Seven Questions for Bev Sykes

The Great Interview Project begins with a Q&A with Bev Sykes, whose blog Funny the World is now in its ninth year. Nine years of daily entries! My mind was thoroughly boggled at the idea.

Even a cursory glance at her blog tells you a great deal about Bev. I started, as I suppose many people do, with two extremely helpful lists, 100 Things About Me and 100 Things I Like. But I also read a lot of her posts, chosen pretty much at random from her archives. And from them I came up with seven odd little questions.

1. I chuckled over your July post about Facebook. I had studiously avoided MySpace and Yelp and Facebook and all the others, and I never use chatrooms or IM. But a friend twisted my arm and I finally joined Facebook, and while it allowed me to reconnect with one old friend with whom I had lost touch, it is often a lot more trouble than it’s worth. My favorite application, a surprisingly realistic animated dog, is also the most annoying, because if I don’t log in every day to feed and water and pet her each day, I feel incredibly guilty. No, I feel like a heartless monster.

So here’s my question: You have a lot of demands, timewise: many, many different things to write and post, Facebook applications to attend to, family to nurture, friends to enjoy. How do you stay balanced? How do you apportion your days to spend a balanced amount of time with so many interests?

Your basic premise is faulty, I fear. You are under the misguided illusion that I have managed to balance my life. In fact, my life is seriously out of balance and an inordinate amount of time is spent on the Internet to the detriment of little things like keeping the house clean, the laundry folded and other homemaking chores. I do manage to do the fun stuff, but the “gotta get it done” things always get pushed to the back burner. And yes, I occasionally allow myself to feel guilty about that, but I manage to work through it.

2. Number 73 of your 100 Things About You says, “There is no better chocolate than See’s.” Tell me about See’s chocolate. What makes it so wonderful?

See’s was the candy I grew up on. My godfather always came to family dinners on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, Father’s day, etc. and he always brought a 2 pound box of See’s bon bons. There was a See’s store right next to the theatre near my grandmother’s house and whenever she took me to the movies, we would stop in to get some candies to take into the theatre (and bypass the lobby candy counter). So it’s the taste I learned to love early in life. Haven’t found anything that lives up to it, though in later years, I think they’ve changed their formula a bit.

3. You’ve shared a great deal of your daily life, your family, your past, a hundred things about you, a hundred things you like, etc. (I had to laugh at your Flat Surface Syndrome, a problem I understand all too well.) What sorts of things do you keep private? What don’t you write about, and why?

Well, if I told you about the things I kept private, they wouldn’t be private any more, would they! I keep private anything that I know would either hurt or embarrass someone I care about. Often one of my kids will ask me not to write about a certain thing on the internet and I respect their wishes. There are times when I’m sorry that I set this up initially and let everybody I know about it, because sometimes it’s nice to have a place that is really all your own that nobody knows about, but it’s too late for that now!

4. Back to your 100 Things. You say, “I once met Judy Garland (she was very tiny).” So tell me about meeting Judy Garland.

I wrote a whole entry about my fascination with Judy Garland here. But basically, she had come to San Francisco for her Carnegie Hall show and I found out that she was going to stay at the Fairmont Hotel. A group of us met and sat in the lobby all day waiting for her to arrive, but she never did. Everyone else had jobs to go to the next day, so only two of us returned and, again, sat in the lobby until we saw her walk in. She was very gracious, gave us autographs, and let me take her photo. The next day we attended the concert and thought I had never done it before or since, I joined the throng rushing the stage at her bow and she shook my hand. I remember her hand being ice cold.

5. I notice you don’t have comments on your blog. I yearn for comments, for any connection with readers. I think the scariest thing in the world must be writing in a vacuum. Does not having comments give you greater freedom? Do you get feedback in other ways?

Actually I have TWO blogs. I set up Airy Persiflage to be a mirror site to Funny the World, the journal I set up in 2000, primarily because I had requests for something with RSS feed and FTW isn’t set up for that. Also, I figured that by setting up a mirror site, I might get more traffic (there are some 300-350 people who check FTW each day). I have a group of regulars who comment on entries, on FTW and occasionally I will get a comment on the same entry at Airy Persiflage. There was a time when traffic and comments and stuff like that was really important to me, but now I just write what I write for me and if someone reads it I’m thrilled, but I don’t fret if I don’t get any feedback. I figure once I’d won a “legacy award” for Funny the World several years ago, I didn’t need to bother about that stuff any more.

6. Why did you love riding in a hot air balloon when you’re afraid of roller coasters? (I’m terrified of both.) Is it the speed rather than the height that upsets you?

The hot air balloon was the least terrifying experience ever, and I’m a real wimp. There is literally no sensation (other than looking down and seeing the ground!) of movement. Just so peaceful. A girlfriend had come from Australia and we both had wanted the experience and I just absolutely loved it. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I guess it’s the fact that it’s so slow that I liked, and it’s the speed of the carnival rides that terrify me. (I don’t like driving fast on the freeway either!)

