I teach a Popular Criticism class to MFA students. I don’t actually have an MFA, but I am a professional, full-time writer who has been in this business for almost two decades, and I’ve written for a wide range of impressive print and online publications, the names of which you will hear and think, “Oh fuck, she’s the real deal.” Because I am the real deal. I tell my students that a lot, like when they interrupt me or roll their eyes at something I say because they’re young and only listen when old hippies are digressing about Gilles Deleuze’s notions of high capitalism’s infantilizing commodifications or some such horse shit.

Anyway, since Friday is our last class, and since I’m one of the only writers my students know who earns actual legal tender from her writing — instead of say, free copies of Ploughshares — they’re all dying to know how I do it. In fact, one of my students just sent me an email to that effect: “For the last class, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown of your day-to-day schedule. How do you juggle all of your contracted assignments with your freelance stuff and everything else you do?”

Now, I’m not going to lie. It’s annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young — all of them, the world’s young — so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule. Here we go:

Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. because one of my dogs was making a strange gulping sound. I sat for several minutes listening closely, wide awake, wondering if she wasn’t developing esophageal cancer or some other gruesome ailment that the pricey animal specialty hospital might guilt me into actually treating. I imagined sitting in the posh chill of their giant waiting room, the pricey coffee and tea machine humming away next to me, filling out forms instructing them to never crack my 10-year-old dog’s chest and do emergency open heart surgery if she starts coding. “Option 1: LET MY DOG DIE.” That’s one I had to check off and sign, over and over again, when my other, eight-year-old dog had an unexplained fever and it cost me $6000 to save her. The vet’s eyes would dart over my forms and the corners of her mouth would pinch slightly, and then she’d treat me like someone who might just yank the IV out of her dog’s leg and twist her neck at any minute, the Jack Bauer of budget-minded dog owners.

Anyway, right about now you’re starting to understand why the morning hours are so potent for a working writer: The mind spills over with expansive concepts and sweeping images that just cry out to be tapped in another scintillating essay or think piece.

Rather than get up and spoil my inspired revelry, though, I know to let these thoughts swirl and churn until they take a more coherent shape. My mind soon shifts to tallying up the costs of college for my stepson, who for some nutty reason applied to a wide range of insanely expensive private colleges on the East Coast. After I marvel over that sum for a while, I try adding together his costs with the costs of sending my two young daughters to college in ten years. Then I think about how we should probably try to pay off our credit cards and our home equity loan first, and THEN focus on coming up with this mammoth amount for college, and then of course we’ll be retiring right after that but we’ll still have 15 years left on our massive mortgage. “We’re never going to retire,” I think. “We’re going to have to keep working forever and ever and ever. And we can’t turn on the AC this summer. And we have to stop going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant every other week and drinking margaritas, which are an inexcusably expensive indulgence.” Old people problems, LOL.

Then I think about margaritas for a while. I think about how there should really be a breakfast margarita. Breakfast ‘Rita. Breakarita. Sunrise ‘Rita. Maybe with Chia seeds. I think about how I worked at Applebee’s when I was my stepson’s age. And he’s never even had a job. Ever! I think about how weird that is, that he’s never had a job, but he’s applying to colleges that cost $250k, all told. YOLO, I guess.

Then I think about how my black Applebee’s polo shirt always smelled like nachos because I didn’t wash it often enough. See how I was thinking about a smell? That’s how you know I’m a real artist and not some fucking hack who writes light verse for The New Yorker. Artists can conjure a stinky odor using only their raw powers of imagination and long-term memory. That’s also how you know it’s time to write.

By now, it’s 5:30 a.m. I get up and tiptoe past the kids’ rooms, put water on for tea, and swiftly unload the dishwasher. Ahead of the curve, motherfuckers! I high-five myself in my mind. (It’s important, as an artist, to reward yourself whenever you do something right. Your life can’t be all “You suck, work faster, you’re falling behind!”)

