The Fraud Police

I finished Amanda Palmer's book The Art of Asking last night. It's been a wealth of information and inspiration. A couple of years ago, Amanda - a musician - embarked on a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $100,000...she ended up making over $1,000,000. It was the most amount of money ever raised by a musician on Kickstarter. It sparked a slew of controversy. Who is she to ask for money? She used to be on a major label. This is like begging. Blah blah blah.

The book is part memoir, part self-help. It looks back on her life, emphasizing all the times she had to ask for help to get to where she is today. It highlights all those people who helped her. 

It helps you understand that it's okay to ask for help.

I don't like to ask for anything. A ride somewhere, to borrow a pen, to get a picture taken, advice...

I can think of hundreds of times where if I just would have asked for help things would have gone so much better. I think about how when I put out my first album, I had so many resources at my fingertips, but I was too scared to ask for help. My friend used to run a label. She knows everyone in town. She knows how to get an album reviewed. But I was scared to ask. So I didn't. And that was that. For my second album, I gathered up the courage and asked for her help. And she was happy to. And then I was on the radio.

All you have to do is ask.

So what does that have to do with The Fraud Police?

Throughout her book, Amanda talks about The Fraud Police. The Fraud Police is the name she gives for that nagging voice of self doubt that everyone has. The idea that someday someone is going to "bust you" and say: we always knew you weren't real. you don't deserve this. you suck at this. and now we figured it out and we're taking it all away.

It's a voice that lives way too close to the forefront of my brain. Any time I want to ask for help with something to do with music, I just hear that voice saying: everyone will laugh. nobody takes this seriously. they're just humoring you. nobody takes you seriously. you suck at this.

And that is terrifying.

In February, I'm hoping to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the new record. It's been recorded, but there is still work to do. Expensive work. And I need help. And so I'm going to have to ask for it. 

And that is terrifying.

Finishing this record and getting it out in the world is so important to me. It's been years in the making and I need to get it out. And the thought that I can't do it without this one part of the equation sucks. 

Because I don't like to ask for help. Because I'm afraid the answer will be no. And then where does that leave me?

And then The Fraud Police come back and then I spend my nights lying in bed trying to convince them they are wrong.

Trying to convince myself.

Do I sound like a crazy person? 

We're entering into a new year, and with that comes all those resolutions. So I guess it's time to make one. It's time for me to learn how to stop worrying and let people help.

Thanks, Amanda.

(Also, it' a really good book and a quick read and you should get it and read it)

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

I just finished Jenny Lawson's (aka The Bloggess) book Let's Pretend This Never Happened. For a memoir of a blog writer that I only started reading this past year, it really got me thinking. 

The book, like all memoirs, tells stories from defining moments in her life. They are stories that at the time they happened probably felt traumatic and life ending (like when she got her arm stuck in cow's vagina), but then you look back and laugh. Those kind of stories. And you do laugh. Because it's a funny book.

I started thinking about my upbringing and how it is somewhat outside the norm and how I've always thought about writing these tales down. The ones I can remember. Which are shockingly few. But none of them are all that funny. No matter how I try to spin it. They are just kind of sad. Like a 6 year old girl's mother lying in a hospital bed in the living room while she dies of breast cancer so she can be with her family during her final months. Or a drunk father throwing empty beer boxes at her friends.

There were a few funny moments in there. Like when my brother snuck a firecracker into one of my sister's cigarettes that she kept hidden in her nightstand. Every night she would sneak a cigarette and every night my brother would lie in bed waiting for her to get to the "special" one. And then one day she did. And luckily she still has a face.

There are snippets of other times: Same brother - annoyed with me complaining that I wanted his Snickers and not my Three Musketeer bar  - just switched the wrapper and I was happy. Or how I refused to ride the swings at the park because they had "bird chit" on them. Or how I thought my sister was actually going to really take me to prom with her and I got all dressed up in a flower girl dress from a wedding I was in (and truthfully, I wasn't even in that wedding but they bought me a flower girl dress anyway because I wanted to be in it and was jealous and was such a brat), posed for pictures with her and her date and then freaked the fuck out when I didn't get to go along.

