I had a blog that a whopping three hundred people read regularly, and at least three of them read it from prison. I have the snail-mail letters they sent me from a minimum-security lockup in Georgia to prove it.
Moira noticed a very critical review of a Duncan Sheik album I had written. If memory serves, I suggested that he was “a eunuch” who should “stop cooing about yoga.” In return for my vitriol, a commenter called me a “mean cunt.”
That particular comment really affected me—for a few weeks afterward I’d go back and look at it every day. I’d have the same two dueling reactions whenever “cunt” flashed before my eyes: Part of me would feel hot-faced shame. Why did I have to be so bitchy? Why couldn’t I be more measured in my criticism? What if Duncan Sheik actually read it? The other, smaller part of me would think, Fuck that commenter guy. I’m allowed to have strong opinions and express them in whatever way I please. And besides, that review was funny.
At least Moira thought so. She called me in for an interview on the basis of that eunuch insult. I met her at a wine bar in the East Village, and she offered me the position as Chick Habit’s third full-time blogger before our second glasses of Pinot arrived. It would be much more money than I was making at Rev—a respectable $45,000 a year—but no health insurance (not like I had any at Rev in the first place). She was also offering me a much bigger audience: Chick Habit had been around for about six months at that point, and it was pulling in about three hundred thousand page views a day.
Both Peter and my mom were excited when I got the job offer at Chick Habit. “I read about that site in the New York Times last week!” my mom exclaimed over the phone. “You should definitely take it.”
Even though it didn’t have quite the gravitas that I had desired when I graduated from Wesleyan four years ago, I was pretty excited myself. A few years in New York had made me a realist, rather than an idealist. No one was going to pay me to write indulgent multi-thousand-word articles about the world’s woes. Chick Habit was, though, going to pay me to write occasional blog posts about those woes, along with the gossipy and cultural stuff that gets more pickup anyway. I knew even then that I would get noticed more if I wrote eight hundred words on the significance of the food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids than if I blogged about a climate-change bill.
Saying yes seemed like the easiest decision I ever made.
I file the bathtub birthers to Moira at 11:12; she gives it a once-over and schedules it to go live at one P.M., which is the blog equivalent of prime time. We get the most readers around lunchtime, when girls in offices all over the East Coast eat their sad desk salads and force down bites of desiccated chicken breasts while scrolling through our latest posts. We get another traffic bump around four, when our West Coast counterparts eat their greens with low-fat dressing.
Even though I no longer work at an office, I run out to get my own version of sad desk salad. There’s nothing in the fridge except a half-empty container of milk and some congealed Thai food from three nights before. I throw on the same black eyelet muumuu that I have worn every day this summer so far—I don’t bother to put on a bra—and scurry across the street. It’s a clear July morning. The sun is so bright I need to hold up a hand to shade my eyes.
At the bodega across the street I’m ordering the same mixed greens with my own limp chicken cutlet when I realize I don’t have my iPhone on me. “Shit! BRB,” I tell Manuel, who is making my salad. It’s come to this: I spend so little time talking aloud during the day, I’ve started speaking in Internet abbreviations to people in real life. He gives me a quizzical look right before I dart back outside and into my apartment for the smart phone. I’m back to the bodega in under two minutes; there are no angry e-mails or texts from Moira. Thankfully Cher has not died while I was in transit.
While Manuel is folding balsamic vinaigrette into my salad with half-clean tongs, the phone rings. I seize up a little, because I assume it’s Moira, but when I look down at the screen, my mom’s sweet, broad face is smiling up at me. I step toward a cooler filled with coconut water in a back corner to answer.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, puffin. Just calling to say hello on my break between second and third period.”
My mom is the only person besides Moira whose phone calls I will take during my workday. She is a high school teacher at Manning prep, which is in the small Connecticut town where I was raised. Since my dad died, my mom has started proctoring summer school in order to pad her nest egg and afford expenses on the house. Mom teaches freshman English and has read every word I’ve ever written; before Dad passed, he taught advanced chemistry, and hadn’t.
Almost exactly two years ago, my father was playing an evening game of squash against Mr. Hibbert, the head of the math department, when he keeled over. He died right there on the court, before he got to the hospital. When my mom called to tell me what had happened, her generally loud and chipper voice was so muffled and faraway it sounded like it was coming from another dimension. My best friend and then-roommate, Jane, was the one who picked me up off the floor of our apartment; I had crumpled down to the tiles in our kitchen and couldn’t move my legs.
Rev let me work remotely for a while, and right after the funeral I went to Connecticut to help my mom regain some sense of everydayness. I was still numb. My dad was always this stoic, immovable figure in my mind, the voice of scientific reason in my head. Sure, he could be a hard-ass, but that was part of his charm. That he could be as ephemeral as anything else disrupted my sense of the world.
For my benefit, Mom tried to put on a happy face, but I would hear her crying at different times throughout the day. Voices carried in our old Victorian, and even though she tried to muffle the sound of her tears in her dressing room pillows, I could still make out nearly every sob and gasp.
About three weeks after Dad died I woke up to the sound of her crying long after midnight. The next morning I confronted her—tenderly—in the kitchen.
