On Wednesday Terry Gross talked with Chris Anderson on Fresh Air about his new book, Free. His book presents the theory that businesses online can make money by making all of their services free. It also presents a history of the internet economy, showing how places like the Wall Street Journal online makes money by offering 80% of its material free, while over one million subscribers pay for the rest of the 20%.

I called Steve so that he’d turn on the radio. He makes his money through online advertising, though some sites make more money than others. His site that gets the most visitors, some 8,000 visitors per day, doesn’t make very much money. Some sites that take the majority of his time also don’t make the most money. Online doesn’t work that way, apparently.

Since the Ann Arbor News closed its doors, we talk a lot about ways that businesses can support themselves online. I personally don’t like that the New York Times is free online. That site is my homepage, I spend a long time there each day, and I want to pay them money. It’s scary to me that they are millions of dollars in debt now, and that good reporters all over the world are being let go because of the free online business model.

But Chris Anderson makes it sound so easy.

I think about it with my own work. If I could make a very long string of text and photography and drawings, good writing and heart and as much thoughtfulness as I can muster each day and offer it up online, which I try to do, and if I could do this and earn something — anything — that would go a long way. But I haven’t managed to figure out how to do that. The subscription system is silly for blogs. And some artists sell their work online through their site, but I can’t find it in my honor system to turn drawings into cards or t-shirts, and I’d rather prepare my drawings for a show in a gallery than give them up one by one online. I think there is a way, somehow, but I must be figuring it out very slowly.

Then Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Chris Anderson’s book in the most recent New Yorker.

Malcolm Gladwell is the king of pat theories. His books make the world seem so sparkly clean! But he argues that Chris Anderson’s Free is way too simple and, though he makes everything sound fluid, Anderson misses a bunch of nuances.

I love that conversations can happen that quickly. On NPR, of which I am a paying member, I hear a conversation with a writer that sparks all sorts of questions in our household. Then that day I get the New Yorker in the mail, which we pay for, and I see an argument against the simplicity of the book in question, all before I’ve ever been to a bookstore. (Nevermind that I link to the free versions of those two resources online.)

I want Steve to save the New York Times.

I don’t know how to do it, I’m not a good business person. This autumn I had a great idea for a book that I was sure would sell a million copies, but when I started writing it, it turned into a series of poems and drawings. That’s my business model.

July 11th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

One:

I sometimes can’t imagine what it’s like to be a single parent. Everything I do is aided by Steve. When I first came along, he was so grateful that adult conversations were happening in his house: it created a line, we were the adults, they were the kids, authority didn’t come in only one-syllable sentences. And it created so much more order, I could see that from the start.

Two:

Take Friday morning: I had set the alarm the night before for 6:40 — Steve had to be in the car with Rosie at 7 to get her to swimming on time. The alarm went off; he slept. The alarm went off again at 6:50, and then at 7; he slept. I told him it was seven and he mumbled that he was going to sleep until 7:30. I told him Rosie had swimming and he jumped up and woke Rosie and they were off. If that one moment got botched, if he had slept in, it would have set off a spiral of chaos for the rest of the morning. One adult cannot so easily keep track of the minutia of an entire household.

This morning Jack walked on the good living room rug with muddy baseball shoes. Show Courtney what you did, Steve said. We sometimes need help reprimanding, when one of us is tired or the words aren’t coming.

Three:

I took Rosie to her doctor’s appointment a week ago — last minute Steve remembered and called me and off we went — and set up another one for July 8. I had the receptionist print out a reminder for us and I gave it to Steve. He wrote it in his calendar for July 9. Rosie’s mother called and said she wanted to go with Rosie to the next appointment. Steve forgot I had made an appointment already and Rosie’s mother was off calling to make more appointments. I asked Steve to text her that she could go with Rosie on July 8, which he did, though in his mind it was still July 9. Then Rosie spent the week with her mother, and arrangements were made to pick her up on July 9 and Steve told Rosie’s mother that we’d go ahead and take her to her appointment. Nobody knows, nobody checks, we all try to just trust the other. July 8 came and left, and I was counting on Steve taking her and hadn’t re-checked my calendar, and Rosie’s mother was no longer going to take her and didn’t look at her calendar. Rosie missed her appointment. These miscommunications between three people happen so often. Two people support each other, but with three, the kids’ schedules slip too easily through the cracks.

