled foods, and said to each other that we needed to dig more deeply into this story than the mainstream media was doing, that it would completely consume my life for the next three weeks... well, I might have tried to get more sleep.

I'm utterly sleep-deprived, have been neglecting other work, and let's not discuss the loads and loads of laundry piled reproachfully around my washer and dryer. Or the abbreviated walks that my dogs have had to put up with on most days.

I'm not complaining. My dogs are healthy and happy, if a bit bored. We're much better off than those whose pets were sickened or killed, or those who had to worry about having fed recalled foods.

I do have two new, non-pet-related articles coming out tomorrow on AfterElton.com - I'll link when they're up. One is a review of Alan Cumming's new film Suffering Man's Charity, and the other is my interview with Cumming, which I did in Austin at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where the film premiered.

Sometime this week, or perhaps next weekend, my review of the music documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, which I also saw at SXSW, will be going up on club.kingsnake.com, and an interview with some of the people involved with that project will be on AfterElton.com on April 16, or as we call it in America, TAX DAY. I did already blog my thanks to 30 Century Man director Stephen Kijak for turning me on to Emmylou Harris' 1995 album Wrecking Ball during our interview... it's totally brilliant and it was worth the entire trip to Austin just to hear it. You can read my fannish gushing here.

I also blogged the pet food recall story over at DKos, which earned me my first ever recommended diary over there. Thanks to everyone who recc'd me, and to the Kossaks who posted more than 500 comments on that diary. That this story is NOT "just a pet story" has been crystal clear to Gina and me from Day One, and one of the biggest frustrations we've had is seeing how many people chose to trivialize or ignore it.

Gina blogged on Pet Connection this morning about a CBS reporter who was complaining that too much time was being given to the pet food recall story at the expense of "real news" like the Iraq war:

No one’s denying the need for honest reporting on the war in Iraq, and I can’t imagine a person who doesn’t care about the sacrifices of our fellow citizens there, or indeed about the suffering of the Iraqis who are living and dying in a war zone.

[....]

This isn’t about 12, 14, 16 dead pets — or even, if you extrapolate from numbers such as Oregon’s, Michigan’s, Banfield’s, the Animal Medical Center, the Veterinary Information Network or even ours, hundreds or thousands dead. (The FDA has some 12,000 complaints to investigate, more than double in a month their two-year load on all other complaints combined. More on the numbers here.)

This is about our happenstance discovery of a vulnerability in our overall food-safety system, one that we’re fortunate to have found and to have a chance to fix before something else even bigger happens, either by accident (which this pet-food disaster may well surely end up being) or on purpose (at the hands of America’s enemies).

In a brilliant comment, MFEMFEM said the reporter "is being a bit disingenuous," and goes on to say:

As others have posted, if he had used the ridiculous coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death or the constant repetitive stories making light of dishonest, selfish, arrogant politicians prancing around Washington, or the constant diet of celebrity Pablum, I might have some empathy for his point of view.

The pet recall story involves corporate lies and deceit, woeful inaction by federal agencies, deception by major pet food manufacturers, the deaths of thousands of pets, the lack of security for food products entering our country, and the exposure of appalling production conditions in plants in China that export foodstuff to our country. The pet food story has NOTHING to do with lack of reporting about Iraq. I hope Mr. Pizzey is not upset because his own reporting may not be getting all the attention he feels it should. I hope he is not trying to subtly imply that what he sees as too much coverage of poisoned pet food is an example of lack of patriotism or lack of support for our armed forces (that card is getting a little old).

He may be right about the lack of reporting of the human suffering in Iraq, but his use of the pet food poisoning story to focus on that lack of coverage is way off base. He looks ridiculous for using the pet food poisonings as a basis for his complaints.

I’m willing to bet the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith was tens times that the pet food coverage, yet Mr. Pizzey is complaining about a REAL news story?

I should probably finish up with something that ties all these things together and impress you all with my writerly prowess, but I'm done.

Talking to the semi-famous

I was going to start out saying that I've never met anyone really, truly A-list famous, but then I realized that's not true. I've met a bunch of A-list famous people - Sylvester Stallone, for one. I chatted with Sean Connery in an airport once. Jessica Lange (is she A-list?). I rode in an elevator with Morgan Freeman, does that count? I also spoke for half an hour in a hotel bar with Peter Gabriel (again, is he A-list?)

I should have said I've never interviewed any A-list famous people. And that's true.

But I've interviewed a lot of people who were sort-of-famous, B-list famous, and people who, while not famous, were rock stars within their own universe. (Trust me - the world's top veterninary cardiologist may not have groupies and squeeing fangirls dogging his heels, but there are parallels.)

I used to be dry-mouthed with fear before most interviews. With time I started to only get frightened when I interviewed people outside of my comfort zone, or people who didn't really want to talk to me and who probably shouldn't have. Once I started the interview I was fine, but I did feel a lot of anxiety leading up to it.

