But I like Comic Sans!

Back in 2005, when I was opening a bakery, I looked for a fun, casual typeface for all my signs and labels. I wanted a font that said, “Relax! There is nothing in life so serious and dire that a whoopie pie won’t help to lighten the mood!” I wanted my customers to walk in and say, “Well, here’s a fun little place with great cinnamon rolls in the bakery case, crazy colors on the furniture and walls, and a lovable, funny proprietor in the kitchen!”

I chose a font that seemed to say exactly what I wanted. How was I to know that Comic Sans, which was created in 1994 by then-Microsoft designer Vincent Connare to evoke hand-lettering of the sort most often seen in comic books, was—by the time I stumbled across it and thought, perfect!—the subject of worldwide ridicule?

OK, OK, so I understand that the fun, lighthearted Comic Sans is not an appropriate typeface for, say, the resumé you’re sending to Pompous & Stuffy, Inc. Or your Aunt Sally’s gravestone. Or Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s angry letter about LeBron James’ betrayal. Or this sign, warning people of the imminent danger of death at an electrical substation:

But does this casual, innocent little typeface really deserve the amount of vitriol that has been expended toward it over the past 15+ years? Does it deserve to be the subject of the “Ban Comic Sans” movement that has exploded in articles, blog posts, and even the Ban Comic Sans Official Website (which asserts that using Comic Sans in the wrong context is like wearing a clown costume to a black tie dinner)?

Just because people make mistakes about where and how Comic Sans can be appropriately used, do we really have to blame the font, and call for a total ban?

Google “Comic Sans,” and the first result is the Ban Comic Sans website. Among others near the top: “What’s so wrong with Comic Sans?”, “Comic Sans Criminal: There’s help available for people like you!”, and “Comic Sans: The font everyone loves to hate.”

Now, because of all of this negative press, when I look back at my “pie lady” logo and the “Amy’s Bakeshop” I so proudly painted on my sign, had embroidered on hats and aprons, and used on every label on every pie, cake, and loaf of bread that left my bakeshop, I’m a little mortified.

To tell you the truth, it’s not unlike the nagging feeling of doubt I get when I look back at photos of me from high school and realize that maybe (just maybe) farmer’s overalls, flannel shirts, and my father’s gold pocketwatch hanging on a chain around my neck did not combine to create the stylish look I thought they did. Aughh! What other significant aesthetic mistakes have I made in my lifetime? (Don’t answer that, please; I have a feeling they may be too numerous to list.)

Holly Combs, who runs the Ban Comic Sans website with her husband, Dave, says, “Comic Sans is in the hands of people that shouldn’t have it. Secretaries and librarians, they don’t use it well.”

Besides the fact that Ms. Combs’ statement is offensive to secretaries and librarians (implying that if they had access to a clown costume, they wouldn’t have the good sense not to wear it to a black-tie dinner), it’s probably not even true. After all, it wasn’t Dan Gilbert’s secretary who chose Comic Sans for his vitriolic missive—he owns that mistake all by himself. And librarians? Please! Do you really think a segment of the population most often caricatured by horn-rimmed glasses, sensible shoes, and the constant admonition to “Shhh!” is going to suddenly go rogue with a font that has been described as frivolous and irreverent?

People seem to take their hatred of Comic Sans quite seriously. Comments on the Combs’ website include “It is a disgusting font – immature, frivolous and visually jarring” and “conveys silliness, childish naivete, irreverence.” There is even—I am not making this up—a book, due out in April, titled Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans.

It all makes me feel kind of sorry for poor Vincent Connare, who undoubtedly has many worthy accomplishments to his credit, but is probably doomed to be best remembered for creating the typeface that font geeks love to hate. He has surely spent a disproportionate amount of time and energy responding to Comic Sans detractors, which is why he has included a page titled “Why Comic Sans?” on his own website, in which he explains that “Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program's interface, the typeface used to communicate the message. There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”

That’s right, Connare was “shocked” when he saw Times New Roman used inappropriately. And I think you’ll agree that Microsoft Bob’s friendly, helpful pup Rover would never speak in Times New Roman.

Because that would be like showing up to make balloon animals at a kids’ party…in black tie.

Resolved:

Happy New Year! Despite the fact that it comes in the middle of the darkest (and usually the coldest) part of winter, and on the heels of the frenetic pace of the Christmas season, I really like January 1st. I love the concept of making a fresh start for a new year.

Although, come to think of it, I would like New Year's Day even better if it came in the spring, which really seems like the most appropriate time to make a fresh start. But maybe it's better this way--if we get dragged down by the long, dark winter and stumble in our resolutions, we can always start over again when the sun gets higher and the days get longer and everyone feels that springtime sense of renewal. My birthday is March 2nd, and I always see that date as a sort of second chance to make all those changes for the better that I promised myself I'd make on New Year's Day.