By 5:45 a.m., I am sitting down to write. First, though, I need to fire off an email to the editor of my weekly advice column about maybe getting a check soon since it’s May and I haven’t been paid yet this year. “HEY IS THERE A CHECK ON THE WAY FINALLY? LOL! THIS BIG GUY WITH A BASEBALL BAT AT MY FRONT DOOR WANTS TO KNOW! OMG MY KNEES! XXXOOO” Always be super-polite and light-hearted with your editors, and never give them any indication that you’ve been waiting for a check for so long and your credit card balances are getting so high that your pulse starts racing every time you think about it, so much so that you’ve started to soothe yourself by imagining choking the life out of their ineffectual shit faces with your bare hands. Lol.

At 6 a.m., I quit email because that’s what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done. But I have to go on Twitter for a second to favorite a few of my editor’s tweets so he’ll know that I’m not mad or anything. It’s so easy for people to think that you’re full of rage when you’re a woman and a writer and oldish and you never, ever get paid! Ignorant dummies. Then I reply to a youngish writer who just moved to LA and hates her job and hates LA and is panicking. “Remember you’re having an adventure!” I tell her, because she’s young and she probably doesn’t have dogs with health problems yet. So then I end up scrolling through my Twitter feed, probably just to remind myself that all of these other writers don’t have 8,204 followers like I do, because I’m so fucking esteemed and accomplished after having done this for almost two decades. I’m a professional, is the thing. I know my fucking shit. I just keep producing high-quality work. That’s why I have 8,202 followers.

Hold on. Where did those two followers go? Was it the thing I wrote about having an adventure? That probably made me sound really old. I probably shouldn’t be so upbeat or urge people to have adventures. You’re not old yet, guys, but you should remember this for when you get older: DON’T EVER WRITE THINGS THAT IMPLY THAT YOU’RE OLD.

At 6:15 a.m., my five-year-old wakes up. “Can I play on your iPad?” she asks. “That’s not how we start the day,” I reply. “We don’t do dumb things like that to start the day, ever.”

At 6:25 a.m. I am checking out the Twitter page of some teenager who makes YouTube videos about fashion. Someone tell me, how is that a thing? Her profile page bio line says “My viewers are my besties and I love them 5ever.” She has 1.43 million
followers. I would write something here about how making YouTube videos and assuring 1.43 million strangers that they’re your besties 5ever is probably much more lucrative than, I don’t know, teaching teenagers how to write and recapping “Mad Men” at midnight. But I’m a professional fucking writer and a true artist, not a teenager in leopard print rollerskates. LoL.

At 6:55 a.m., I have to start my 5-year-old’s breathing treatment for her cold and make both kids a kale smoothie so they don’t die of scurvy or rickets. The rest of the morning passes in a blur.

7:01 a.m. OK, it’s not really a blur at all. But you should never, ever detail your domestic chores or rail off the cute things your kids say unless you’re Louis fucking CK. If you’re a woman, forget it. People will think you’re a mommy blogger, which is bad, because it’s a woman thing. Suffice it to say, there’s lots of screwing little rubbery straws into little cup lids and struggling to keep the dirty laundry piles from mixing with the clean laundry piles. In the end, the kids looked fresh and beautiful and ready for the day and I looked like a bedraggled, angry old whore. Or sex worker. YAAASS! (Is that how you spell it?)

8:45 a.m. Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them — or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there’s one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it’s exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You’ll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that’s pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you’ll think about the fact that you should’ve been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

9:20 a.m. Leaving house for run with dogs. High-five!

10:20 a.m. Hydration. Crucial. As Al Swearengen from Deadwood once said, “Those that doubt me suck cock by choice.” Actually, not sure if it was Swearengen or that grisly looking dude, what was his name?