Then there are the people of whom I'm something of a fan, or interviews about a subject on which I have passionate feelings. The most obvious example of this is when I interviewed - be still my heart - Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor at the Xena convention in Burbank in January and yes, this whole post is just an excuse to post that photo, bite me. I've experienced it interviewing people about films, television shows, or music that I particularly loved, and also when doing stories, even news stories, on subjects that matter a lot to me, such as the ongoing coverage we're doing on the pet food recall over at Pet Connection.

Sometimes the somewhat-famous are people that I really don't care about one way or the other. I was supposed to interview David Boreanaz in Austin, although it fell through, and the truth is, I wouldn't have known him if he'd walked up to me in the street and punched me in the face. I've never seen him in anything, didn't recognize his name when I got the assignment, and had to look him up on Wikipedia. (My apologies to David and all Buffy fans; apparently he's a much bigger star than Lucy or Renee to them.) Had I interviewed him, I'd have been as calm as if I were interviewing my dog groomer. Seriously.

I was very professional when I interviewed Lucy and Renee, despite my pre-interview jitters and the fact that it was the culmination of my career as a journalist. KT, who took that photo, said I seemed calm, anyway. I remember feeling very focused when I was talking to Lucy, who is extremely direct and forthright and beautiful and also, very tall. And when Renee joined us, I was calm.

At the end of the interview with Renee, though, I did have a moment of OMG I AM INTERVIEWING GABRIELLE, and felt my mind start to melt. Just then her baby did something extremely adorable like try to eat my earring, and I got over it before we had to go on.

That never happens when I interview my dog groomer.

Greatest invention ever

I have found the perfect program for turning digital interviews into text documents.

It's called the human brain.

I paid someone to transcribe a bunch of interviews for me. OMG it's bliss. Bliss, I tell you. I would never have done this if I weren't so freaking overwhelmed with work right now (bitch bitch bitch), but I may now become, you know, an addict.

I always knew I needed a secretary. It's not that I'm disorganized, it's that I'm UNDERSTAFFED.

Idle thoughts while I should be writing

It's probably a sign of how deeply insane I am that I'm taking a break from writing to blog.

Do you know that it's much harder to write 600 words than 2500? Trust me.

Do you know I had an article for a magazine I used to edit due today? Neither did I. I should write these things down.

Have I mentioned it's harder to write 600 words than 2500? I started with 2500. I have it finally whittled down to 708. I'm staring at this freaking thing and I can't bear to cut one more word.

Perhaps I should buy shoes online go walk the dogs and clear my mind.

Perhaps I should stop leaving so many things to the last minute and completely forgetting others.

C'mon, guys

Not all my professional life is really spent interviewing Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor, okay? Some of it involves doing stuff like trying to get people who DO. NOT. WANT. to talk to me, to talk to me. People who know the article I'm writing is not in their best interest and really, if they had the brains they were born with, would in fact, not give me the interview at all.

But a lot of it also involves getting press releases from companies and organizations - most of them large corporations and major non-profits with full time PR staffs and huge budgets - who are falling all over themselves trying to get me to talk to them, who want to talk to me for hours, who are absolutely overflowing with the milk of human kindness for me.

So to them, I have one request: Put your freaking press releases on your website when you send them out. Put them on a blog or a press release engine and INCLUDE THE URL IN THE EMAILED PRESS RELEASE.

Because the odds I'm going to regurgitate your entire release are zero, but I might excerpt it and then link to the whole thing.

If I could.

Instead, I call you and ask, "Is this release online anywhere?"

Silence. "I don't think so. Let me check."

They return. "No, no it's not."

WHY ISN'T IT? PUT IT THERE. DO IT NOW.

That is all.

More on the interview hate

I recently got a hot new digital voice recorder to use in interviews, to replace the OMG so outdated tape recorder I (rarely) used, prefering to rely on the old-fashioned method of making often-illegible marks on paper with a long tube filled with ink.

There's no question there are a lot of problems with note-taking. One, you can get it wrong without realizing it. Two, my handwriting is, at its best, a scrawl, and at worst, abstract art. If I didn't have the time to type up my own notes immediately after the interview, I typically couldn't even begin to decipher them later.

The other problem with taking notes, even though I'm wicked fast at it, is that while you're taking notes, you aren't looking at the person you're interviewing, and you're missing eye contact and body language that can inform your story. This is less important on a phone interview, but even there, I would sometimes find that I was still scrawling something down after they had finished talking, and not  formulating my follow up questions.

But there are problems with recording interviews, too. I hate having to listen to the whole freaking thing twice. I do the best I can to turn each interview into a scintillating article full of brilliant commentary, capturing the essence of the subject and shedding light on their cultural contributions, but DAMN some of these things are dull to listen to. Let alone listen to a second time.

The obvious cure is to do both, and use the recording as a backup for my own notes. The problem with that is, of course, then I lose the ability to really focus on the subject of the interview, and still almost always have to listen to the thing twice.

No, there really is only one true solution, and that's to become so highly paid as a writer that I can afford to have someone transcribe my recorded interviews for me. If you want to do that and are willing to work for gratitude and fame (such limited fame as I can offer, anyway), hey, let me know.

Yeah, I didn't think so.