But I have to make those initial promises, or resolutions, or whatever you want to call them, first, just on the chance that they'll actually take the first time.

I woke up this morning feeling quite resolute, and thinking about the ways in which I'd like to change my life in 2012. I've decided not to make any resolutions about exercise, weight loss, or healthy eating this year, even though all of those are areas in which, like just about everyone I know, I'd like to make changes. However, if I'm successful in achieving The Big Goal I'm setting for myself this year, I believe it will have a positive impact on every aspect of my life.

My Big Goal is simply this: to make measurable progress toward living my Authentic Life.

Here's how I envision my Authentic Life: I have very little stress. (There is some research that argues that a certain amount of stress is actually good for you, but I think that argument pertains more to competitive young professionals, or those in military training, than to 50+ women seeking simpler lives. I'm pretty sure I can get by without much stress at all, thank you very much.)

In my Authentic Life, I live in a house that is comfortable and homey, with enough well-loved possessions to make me feel comforted, but not so many possessions that I feel possessed by them. I don't ask for extreme tidiness, just enough clutter control that I can find things when I go looking for them, and I don't always feel like hiding when someone unexpectedly comes to the door. (Chances are there will be many times when I still feel like hiding from unexpected company, even if my house is clean, and that's OK. Another part of living my Authentic Life involves embracing my introversion.)

In my Authentic Life, my family and friends adore me, and marvel at my wonderful sense of humor and my calm, relaxed approach to everything. I do fulfilling work, and earn at least part of my income by writing.

That last one is important. It's been the missing piece of the puzzle for me for a long time, and I'm determined to figure it out. One of my writing goals for the new year is to pitch some story ideas to magazines, and, hopefully, to sell at least two stories in 2012. In other words, to get started on the freelance writing career I've been talking about for...oh, decades now.

I've made a list of steps I think will get me to my goal. Most of them are about self-discipline--"Write something every day, or almost every day" (I always give myself an out, in case there are days when I wake up paralyzed, or barfing, or just in a terribly foul mood) and "Blog regularly--weekly?" (The weekly part is my daughter's suggestion; I think it may be a little too ambitious, but we'll see.)

Many of the steps concern improving my relationship with time. For example, "Recognize how much time tasks actually take to complete." (I procrastinate on simple tasks because I can't seem to get it through my head that washing a sink full of dirty dishes takes 5-10 minutes, while "checking in on Facebook" may take 30-60 minutes--instead of the other way around.)

I will learn to prioritize. When I make a daily to-do list, I'll stop putting "Read?" and "Write?" at the very bottom, as a tentative afterthought to "Clean bathrooms" and "Go to dump," and, instead, schedule time for reading and writing during my most productive and clearheaded hours of the day.

I'm also challenging myself to continue getting up early--I'm targeting 5 a.m., seven days a week--and to use the early morning hours productively. I'm resolving to attend a writing class, workshop, or retreat, and to schedule mini writing retreats throughout the year.

Last, I resolve to minimize the time I spend on housekeeping chores by (gasp!) trying to stay on top of them, instead of letting things get to a state of emergency before I grudgingly tackle them. Admitting my particular weakness for horizontal surfaces, I vow to keep the big table in my writing room (a.k.a. the dining room) clear for working on projects (whether writing, paying bills, or folding laundry), and to keep the kitchen table clear for purposes of meal preparation (I don't have much counter space), eating, and just generally keeping the peace.

That's it--the steps to my Authentic Life. Time to get started.

Mother's Day

I wrote this a few years ago, but decided to revise it a bit and post it in honor of Mother's Day.


I take a book of writing prompts from my bookshelf and allow it to fall open where it will. “Take a moment to think about the phrase ‘What matters today…’ then begin to write.”

I think back to this morning, when I sat on the rock at the edge of the lake and looked down into the cold, clear water. What matters today is the way brown and yellow leaves were suspended there in the water, like objects caught in acrylic resin. Some had sunk to the bottom, many more were floating on the surface, but what matters to me today are the leaves that were caught between floating and sinking, catching the sun and sending it back to my eyes, like the light reflected in the yellow diamond from my grandmother's ring….

My mother was ten years old when her mother died, leaving her in the care of her father—distant and brokenhearted—and a succession of live-in housekeepers—thoughtless and preoccupied— and in charge, to some extent, of three younger brothers. She had her mother's eyes, her buoyant spirit and sharp wits, and, in a keepsake box on the dresser of her tidy white room, tucked next to an ordinary bobby pin, her mother's yellow diamond ring.