10:40 a.m. I go to look up that quote, because: fact-checking, hellooo! Every good freelance person fact-checks everything religiously. Clean, error-free copy is how you get the high-end writer gigs, and it’s also how every editor contacts you all the time and asks you to read a 500-page book and write 2000 words for a $300 check you’ll receive four months later. Boo-ya! See, when you’re an acclaimed critic and a fucking pro, you get paid $40k a year to do complicated theme-paper type assignments, instead of paying $40k a year. So there! See ya, wouldn’t wannna be ya!

11:15 a.m. This is lunch time, because I woke up at 4 a.m., remember? And I can’t just eat a few slices of cheese and bread, because that’s not brain fuel. Brain fuel is kale, and you have to chop kale up and then massage it with lemon juice and honey for a long time, so it’s not prickly and bitter, and then you add shallots (also chopped) and pine nuts (toasted). Those that doubt me suck cock by choice. (See how I used that Swearengen line again, as a callback? If you work really hard and write every day for two decades, this kind of stuff will just spring into your mind.)

12:00 p.m. I read an article about South Korea ferry accident. Feel depressed. This is my humanity I’m getting in touch with, so it’s important.

12:30 p.m. I clean up the mess from lunch, still feeling depressed. Feeling feelings is a crucial part of the professional writer’s day. You’ll never write anything worthwhile if you don’t feel your feelings. Also, you always have to clean up your messes, because as the day progresses it gets harder to write, and when you see a big mess in the kitchen that can be super disheartening if you’re already struggling to put words onto the fucking page.

1:05 p.m. Finally time to write! This is when I pull up the piece I’m working on about BuzzFeed and John Updike and the enforced cheer of American pop culture. This piece is the fucking shit, is what I’m thinking as I’m reading it. When it’s ready, it is going to blow some high-falutin’ editor socks clean off.

1:25 p.m I decide I should really read this Updike biography from cover to cover right now if I want this essay to be worth reading.

1:55 p.m. I stop myself! Because I’m not writing, and this is my time to write. Remember this one thing, even if you forget everything else: WRITERS WRITE. If you’re not writing, you’re not a fucking writer. I am a writer, so I write every fucking day. So I open the piece and…

1:56 p.m. I realize I have to finish that review of “American Idol” because it’s due this afternoon. And honestly, at first it’s hard to write the review, because that other essay is going to be way better. But then, when I start to write about how J. Lo always says she’s “getting goosies” when she likes someone’s singing? Well, that’s the kind of little detail you just know to include when you’re a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I’m in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!

2:23 p.m. Time to go get the kids from school.

3:30 p.m. The kids are doing their homework now, so you probably think this is a good time to write. WRONG. I’m too tired, and if I try to write AND answer their incessant fucking questions, I’ll start to say things like “Please don’t talk to me,” and “Please shut up,” and “Don’t look at me right now.” And sure, there are people out there who are thinking, “Christ, Heather, YOU ARE THE REAL DEAL. The world needs more of your fine prose and insights, not less. If you need to tell the kids to fuck off, then do it. If not for them, then for HUMANITY.”

And I do care about humanity. The people of the world matter to me at a deeper level than most, because I’m a true artist and I’m sensitive. But here’s the truth: It bums ME out to tell my kids to fuck off. Weird, right? But I need to be available to them. So I’m playing Candy Crush instead.

3:45 p.m. My 7-year-old asks me a question and I tell her, “I’M ON A TIMED LEVEL, HERE! GIVE ME ONE MINUTE!” and then “NO, STOP TALKING! TIMED LEVEL! A TIMER IS TICKING DOWN! ONE MINUTE ONE MINUTE!”

4:04 p.m. A confession? I fucking hate Candy Crush once you get past the Minty Meadow. It’s too hard, but there’s no skill involved. It’s at once incredibly tedious and taxing, and yet there’s very little reward for it. You try and try and try and try and you work and work and work and you tell the whole goddamn world to go fuck itself, and you know what you have to show for it in the end? A fucking headache. You have the illusion of accomplishment, but really? You aren’t doing shit. You’re pretending that you’re accomplishing something, that’s all.