7. I’d give anything to see “A Streetcar Named Mikado”— Gilbert & Sullivan’s characters in the world of Tennessee Williams. Are the stories mixed together, or is it mainly the Mikado story in a New Orleans setting?

Gosh. “Streetcar Named Mikado.” What WAS the plot of that thing. You know, I’ve collaborated on many Gilbert & Sullivan parodies over the years that they kind of all run together. It was loosely based on Streetcar, peopled with characters from Mikado and we rewrote the lyrics from Mikado to fit our convoluted plot. It was part Tennessee Williams, part Gilbert & Sullivan and mostly Peithman & Sykes for plot line, I think. E.g. there was a scene where Blanche, to make money, decided to sell Tupperware and sings a song written to “Braid the Raven Hair” from Mikado. That sort of silliness.

Peruse This

Over coffee this morning (Raven’s Brew‘s delicious Resurrection Blend, which I highly recommend), Adam, newly graduated from massage school, read me part of a magazine article written by an expert in the field. It may have been chock full of good information, but I couldn’t get past the truly awful writing. Egregiously awful. With poor grammar to boot.

One error the writer did not make, mainly because I doubt that she’s ever heard the word (OK, that was unfair; I’m sure she’s heard the word, even if she’s never uttered it), is the misuse of the word “peruse.”

Peruse does not, as is popularly thought, mean “browse, glance over, skim.” It means “to read through with thoroughness or care; to examine in detail.” It was used as early as 1479 to mean “use up, wear out, go through,” from the Middle English per- “completely” + use. Its meaning of “to read carefully” is first recorded in 1532.

A similar pet peeve of mine is decimate. It does not mean “to wipe out or eliminate a population.” The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit),” a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions.

The extended sense, “destroy a significant number or proportion of,” developed in the 19th century: “Cholera decimated the urban population.” Today, alas, this meaning is erroneously used to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence “The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war,” even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in “The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl,” only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.

Personally, while I can accept it being a general percentage rather than a strict ten percent, decimate will always mean “an indiscriminately chosen but relatively small percentage of the population,” specifically when those deaths are shocking to those left alive.

And please don’t get me started on the word hopefully. In this word my lexical curmudgeonliness is revealed. Even my beloved American Heritage says I’m a dinosaur:

Usage Note: Writers who use hopefully as a sentence adverb, as in Hopefully the measures will be adopted, should be aware that the usage is unacceptable to many critics, including a large majority of the Usage Panel. It is not easy to explain why critics dislike this use of hopefully. The use is justified by analogy to similar uses of many other adverbs, as in Mercifully, the play was brief or Frankly, I have no use for your friend. And though this use of hopefully may have been a vogue word when it first gained currency back in the early 1960s, it has long since lost any hint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader. The wide acceptance of the usage reflects popular recognition of its usefulness; there is no precise substitute. Someone who says Hopefully, the treaty will be ratified makes a hopeful prediction about the fate of the treaty, whereas someone who says I hope (or We hope or It is hoped) the treaty will be ratified expresses a bald statement about what is desired. Only the latter could be continued with a clause such as but it isn’t likely. It might have been expected, then, that the initial flurry of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, critics appear to have become more adamant in their opposition. In the 1969 Usage Panel survey, 44 percent of the Panel approved the usage, but this dropped to 27 percent in our 1986 survey. (By contrast, 60 percent in the latter survey accepted the comparable use of mercifully in the sentence Mercifully, the game ended before the opponents could add another touchdown to the lopsided score.) It is not the use of sentence adverbs per se that bothers the Panel; rather, the specific use of hopefully in this way has become a shibboleth.

Sometimes I think I was born a century too late. But then I wouldn’t have email, so all things considered, perhaps things are fine as they are.

The Moment You Knew the Relationship Was Doomed

When you look back on your failed romantic relationships (and most of us have had one or two), was there a time when you knew, with absolute certainty, that it was over? I’m not thinking of the arguments or the betrayals, but those little revelations that tell you This person is not for me, no way, no how.

An acquaintance writes:

I was teasing this guy I’ve been dating this morning over the fact that he could not be bothered to pay any attention to the war in Georgia. This morning he said casually over coffee, “I don’t understand what they’re doing here.” “Who?” I asked. “The Russians,” he replied. Yes, he thought the Russians had invaded the United States. And he still couldn’t be bothered to look into it.

I remember one fellow by the name of Tony who took an inexplicable shine to me a number of years ago. Gorgeous, but dense as a bag of rocks. We enjoyed one another’s company for a while. But the more we talked, the more his intellectual limitations became apparent.

Like the time I mentioned that I had lived in the Virgin Islands. He gave me a blank stare. “They’re a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea,” I explained.

“Ca-rib-be-enn?” he sounded out. “What’s that near?”

I took a beat, then said, “It’s, um, near Puerto Rico,” knowing that wouldn’t help him in the least.

“Oh,” he said, frowning.

My friend Herb whispered to me, as we walked back to the car, “I like ’em cute-but-dumb as much as the next guy. But does he have opposable thumbs?”

That was when I knew.

Tell me your stories. When did you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that your relationship was doomed?