When my grandmother was in the hospital, recovering—or so everyone thought—from some sort of unnamed “female trouble,” my mother, the oldest child, was allowed a short visit. My grandmother was feeling better—was, in fact, sitting up in a chair when my mother arrived, and she spoke cheerfully of coming home in just a few days. Then she said, “Ruthie, your hair's hanging in your eyes,” and lifted her hand to brush back my mother's dark hair. “Here,” my grandmother said, and, taking a bobby pin from her own hair, she fastened back the stubborn wisps.

My grandmother relapsed; she died the following day. “I kept that bobby pin for years,” my mother told me, not long before her own death. In fact, she said, it had been in her jewelry box for seven decades, disappearing, somehow, only recently. When, later, my sister and I were sorting through her clothing and jewelry, we ran across several bobby pins, caught in the crevices of drawers or tangled in the chains of necklaces. With each one we found, I caught my breath, wondering...but they all looked the same, and who could tell?

The yellow diamond has a more satisfying story. For a dozen years or more it remained in my mother's keepsake box. I imagine her as a teenager, opening the box every now and then, drawing out the ring and holding it in the palm of her hand. Perhaps, on an afternoon filled with sorrow and angst and the frustration of being misunderstood, she escaped to her room and slipped the ring on her finger, holding it up to the light, gazing at the yellow stone through angry adolescent tears. Perhaps, preparing for a high school dance, with no one to help her dress and her awful state of motherlessness suddenly overwhelming her, she put on the ring and felt, almost, my grandmother's cool hands lifting the hair from the nape of her neck to hook the tiny clasp of her dress.

In the mid-1940s my mother, newly married herself, gave her mother's ring to my Uncle Don, her second brother, so that he and his sweetheart could become engaged before he was sent overseas during World War II. Many years later, my aunt and uncle returned the yellow diamond, now set in a gold pendant, to my mother, and she often wore it on a chain around her neck.

My mother had only ten short years with her mother, while I had more than four long decades with mine. While most of my mother's memories of her mother were half-formed impressions, freeze-frames from her very young childhood, my own mother shaped my personality and my life in ways I am still only beginning to discover. More than seven years after her death, I converse often with her in my mind, and, as odd as it seems, I sometimes find it easier to write her part of our dialogue than my own.

I have the yellow diamond pendant now. And sometimes, on an afternoon filled with sorrow and angst and the frustration of being misunderstood, when my awful state of motherlessness overwhelms me, I escape to my room, take out the yellow diamond on its gold chain and feel, almost, my mother's cool hands lifting the hair from the nape of my neck to hook the tiny clasp.

I am an introvert...no, really, I am!

People make me tired. This is not to suggest that I’m unfriendly, or that I don’t like people (some of them, anyway). But being around them makes me tired.

It’s been this way all my life. In junior high, when we had about three-quarters of an hour for lunch (divided between the cafeteria and the playground, two places I avoided like the plague, for reasons that would fill a blog post and then some—suffice it to say that we moved to a new school district before seventh grade, and it pretty much ruined my life) I walked home, all by myself, every single day. I may well have been the only student from Mathewson Elementary School who went home for lunch, but, as far as I know, there was no rule against it—at least, no one ever tried to stop me from leaving the school grounds the minute the lunch bell rang.

By the time I had gotten through a morning of non-stop human interaction, I really needed that break. It was about a ten-minute walk, and since my mother worked, I came home to heat my can of Campbell’s soup in a house that was blissfully silent and empty. I don’t remember what else I did during my solitary lunch breaks, except that I know I talked to myself a lot. But, even though I hated having to go back to school afterward, that 45 minutes of solitude gave me the energy and courage to get through the afternoon.

For the next 15 years or so, I often felt overwhelmed by too much “people contact.” Sometimes I was able to recognize the signs and carve out some time for myself before I reached the breaking point. But more often than not, thinking I wasn’t “supposed” to need time alone—or at least, not so much of it—I ignored the warning signs until I felt like this:

Then, sometime around the mid-1980s, I got hold of a copy of Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, which (despite its pathetic, self-indulgent title) was enlightening, mainly because it offered a definition of “introvert” that I had never heard before: someone who draws energy from solitary activities, in contrast to an extrovert (or extravert, the spelling Keirsey and Bates use), who draws energy from being with other people.

AHA!

Keirsey and Bates go on to say that when introverts interact with others, “it drains their energy in a way not experienced by extraverts. Introverts need to find quiet places and solitary activities to recharge, while these activities exhaust the extravert.”

Again, AHA!

I also learned that about 75% of the population is extroverted, making extroversion the norm—which explains a lot about why introverts are often regarded as shy, anti-social, selfish, boring, or just plain odd. (I myself am, in fact, all of those things, at least at times, but it’s grossly unfair to attribute those qualities to all introverts just because they need a little solitude and space.)

