How to Be a Person (24 page)

Things the Internet Is Not Good For (Yet)

Genuine human connection, in-depth scholarly research, sustaining the human body with food and water, breaking up with a friend or lover, learning how to knit, feeling the life-giving warmth of the sun on one’s skin, getting drunk, physical fitness, replacing electrolytes, tooth whitening, privacy, productivity, and not masturbating.

Trolls Be Trollin’

“BLUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH! I’M AN INTERNET TROLL! FAT PEOPLE ARE THE FATTEST! GAY PEOPLE ARE GAY!!! GO BACK TO MEXICO, GAY PEOPLE!!! YOU’RE SO FAT THAT YOUR MOM’S SO FAT THAT SHE’S FAT! GUUUUURRRGGGG! I HIDE IN A BASEMENT AND HURT PEOPLE ON PURPOSE BECAUSE MY LIFE’S AMAZING!
SERIOUSLY, IT’S GOING EXACTLY AS PLANNED! BLACK PEOPLE SUCK! I HAVE AN INFECTIOUS SKIN DISEASE! I’M SO ALONE!!! GRAAAWWWW!!! FUCK JEWS!”

How to Twitter

Obviously you can do whatever you want with your Twitter, but really, stop writing about whatever mundane shit you’re doing that day. Nobody cares. That’s what Facebook is for. Nobody on Twitter cares that you had a cool time at Magic Mountain today. Nobody on Twitter needs to know that you bought a new shower curtain. Nobody on Twitter is like, “Holy shit! Jeff is eating
yogurt right now
!?!!? RETWEETED.” If you want to be the kind of Twitterer whom people on Twitter want to follow, CUT THAT SHIT OUT. No shower curtains, no roller coasters, no yogurt.

Twitter has three really useful uses: a tool for disseminating information from war-torn places where people are getting hit with sticks (e.g., “Ow! A policeman is hitting me with a stick!”), a way to alert people to interesting/funny/relevant content on the internet (e.g., “Peep this article, bro!”), and a global writer’s room for hilarious people to hone their one-liner skills (e.g., “Chickens masturbate to cornography”). Everything else is boring and pointless.

How NOT to Facebook

No FarmVille, no Mafia Wars, no tagging people in unflattering photos, no frowny-face emoticons if someone dies (not that it should matter because NO DEATH ANNOUNCEMENTS ON FACEBOOK), no naked pictures, no deep emotions (awkward), no tagging a bunch of people in a picture of some fly Nikes, no making dinner plans (just use a PHONE).

Sexy, Sexy Pornos!!!

Look. Porn is great. Watch it or don’t. But delete your browser history, okay? Please? Even if
you’re
not embarrassed, the next person who uses that computer doesn’t need the mental image of you fondling yourself to
Poontanglers 2: Last Tangle in Paris
. When it comes to porno, extremes are to be avoided. Nobody likes a militant anti-porn crazyperson, just like nobody likes a sweaty pornography addict. Just be normal. Use in moderation. Also avoid: kids, animals, dead bodies, nonconsenting adults.

SHOW ME YER BOOBZ

Some people really, really love the thrill of photographing their genitals and then transmitting said genitals electronically to the phones or e-mail accounts of potential or established sexual partners. Great. Fine. Go nuts. But seriously, NO FACE. Keep your face out of
it! No matter how much you think you can trust this person—clearly you trust them with your precious, precious gonads—remember that almost ALL relationships end. And when relationships end, things get sticky. And things could easily get extra sticky for you if your now-angry ex-beloved possesses a photo of you getting sticky all over your own face. KEEP. THE FACE. OUT OF IT.

Also, dudes, pro tip: Establish whether or not a girl
wants
a picture of your penis
before
you send her a picture of your penis. Because maybe she does! But she probably doesn’t. Really, she probably doesn’t.

How to Un-Spam Thyself

Just never, ever enter passwords or personal information into any field on any website that you didn’t seek out and go to on purpose. Nobody really has a free iPad for you. There is no Nigerian prince—Nigeria isn’t even a monarchy. Your bank didn’t send you an e-mail in broken English asking for your Social Security number because they “forgot it.” Anything that looks like spam—even a little bit like spam—is spam. Delete, delete, delete.

How to Date People Inside Your Computer and Not Get Murdered

If you haven’t noticed, we live in the future now. And in the future, online dating no longer carries that lonely-nerd-mom’s-basement-wasteland
stigma that it used to have. It’s normal now! Respectable! So date away! Meeting people online is just like meeting people in the real world, only without all the stuff that makes the real world real (you know, like trees and sunlight and vulnerability). Keep your profile short, light, and funny. Keep your pictures tame. Also: NO PHOTO OF YOU AND YOUR GUITAR. If you finally decide to take it to the next level, make sure to meet in a public place. (Pro tip: Right after you say, “Nice to meet you in person,” say, “I’m so crazy-busy, I have to be somewhere in 45 minutes, I’m so sorry. How’re you?” This establishes [1] that you have a life and [2] that you can leave in exactly 26 minutes if this person is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. If you end up liking them, you can say, “I’m just going to push this other thing back a half hour,” and send a text to your houseplant about it. Do depart after that half hour. No big games, but this is a good time to leave them wanting more.) If someone seems like a murderer, politely decline a second date. Don’t give out your Social Security number. And most importantly, NO UNSOLICITED PENIS PICTURES UNTIL DATE FIVE AT
LEAST
.