What do you mean, is that a metaphor?

4:35 p.m. I’m making myself a margarita but it’s not what you think. I’m doing this so I’m not a total jerk when my husband walks in the door. My husband has a real job, FYI. He’s an awesome guy and he also keeps the lights on around here, just in case you were saying to yourself, ‘WTF? How do the fucking lights stay on, because even with her being the real deal and all, she never seems to get paid or anything?” Have to be cheery, for the breadwinner! Booze.

4:55 p.m. I should add that tequila is a very important part of surviving life as a big-deal professional writer. You don’t believe that now, but you will later. I am having some great ideas right now that I would never have without the tequila, and I’m tweeting them all so I don’t forget a thing.

5:19 p.m. OK. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “This person is kind of an asshole. If I become a professional writer, I won’t be so discombobulated and distracted and self-hating.” That’s what I used to think about my creative writing teacher in college, who always said depressing things about her life and had uncombed hair and a tote bag filled with crumpled papers. I thought she was old and weird and wishy-washy about the whole world, her kids, everything. But I had coffee with her last year, and I realized that she wasn’t even old back then, and besides, we have so much in common! Anyway, time for another margarita.

6:35 p.m. Husband got home. Hi babe. Mmm so fucking tired. I know, I DO work too hard.

7:15 p.m. Use the washcloth. Stop. Good job. Don’t hit her. You’re right I said “Dummeldore.” OK nighty night. No, don’t even. President? Of a professional organzination? That’s what blowhards do. You’ll have to fly to Dubai or whatever and I’ll have to deal with all the shit. Well, bring home more bacon, then. We need much, much more bacon. Much more. I’m just saying, I’ll be the one dealing with the shit, as always. I only had two of them, that’s not the thing. Margaritas, not kids. What does that mean. You don’t get it. Whatever. Fuck.

Zzzz.

4:00 a.m. I’m awake because my husband is snoring in a weird way and I think it must be sleep apnea. What the fuck is sleep apnea? I hope it’s not something that could kill him, or worse, maim him. So now I’m thinking about how fucked we’ll all be if anything happens to any one of us, given how much debt we have to pay off and how many huge piles of cash we’ll need to save our kids from also having giant debts and how we’ll never, ever be able to retire, ever. I think about us working forever and ever and then I think about earthquakes and that ferry disaster again and, right about now you’re probably starting to understand why the morning hours are so promising for a working writer! The mind spills over with vibrant imaginings that just beg to be formed into another scintillating trend piece or capsule review or “Real Housewives of Atlanta” recap!

But this is just how writing professionals do it. We wake up super duper fucking early and we start thinking our big thoughts and then we write. It’s that simple. This is how you get ‘er done, motherfuckers! Those that doubt me suck cock by choice.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Ed Yourdon.

Good morning to you too, World Health Organization:

After discussion and deliberation on the information provided, and in the context of the global polio eradication initiative, the Committee advised that the international spread of polio to date in 2014 constitutes an ‘extraordinary event’ and a public health risk to other States for which a coordinated international response is essential.

Pakistan, Cameroon, and the Syrian Arab Republic are getting hit hardest. Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Iraq, Israel, Somalia and Nigeria “pose an ongoing risk for new wild poliovirus exportations in 2014.” Meanwhile, retro pathogens are booming on from the other side of the economic stability spectrum as well.

In New York and California, measles outbreaks are bigger than they’ve been in decades. A decrease of vaccinations across Europe brought with it 26,000 cases of measles in 2011. And one Australian survey found that 83% of Sydney homeopaths advised their clients against vaccinating… Brazil is seeing small outbreaks of diseases like measles. But they aren’t homegrown — they’re reportedly coming in from Europe and the United States…

The World Cup in particular is a worry; the WHO has drafted an emergency plan for anticipated measles and rubella outbreaks resulting from the sudden influx of Americans in Brazil this summer. And because why not, Let’s worry about syphilis again.