“You can cry in front of me, you know. I want to be here for you,” I told her.
She looked shocked, and like she might cry again. Then a deep sigh seemed to travel through her slender body—which was starting to look downright bony. Before the tears started flowing she sniffed and straightened her robe, a crisp blue pinstripe that she’d been wearing every morning since I was a child. “You’re the kid here,” she said. “I want to support you, not the other way around.”
After that, I stayed with my mom for just one more week. I sensed that my being there didn’t actually make it easier for her—she wanted to get back to her routine. My mom’s attitude toward profound disappointment and woe has always been to fill her days with productivity. The other teachers at Manning, close neighbors, and various friends that she had made through our temple were there to help, so I knew that I wasn’t leaving her to the wolves.
Before I left, I gave the house the best scrubbing I could (not really my forte) and sent my dad’s clothes to the Salvation Army at my mother’s request. “Are you sure you don’t want to save anything of his?” I asked her. “Not even his beaker cuff links?” Dad wore them on the first day of school every year, his own private sartorial chemistry teacher joke.
“If you want them you can keep them,” my mother said faux-cheerfully. “But I can’t keep his stuff here.” This is the way she’s always dealt with things, by putting a positive gloss on them and moving on. “There are no problems, only challenges,” says the poster on her classroom wall. I pocketed the cuff links but sent everything else away.
I don’t really have time to talk to her right now, but I felt too guilty to send her straight to voice mail, so we have a quick chat. When my salad is ready I tell her I need to rush on back home.
“I’m so proud of you for your exciting job!” Mom says, which is what she always says when the topic of Chick Habit arises. When we hang up, I turn to Manuel and apologize for talking on the phone in the bodega.
He smiles at me and says, “Your voice brightens up t
he place.” I give him a ten for a seven-dollar salad and tell him to keep the change.
When I get back home I catch sight of myself in the mirror and grimace, hearing my mother’s sweet yet firm voice in my mind. If she could see me now, unwashed and underdressed, she would have trouble hiding a look of abject horror. I decide to sit at the desk that’s in the corner of the bedroom rather than slouching back on the decrepit couch. I eat my limp greens as I search my RSS feed once again. I check my Chick Habit e-mail account. Occasionally story tips will come through that way. Today all I see is spam from chirpy PR women trying to sell me on stories about eco-friendly makeup and an e-mail from someone who claims to know me from college.
“I’d always admired your work at school,” the note says, “and I’d love it if you’d link to a piece from my literary quarterly about the Langi women of Uganda. My writer spent six months living among them.”
I get e-mails like this all the time from acquaintances asking for link love. I am sure the piece is smart and worthy, but at this point I know that Moira will laugh me offline if I ask if I can post on some ten-thousand-word bit of earnestness from a journal no one’s ever heard of.
I listen to the air conditioner clanking in the window that faces the sidewalk, feel the clammy air pushing inside. I’m just about to cross the threshold into goose-pimpled anxiety when I find a new blog that’s getting a ton of attention today—a series of videos of people crying while eating.
I write a hundred words and post a quick link back to that site. “Who hasn’t cried into her ice cream after being dumped?” I ask the commenters. Moira schedules the post for twelve forty-five. Our readers respond by posting tales of weeping while eating pizza after their best friend ditched them and sobbing into their salad after fighting with their boyfriends.
This is when the commenters are at their most charming. Writing mini posts like this makes you feel like you’re hosting the sweetest virtual sleepover party ever thrown.
The love fest ends abruptly when the water birth post goes up fifteen minutes later. About a quarter of the commenters are on my side. Someone called rebekahb writes, “Ugh, I hate hippies. I would die if my upstairs neighbor was giving birth in her apartment. Isn’t that a violation of the lease?” And 75 percent of them want me fired: “I thought this site was supposed to be supportive of women and their choices. Giving birth the way nature intended is a choice that every woman should be able to make without getting made fun of. I’m appalled by this and writing a letter to the editor.” That one is at least civil. This one, from a frequent commenter with the handle Weathergrrrl, is not: “Alex Lyons is a fucking traitor.” You’d think I’d be more immune to mean comments by now, but it still feels like I’m trapped in a bathroom stall while a gaggle of girls stands at the sink, gossiping about what a terrible jerk I am.
Moira, of course, is delighted:
MoiraPoira (2:05:33): Your birthing post already has 25,000 page views and 256 comments!
Alex182 (2:05:41): I know, but have you read any of those comments? They want me crucified for crimes against womanity.
MoiraPoira (2:05:58): You have nothing to feel bad about. You had a decidedly un-fuzzy response to that water birth article, and it was your honest response. They shouldn’t care what some 25-year-old ninny thinks about the fact that some woman in Brooklyn shot a baby out into a bathtub.
Alex182 (2:06:10): I know, I just feel bad.
MoiraPoira (2:06:17): Love, grow a pair.
Moira and I have some version of this conversation every time I write a controversial post. From what I’ve observed, she’s never had even a pang of guilt about anything she’s written, even when she broke the news about Lily Allen’s miscarriage back at the Mews. And Moira’s right. I can’t have it both ways—I need to stand by what I’ve written.