July 11th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

I think I am too good at looking stern and serious. I want to understand better how to relax and enjoy.

July 11th, 2009 | Category: inward | Leave a comment

We celebrated Jack’s ninth birthday today, the day before Rosie leaves for camp. She’s been at camp for his last three birthdays, and she’s serious that when people ask her how old her brother is she has trouble not saying five? The ritual of celebrating a passing year helps us all mark time, and really see each other, and acknowledge that we have grown. And plus we get sugar.

July 10th, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Leave a comment

When we went in for our emergency ultrasound at 12 1/2 weeks, we saw the woman who led us through the ultrasounds of our first IVF, and the second. She had counted all my eggs with her ultrasound equipment during the drug regimen, and she was the first to see that twin A’s heart was no longer beating. This woman isn’t much older than I am — it’s strange for me to realize now that actually she might be younger than I am — and she is no more mature. When I think of her I think of her chatter about cookie dough and decorating easter eggs with her nieces and nephews and about suntanning and jogging on her lunch breaks. I was afraid it would be her that entered our room when I knew that the fate of twin A might not be good, and it was her, and she was quiet and composed right when I needed her to be.

If I’m bleeding again should I get another ultrasound? I asked her after the last emergency one.

She stopped and looked at me. This baby is so loved. You’re allowed to call for every single concern. I’m not saying that a baby born of a crack-smoking mother isn’t loved, but you guys have worked so hard for this.

I thought about that a lot afterward. Because what I’ve been feeling for a fifteen-week-old fetus that I’ve never met is not necessarily love. It felt okay to say that to myself, but I told Rosie that today and she didn’t understand. Of course you love it, she said. And I rushed to agree with her because, twisted logic, I didn’t want her to think that if I didn’t love this fetus inside of me then I also didn’t love her.

I’m not going to begin to define what love is, because when I’ve tried I’ve started to doubt just about everything. But what I feel for the coming baby is more protective, a little possessive, tender. I’ve been okay with that. I couldn’t have loved my dogs before I met them, and I had the added benefit of seeing pictures of them online first. I don’t even think that I loved them once we met them: it took much longer. I had to get over Moby ripping holes in my pants and flesh, Joon peeing on every good rug. I’ve read studies showing that babies conceived through IVF are more likely to be taken to the emergency room, but they are no more likely than a baby conceived naturally to be ill: it’s the parents who went through IVF who are the sick ones, having undergone that sort of trauma. (The trauma: hoping, trying, time passing, future plans on hold, hoping, trying, learning the diagnosis, infighting, blaming, feeling the pull of biology — a carnal beast inside that finds cliffs and bombs everywhere — trying alternative methods, again and again, paying thousands of dollars without the assurance that it will ever work, it working, the fear that it will be lost or lost again.)

But today I was thinking about it more, and it felt suddenly very wrong to not call my feelings for the fetus love. This feeling now that I wouldn’t be the same without this coming baby, that’s powerful. The feeling of connection that involves no language, just breathing and heartbeats, the conscious knowledge that with every bite I eat I am making something that is its own person, that feeling involves more than just being in a host/parasite relationship. I think maybe I’ve been afraid to think it, love, because if this disappeared it would be more tragic that way. But this one hasn’t been disappearing.

I don’t think I’ll, I hope I won’t, be the parent who takes her IVF-conceived child to E.R. I already feel like that phase is so far away. I don’t connect what I went through with what I’m growing now. That was one experience, and this is a whole other. And maybe, maybe they aren’t connected. It’s a game I play. For all I know this baby came naturally, out of love and into love. In the end, who could say? Maybe it did.

July 10th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

cleaning the stainless steel on the stove with a soapy sponge.

July 8th, 2009 | Category: house, photograph | Leave a comment

Walking around today doing fine, perfectly fine, though rushing, hiding from I’m-not-sure-what inside.