So 2014 is the year history finally comes back to wipe mankind off the planet. But why? A study in contrasts:

The consequences of further international spread are particularly acute today given the large number of polio-free but conflict-torn and fragile States which have severely compromised routine immunization services and are at high risk of re-infection. Such States would experience extreme difficulty in mounting an effective response were wild poliovirus to be reintroduced.

And:

The resistance to getting inoculations comes from an unlikely variety of views: Deeply conservative parents reject the government’s interfering with their child rearing; orthodox religious groups dislike vaccines for being man-made, not God-given; and well-educated, health-conscious, affluent and Internet-literate parents don’t see vaccines as organic or natural.

What better way to start the week than with a reminder that human progress is not inevitable — that the very concept is a form of self-sabotage. Wash your hands!

Why is advertising so weepy lately? SAD YOU ASKED.

I think there are a lot more clients briefing their agencies saying, ‘This made people cry and do you see how many views this thing has? We want to make people cry about our brand’,” says Mike Byrne, partner and chief creative officer at Anomaly.

★★ Yesterday’s jacket, hanging in the coat closet, was still damp to the touch. Mist clung to the top of the glass tower across the avenue as the rain reluctantly lifted. The shower steam had nowhere to disperse to. Sun came on, in pulses. Wet discs of dog shit glazed the sidewalk under the scaffold outside the dog day-care center. The temperature reading was only in the mid-60s but the city had become an immense sweat gland. Jackets were coming off and being draped over arms. The glare began to hurt a little, despite the leaves having popped out. Puddles dwindled; now the clouds were like fish scales coming away under the knife. By early evening, the suffocating air had become simply soft and enveloping. “This day is just a hundred percent perfect,” a young woman said, languidly and inaccurately, as she drifted down Prince Street. That moment of the day may have been. But there were the moments before it, and those that followed: stepping out into the night to hear rain just starting to patter on the trash bags. It was just enough of a shower to make a waiting taxi irresistible — and enough of one to destroy Google Maps’ prediction that the taxi would be faster than a train to Brooklyn. Traffic crawled across the bridge, and the BQE down off to the right was a tangled strand of Christmas lights. The rain ended right before the taxi arrived. Outside the party, the cigarette smoke stayed right where the smokers had exhaled it.

A most disconcerting scene from a high school in Kansas, where teens are in the grips of a sickness. A teacher’s perspective:

I am pretty lenient about phone use in my class because we use phones for various things. There is always the kid that sneaks in a text or two, but as long as it isn’t a distraction, I don’t worry too much.

Today was the first day in a long time I actually took phones away. I have no idea what all was included in the update, but you would have thought it was crack. They seriously could not keep away from it. I even had one girl crawl under the table with her phone.

This “update” was a change to Snapchat, the teen messaging app du jour, which adds face-to-face video calling and basic texting. All kinds of apps do this now, there are a hundred ways to text, and we’ve been Skyping for ten years. So what IS it, really, with this particular download? It’s mostly just that all the teens are already there, configured into their little cliques and constellations. But there’s something else going on: The new Snapchat has some unusual ideas about personal space.

Snapchat’s basic privacy settings are clear and helpful: You can turn off unsolicited messages in the settings. Even then, messages have to be tapped to be seen, problem senders can be blocked, etc. It’s not a bad system! You can mostly avoid getting unwanted photos and videos in the first place, and you have recourse if your safeguards fail.