Over the years, I’ve learned to cope pretty well in this extroverted world. In the same way that left-handed people usually become considerably more ambidextrous than right-handers—because of all the times when, dammit, there are just no left-handed scissors available—most introverts learn to spend more time than they would prefer with other people, and to give the appearance of enjoying it more than they actually do.

Sometimes I think I’ve done too good a job of “fitting in,” like when people express surprise that I consider myself very strongly introverted—I get a score of 10-0 on that part of the Keirsey and Bates assessment (or maybe 9-1 if I take the test on a day when I’m feeling especially friendly).

People often assume that, like them, I enjoy lots of Fun Group Activities, and invite me to participate, putting me in the position of having to:

(a) go along (because, despite being an introvert, I have a nearly pathological need to please people and to be liked) and, very often, end up feeling frazzled and peevish because what I really needed was some alone time;

(b) make up a phony pre-existing commitment (and how many times are they going to believe I’m visiting my sister, or that my cat has a vet appointment for a pesky skin condition?); or

(c) come up with a clear, honest response that protects my need for solitude without offending anyone.

When I was younger, I almost always opted for (a), mostly because I had such lousy self-esteem that every time someone asked me to do something, I was stunned into acceptance: Me? You want me to come to your Tupperware party? Really? That sounds like great fun!

More recently, I’ve used (b) quite a bit. The obvious problem with (b), besides my general discomfort with any kind of dishonesty, is that it can lead to all kinds of complications and intrigue: I can’t be seen in the grocery store if I’m supposed to be at my sister’s for the day; I’ll have to remember my story, and anticipate that someone might ask me if the cat’s eczema is clearing up.

Obviously, (c) is the best choice, but it has taken me my whole introverted life even to begin to be able to express my need for down time without apologizing for it. It’s probably only the fact that, as I get older, I need more and more solitude that has made me brave enough to stand up for it.

So I’m developing a repertoire of appropriate responses, all of which seem to have three parts.

First, they start with some variation of “That sounds like fun, but…” This is the part that I hope people understand to mean “I like you/you are a wonderful person/it means a lot that you thought to ask me.”

Second, the excuse part. (I know, I know, if I had really good self-esteem and felt entirely comfortable in my introversion, I probably wouldn’t need this part, but I always feel as if people deserve to know that it’s really me, not them, that’s the reason I don’t want to attend the party/go out to dinner with a gang/join a knitting group.) This is usually something like, “I’ve had a busy, overwhelming week and haven’t had much time to myself.” (No matter how the week has gone, for an introvert, this is always absolutely true—we’ve always had a busy, overwhelming week, and we’ve never had enough time to ourselves.)

Finally, the part where I suggest what I might be doing instead: “I’m really looking forward to just sitting in the recliner with a book this weekend,” or “I’m planning to take the dog for a long walk after work,” or “I’ll have the house all to myself tomorrow and that’s an opportunity I can’t bear to pass up.” My hope is that this type of response helps to dispel any notion people may have that I’m not really an introvert, and I must just be waiting to be asked to join the next fun group activity.

And by the way, yesterday, while I was out for a nice, long, solitary walk with the dog (having—politely, I hope— turned down an invitation for a group snowshoe hike), I came up with

The Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert

10. You may be an introvert if you think organizing your stamp collection is a reasonable excuse for not going out for drinks after work.

9. You may be an introvert if you think Henry Brooks Adams was a genius for knowing that “One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”

8. You may be an introvert if you’ve ever heard someone use a line like “I’m just not one for crowds” and filed it away in your memory, thinking, that’s one I can use!

7. You may be an introvert if the statement, “I never feel lonely, except in a crowd” makes perfect sense to you.

6. You may be an introvert if you secretly (or not so secretly) hate weddings.

5. You may be an introvert if you can’t believe your good fortune when you get home and find no messages on the answering machine.

4. You may be an introvert if you’ve ever had to be bribed to attend a party. (When I was about seven, I refused to attend a friend’s birthday party until my mother told me a secret: the prizes for those ridiculous games like musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey were going to be…live dime-store turtles! Obviously, this was before the sale of baby turtles was banned due to concerns about salmonella.)

3. You may be an introvert if, in high school, when couples were slipping into supply closets to neck, you were slipping into them just to be alone for one goddamned minute!

2. You may be an introvert if the part of a recent party you enjoyed most was the 30 minutes you spent reading the label on the Listerine bottle in the hostess’ bathroom.

1. And…the number one sign you may be an introvert: if you’ve ever left a gathering to get something from your car and instead found yourself driving home, leaving your purse, coat, and spouse behind.