(Wake in our screen porch where we’ve dragged out a mattress, feed the dogs, walk them, shower, prepare Rosie’s paperwork for camp, call her doctor for physical info, fill out silly forms for AT&T, gather the list for Jack’s birthday wants, plan a breakfast for Friday, check the sites I check daily online, clean the dog pee off the living room rug, do a load of laundry, fill the car’s tank, drive to the Community Farm to pick up our week’s share of vegetables, drive to the paint store to get paint chips that resemble what I think should be a light lemongrass, have lunch, vacuum, rearrange the furniture in the bedroom, more vacuuming of the cat-sized fur ball from under the bed that I could only reach when I moved the furniture, do another load of laundry, meet Jennifer, talk, write together, plan the details of a website we’re working on, walk home, walk in the garden, talk to Steve, read, accidentally fall asleep, wake, eat the dinner Steve’s prepared, bring vegetables to the neighbors.)

But something is off today. As if there are 25 letters, one is missing, and I can’t form any of the words I want to say. Or 31 teeth, leaving a gap where the tongue obsesses.

(It was a difficult Rosie day, and I think that is why. Trust. Trust. Trust that she will burst through these teenage years.)

When a day has felt off in the past, it’s nothing a glass of Chateau Saint Michele Chardonnay can’t fix. I am not one to go running when a day is hard, or fighting, or even hiding in a movie. I turn inward, walk, write, problem-solve in circles in my head, feel twisted inside, then nurse that glass (or two) of wine. Not necessarily the best habit, though not awful. But these days I can’t use that solution, that pretty-pretty glass, tall and thin with the translucent drink inside.

It is a gift now to be forced to find another mode of contentment. Steve drew a bath for me. He pressed on all the spots in my shoulders and spine that pushed back. He lit candles, four on each side of the tub, then went out into the garden to use the last half-hour of light while I breathed, warm, inspired in the bath.

That sign of energy: inspiration. The desire suddenly to write, photograph, draw. I’ve been without that for the first trimester, and without that while I volunteered my legs as hormonal pincushions to get here. Coming into the second trimester, I feel pieces of who I am unfogging, hopefully even for the better.

July 8th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Comments (1)

I’ve heard this, and I do sort of believe its essence: look at a fruit or vegetable or nut and see some component of ourselves — and that food nourishes the bodily component that it resembles.

(all these images are stolen off the internet)

A carrot slice looks like an eye — pupil, iris — and enhances blood flow and function of the eyes.

A tomato and a heart have four chambers and are red. Tomatoes have lycopine, which nourishes the heart and the blood that pumps through it.

Kidney beans: tiny kidneys that help maintain kidney function.

Celery: they are the outer string and the inner sponge of bones and they target bone strength. And as bones are 23% sodium, so is celery (as well as other bone strengtheners: rhubarb and bok choy).

Avocado, little womb. When a woman eats one avocado per week, it balances hormones, sheds birth weight, and helps to prevent cervical cancer. And: it takes nine months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit.

Orange, grapefruit, and other citrus fruits: if I were to draw a breast with its mammary glands, it would look so much like this photograph. Citrus fruits sustain the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of them.

Walnut brain: A skull with its wrinkly gray matter inside, left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrum and lower cerebellum. Our brain is more than 60% structural fat: it needs the omega-3s found in walnuts (and flaxseeds and cold-water fish) to function properly.

—-

I love the poetry of this food-body theory. I can see the research and see the food and make the connection, but I’m not so sure if I could look at, say, an apple, and be able to guess what part of the body it nourishes. And I know that it’s not that simple: foods can nourish more than one part of the body: walnuts, for instance, also help prevent gallstones, protect against atherosclerosis, and improve blood pressure.

But after eating so poorly in Las Vegas (and feeling under the weather for the first time in my pregnancy probably because of it), and after seeing the Bodies exhibit, seeing the beauty of the lungs, the enormity of the heart, what our bones are made of, seeing the juiciness of the brain, I came home thinking about the shapes of our insides and the shapes of things growing in our garden.

Because these beets, they look so much like hearts.

I looked it up, and beets do indeed aid in the function of the heart.

I think of food these days, in these 15 weeks, and how it helps my body function as a host, yes, but also how it literally creates a new body inside of me. It says it this way in my book of macrobiotics: Women can turn food into babies.

So last night I did. A la Alice Waters, I cooked the beets for an hour, the beets that Steve had picked from our garden just an hour before, then I sliced them and sprinkled on some salt, vinegar, and olive oil. Tiny pieces of hearts:

July 7th, 2009 | Category: overheard, the baby thing | Leave a comment

July 6th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (2)