In contrast, the new system plays loose with permission and consent. Entering in a chat with someone takes you to a separate screen that feels like texting or private messaging. But by starting that text conversation, you’re also opening your phone to live video without warning. I started a chat with a friend, forgot about it, and looked back down at my phone a few seconds later to see his face, staring at me silently through the phone, live. He pressed a button and appeared on my phone. I never answered that call! There’s was no “so and so wants to video chat with you” or “you’re about to see whatever this other person’s camera is pointed at” warning. It’s disconcerting, and feels a little like a trick — texting and live video are at different ends of the intimacy spectrum, and now you consent to them both with the same subtle action. This is what makes it exhilarating, I suppose: It makes Snapchat feel a little more dangerous, or volatile, or sexty, in the way that parents have assumed it was all along. Things can escalate INSTANTLY.

Snapchat got a lot thirstier with this update.

— Matt Jarman (@itsJarm) May 2, 2014

This is what the startup world is bringing us: Phone calls that answer themselves, and conversations that never end. God help the teens.

New York City is going to replace its ninety-six hundred or so public pay phones, which obviously nobody uses anymore because a) who even talks on the phone and b) on the occasions when people do speak into a small grill to transport their voices across time and space, it’s typically one that they carry with them except c) people who can’t afford miniature computers or the oppressively priced monthly service plans that allow them to work. They’re going to be supplanted by some ten thousand “public communications structures” that will provide free Wi-Fi to anyone, so long as he or she stands close enough to view the digital advertisements plastered on the side of the kiosks.

Ads will ostensibly allow whichever company wins the contract to make money — hopefully enough that access can remain free without needing to sell or otherwise exploit the personal information of the vulnerable population of people who will actually need the kiosks for their broadband access. Or worse, going essentially broke like Alta Bicycle Share, the company that operates CitiBike, a program with lots of users but that hasn’t been able to sustain itself and is maybe on the brink of disaster. It would be pretty great if the free Wi-Fi flooding the streets of the New York wasn’t super slow, either, like the Wi-Fi at Starbucks or on airplanes, which is the absolute worst, especially when it’s free because some crusading advertiser like Google sponsored it — ruining it even for the people who’d actually be willing to pay fifteen dollars for the Internet on a plane. Seriously, it’s so slow that even Twitter won’t load and when that is the case, why are you even on the Internet at all?

“A study into the popular game rock-paper-scissors has discovered the best strategy to win the game.”

There are some performers whose mere presence inspires laughter, and for me that is a list on which Matt Berry appears fairly close to the top. What with him having a birthday today and all I need no better excuse than to share this terrific bit of Berrydom from the second season of “The IT Crowd.” The man is just comedy in human form.

Data journalism goes to the movies:

Violence is on the rise in blockbusters. While the term is rather vague, 40 percent of movies in the entire set spanning 1975 to 2013 — and 70 percent since 2010 — were tagged with ‘violence.’ Let’s break that down into some of the tags that are typically found in violent movies.

Gore is down since the decadent days of the late 1970s, but murder is up. Here’s something interesting, though. The “murder” tag and the “blood” tag largely kept pace with one another through 2004, which is to be expected, as the former often leads to the latter.

This IMDB-tag-based approach to film appreciation is not going down so well:

Man, who needs film criticism when we have data journalism to sort this shit out. http://t.co/YxqdRxuc38

— Mark Slutsky (@totallyslutsky) May 2, 2014

It’s not obvious what data-based film criticism wants, or what it intends to do, but it certainly has utility: I don’t need to see a single one of these summer blockbusters to have an opinion on all of them! Nor do I need to borrow a professional critic’s take or formulate a snappy, counter-intuitive riff on the fly. I can just talk about data and directional trends and charts. The big picture, the context.

This kind of analysis might not cut to the core of a film but it does produce some interesting meta-trivia, and a bonus sense of closure:

Even before the movie begins, you’ll see the logo of the studios that produced the film. In recent years, you may have noticed that the production companies changed their logos to match the spirit of each film.

This practice has become increasingly visible in blockbusters. According to our data, 27 blockbusters released since 2000, or 16 percent, had an altered logo.

Magical.

I don’t miss the ’90s one bit, but I guess if I did I’d be glad these guys are around to spread its styles to a generation that is too young to know better. [Via]