The comments affect me less than they used to. I try my hardest not to read them whether they’re positive or negative, though most days I break down and take a peek at a few. Okay, several. But I never read every single one of them late into the night until Peter forcibly removes the laptop from my hands. I’d never do that!
The positive ones are ego inflating, and the negative ones can be soul raping, but if you let them get to you too much, you start pandering to the audience. You write toothless, feel-good posts about everything so you’ll be above criticism. This involves lots of exclamation marks: “It’s so great that Britney has finally found a solid guy and is no longer flashing her business everywhere!!!!” Even when you’re writing about celebrities, this feels icky.
One of the reasons I look up to Rel is that she never seems to be affected by responses to her posts. Whenever commenters start attacking her, she starts attacking right back. “I can’t believe you care that I’m insulting one of the Real Housewives,” she’ll write. “Get a fucking life.” But reality stars are one thing—they put themselves out there as public figures. What about the girl in the background of that photo, the one caught in an odd grimace watching her sister give birth? Did she ask for her face to be plastered all over the Internet? I try not to think about these questions. It bogs down my posting schedule.
During the next hour I do two more short posts. One is about a woman who has found her long-lost cat seven years after it went missing. The other is about what size Marilyn Monroe really was (12, but a 1950s 12 is like a current 6). I’m just searching for a good image of Marilyn that we have rights to when Molly IMs me.
Prettyinpink86 (3:52:11): I heard you’re working on a Marilyn Monroe post. Can I do some historical research for you? I have access to the Life archives. Or if you’re really slammed today I would be happy to write the post! I have seen every one of her movies and I dressed up as Marilyn last Halloween! LOL!
Somehow I feel like her offer to write about Marilyn is not motivated by the goodness of her heart. Moira’s always talking about how adorable Molly is and how she doesn’t “know how we got along” without her. I think we got along just fine.
Alex182 (3:53:42): I’m almost done with the post so don’t worry about it.
Prettyinpink86 (3:54:23): Okey dokey!
I’m looking for one more longish post before I can start relaxing. I scroll through my RSS feed again; I see a story from one of the medical websites I subscribe to that looks promising, about a new study that shows how women are more likely to buy sexy clothes when they’re ovulating. That seems like a perfectly ridiculous premise to pick apart. I spend 378 words writing from the point of view of my eggs, describing how they ran up a $400 bill at Frederick’s of Hollywood the last time they busted out of my ovaries, how they can’t resist the stripper heels. I call the post “Your Ovaries Want You to Dress Like a Whore.” When Moira posts the piece, at four fifteen, I’m back in the commenters’ good graces: “OMG this is hilarious!”
Even silent Tina IMs me her approval:
TheSevAbides (4:20:11): Nice one on that ovaries post. I LOL’d.
Alex182 (4:20:13): Hey thanks! I was really into the one you did today about Michelle Obama’s state dinner fashion.
TheSevAbides (4:21:15): Word.
I think I like Tina, though I’m still vaguely intimidated by her. She is this impeccably dressed black woman who used to work as a freelance stylist before she started at Chick Habit. She had a Tumblr called What Chloë Wore, in which she dissected the always-batshit outfits of the actress Chloë Sevigny. The blog was a side business until she designed a graphic that ricocheted around the Internet for months, of Chloë wearing high-waisted hot pants, suspenders, a Zen expression, and nothing else. Under that image was the simple tagline “The Sev Abides.”
The Sev Abides meme got Tina 674,530 readers in one day. Sure, they fell off after that, but it put her blog on the map. The New York Times Thursday Styles profile was next (“Fashion Don’t Becomes a Blogger Do”). Shortly after that, Tina stopped posting photos of the Sev every day. She started posting photos of what she was wearing instead. Moira says that it was the photo of Tina in spiky, lobster-claw
ish Alexander McQueen heels that got Tina the job at Chick Habit. Tina’s always polite to me, but she’s a bit of a cipher. I can’t tell whether she’s just being cordial or if she actually hates me.
At this point in the day I don’t need to have any more ideas; I merely need to read and condense. That’s because my last post of the day is always the same—a gossip roundup that culls links from the web. Since I’ve been doing this for half a year now I can tell you every single person that has dated any Kardashian for more than three days. I go to the website of every major tabloid and get URLs for the most recent stories. I write a sentence or two about each one. My favorite today is the quote from Bret Michaels’s wig stylist, who claims that his real hair is just as lustrous as the fake hair she manages for him. By the time I file to Moira it’s five fifteen—and I’m done.
I take stock of myself. I’ve migrated back to the dun-colored couch with my laptop. No matter where I start on the couch, I always end up slumping in the crack between the cushions. I’m sitting among the spare change and the crumbs from the toast I always eat here. It’s a near-perfect day outside. Sally forth! my inner camp counselor says. Go for a run, or even just a walk. Go to the supermarket and get provisions for dinner! Breathe fresh, non-basement air!
Then Rel IMs me.
Wienerdog (5:20:49): Dude.
Alex182 (5:20:51): What?
Wienerdog (5:21:13): Some asshole started a blog about us: http://www.breakingthechickhabit.com
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