16. HOW TO WRITE GOOD

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

T
here is no secret to being a good writer. You have to read until your eyes bleed, write until your hands fall off, get new hands and eyeballs, and get back to it—you should be reading fiction, biographies,
The New Yorker
, the Sunday
New York Times, The Stranger
, poetry, essays, tell-alls, interviews, old stuff, new stuff, red stuff, blue stuff. Facebook and Twitter don’t count—that’s not writing, that’s grunting. Read a few of the great comic campus novels—Kingsley Amis’
Lucky Jim
, Vladimir Nabokov’s
Pnin
, Michael Chabon’s
Wonder Boys
. The best books are funny: Feel free to put down any that aren’t. Feel free to put down anything at any time. Life is 100 percent fatal, and you’re not going to get to all the good stuff as it is.

Three Great Sentences and What Makes Them Great

A couple years ago, while visiting San Francisco, I saw something in a storefront window. It was a paragraph photocopied and enlarged into a huge poster, the letters fuzzy and weird. It was the first paragraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” an essay he wrote for
Esquire
11 years after writing
The Great Gatsby
and four years before dying:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

It’s not every day you encounter a paragraph like this while you’re walking down the street—who knows what it was doing there in that store window (San Francisco is magical). Fitzgerald’s sentences are jolting, the way feeding a fork into an electric outlet is jolting,
and even though I’d read this paragraph in a book before, I stood there on the street jolting myself again and again, trying to figure out where the jolts come from. Later I wrote something on a blog about how “everything” you need to know about writing you can learn from that paragraph, which is kind of a stupid way to put it, although those sentences are packed with brilliance.

Should we do a close read?

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down” is great because the “Of course …” is so confidently conversational, hinting that what’s coming is light and easy, or at least something we can all agree to, but then what comes is so morbid. You go into the sentence thinking you’re going to get one thing, but right off you get something else, and it’s startling. If a reader thinks they’re going to get something in a sentence (or a character, or a plot) and then they do, they’ve been deposited into a cliché—which is not good writing. Good writing is: You think you’re going to get one thing, but you don’t.

The rhythm and the alliteration that come next (“but the blows,” “do the dramatic”) are good because they’re subtle. They’re there if you’re listening, but they don’t stand out. They don’t put on tap shoes and go, “Hey everyone, check out how rhythmic and alliterative we’re being!” They just sound nice. Likewise, several of the words echo (“blows” appears twice, “come” appears twice, “side” before “outside”) without calling lots of attention to the echoing. The echoing just comes across as simplicity: Why reach for another word when what you mean is the word you just used?
And—to keep going—making the words echo echoes the prevailing point about getting older, because the idea of an echo contains the idea of lapsed time. (A word appears early [in life/in the sentence] and then it appears again later [in life/in the sentence].)

Another thing to marvel at (drool over) in that first sentence: the economy of “the ones you remember.” Makes you think of all the blows you’ve forgotten, without mentioning them. “And, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about” is an unexpected, funny, and concise critique of his friends, evoking a loneliness that would be maudlin to spell out. And “don’t show their effect all at once” is the sentence’s payoff, the final whiplash, which leaves so much unsaid, raises more questions, and draws you further in. Those seven words—“don’t show their effect all at once”—give off a funny feeling every time you read them, a funny feeling in the chest, like you’re being lifted up by them. You get this same feeling at the end of a lot of great first sentences. (Check out the first sentence of Joan Didion’s essay “Insider Baseball” sometime.)

After all the subtle showing off of that first sentence, we get a very regular second sentence, not a complicated one or an alliterative one or one where the grammar echoes the meaning or whatever—it’s just strong and blunt. Fitzgerald’s saying: I realize that first sentence was super rich, have a glass of water now. It comes as a relief, and yet it’s very much in the mood of the first sentence, so there’s no interruption.

Then there’s the third sentence with that insane em dash. As you know if you read Fitzgerald, he believed you can never be
too rich or have too many em dashes. Notice how the em dash in the third sentence doesn’t function like em dashes usually do—at least it doesn’t function like the em dashes in the first and second sentences do. “The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.” On any planet, that em dash should be a semicolon. Or it should be a period. But those would slow you down, whereas that em dash is like a people mover at the airport: It slides you forward without you doing anything. It speeds you up, sending you right into the next thought, almost too quickly, against your will, as if you’re trapped in the forward-moving-ness of, well, you know, life, and getting older, and the process of breaking down, in spite of your every wish.

What Not to Do

DON’T USE CLICHÉS

Clichés are useless, and they’re everywhere. Since everyone knows them already, there’s no point in writing them down. If you want to make the point that “you never know what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes,” you have more thinking to do, because SHUT UP. It’s a cliché. It’s hokey. It’s boring. The secret to good writing is that it’s interesting, and used-up, dried-out, shopworn thoughts and phrases are not interesting.

DON’T WASTE TIME

The other thing about clichés is they waste time, and good writing doesn’t waste time. Describing the sky as “blue” is wasting time; describing someone as “quiet as a mouse” is three words longer than necessary; don’t write “as a rule of thumb” when you just mean “as a rule”; and never, ever write “for all intents and purposes.” You don’t want any words in your writing that don’t need to be there; they’re just junking up the place. Likewise, don’t use a long word when a short word will do. Long words are florid and showy and annoying. In that Fitzgerald paragraph quoted earlier, he uses “blows” instead of “calamities” or “letdowns” or “afflictions,” and then repeats “blows” instead of reaching for a synonym, and the paragraph is so much better—sharper, more memorable—because of it.

DON’T OVERWRITE

Don’t use “utilize,” just use “use.” Only douchebags and blowhards use “utilize.” As mentioned above, finding a synonym for the word you just used doesn’t make the next sentence better; it makes the next sentence overwritten. Don’t write “murmured” or “exclaimed” or “rejoined” when “said” works; come to think of it, always use “said,” no matter what. Anything other than “said” is desperate, thesaurus-y. I didn’t “pen” this chapter that you’re reading right now, I “wrote” it.