Okay. That last one was sad. And, also, I don't remember exactly what kind of candy bars we were having. I mean who remembers those kinds of details? Memoirs always must be embellished, right? 

And then there is the overall theme of the book and that is Jenny's General Anxiety Disorder (her doctor's diagnosis). Not just social anxiety, but general anxiety about everything. She starts talking about situations she's in and how she reacts to them and I can't help but see a bit of myself in those situations. Any sort of social function tends to make me freak out a bit - and I know that's true for most people, I think. But I absolutely cannot have a conversation with anyone that I haven't known for at least 10 years and that I see on a regular basis. Which really limits the people I can converse with down to, like, 5 people. There are people that I consider friends - close friends even - that if I'm left alone with them, I get super uncomfortable and nervous as I get so worried that I will say something wrong that will make them dislike me. It's awful. I feel like I'm coming across as trying too hard, which I probably am, because I am. And nobody likes a try hard.  

I would say that I have nowhere near the eccentricities that The Bloggess has. Though maybe I would if I was more comfortable with myself and wasn't so concerned with what every last person thought about me. I admire her ability to just be herself in any situation. And I know that the fear of being herself in social situations makes her act the way she does, but she does it anyway and she's turned it into a positive and made a career out of it. 

Either way, the book has inspired me to try to just be myself - even if myself is the brooding girl who sits in the corner and talks to no one. And to try to remember moments from my past and write them down when I do remember them. It'd be a nice project to get that all down and look back and reflect. 

So thanks, Jenny. I enjoyed your book. It was a really good read and I highly recommend it to others. 

The Hunger Games: The Movie Version

 

I hadn’t been to the movie theater since Toy Story 3 was out. I’m just not really a fan of going to the movies. It’s expensive. You don’t know what kind of crowd you’re going to encounter. Will they be respectful movie goers? Or will someone bring their screaming, sick baby or talk on their phone or kick my seat or whatever other annoyances can occur at the theater?

But last Wednesday I went to see The Hunger Games and had a pretty pleasant movie experience. It was a great crowd for a packed theater. People were pretty engrossed in the movie the whole time.

I’d read the books. I really enjoyed them and have been waiting for the first movie to come out since I finished them. So, yes, expectations were high. I’d also been reading pretty much glowing reviews of the movie, so my hopes were up.

I was kind of disappointed.

Not that it was a bad movie. It just could have been so much better. I know they had to cram a lot into one film and with a running time of over 2 hours already, a lot had to be cut. But it seems the stuff they cut was kind of important and, if you hadn’t read the books, you would have been very confused.

Jennifer Lawerence was great as Katniss. She really did an excellent job. Josh Hutchinson as Peeta totally bugged. He walked around with his mouth hanging open the whole time. Just generally kind of unlikeable. And I liked him in the book. Gale, with his very minimal appearance in the film, came across as a meathead. Woody Harrelson made Haymitch a comical character, when in the book I found him to be quite tragic. Sure, he had some funny, drunken lines. But his story is really quite sad. I found it odd that the audience in the theater laughed at so many sad things. It was weird.

Surprisingly, I thought Lenny Kravitz made an excellent Cinna and was sorely underutilized. The movie really glossed over his relationship with Katniss except for right before she heads into the games. It was another time where the filmmakers went with the idea that everyone has read the books so we really don’t need to show this relationship grow. Everyone will just know that Cinna is important.

And that was really what kept happening. It was like they made the movie not as a movie on its own, but more as just a visual accompaniment to the book. Like you almost had to read along as you went so things made sense.

• They shoved in the backstory about Katniss’s father in a dream sequence.
• They tried to show how Peeta saved Katniss’s life by tossing her the bread in some terrible flashback cut scenes that were very confusing without any sort of narrative as to what they were supposed to mean.
• One moment during the games, from Katniss’s perspective, it appears Peeta is trying to kill her. Then, suddenly, she finds out there can be two victors and she seeks him out to help him without ever asking him why he was ganging up against her (like she does in the books).

There was just a lot left out that left the story very confusing. I was trying to view it as someone who did not read the books and I just thought that it seemed off.

I will say the sets were fantastic and, in my opinion, a good visual representation of what I had imagined.