Some Difficulty Transitioning
I read an Ian McEwan novel, and how it relates to Wrongcards.
I’m out on a walk when my phone rings. My wife calling. It’s 8:50am, she’s supposed to be dropping Hattie off at school. I answer the phone and a small voice pipes down the line:
“Dadda, I having difficulty transitioning this morning.”
It is Hattie, who is ten.
“Don’t blame you,” say I, because I am a supportive father. “School’s the worst. Still, it has to be endured. But what is the essential problem, today?”
“Some of the girls talk about me behind my back. They go quiet when I walk up.”
“Well, let the little people talk. You’re interesting, and evidently they are not, and it’s nice you bring some color into their squalid lives. I wouldn’t concern myself with them, honestly. You won’t remember these people one day, I promise. I don’t even remember the names of the kids I went to school with —”
“Yes, you do,” says Hattie.
“I really don’t,” I assure her.
“Sometimes you’ll remember one of their names and look them up on your phone and say, ‘Oh, look at that, they’re in jail, now. How lovely.’”
“Hattie, this has never happened.”
“It’s happened a few times.”
“No, it —”
My wife takes the phone from Hattie and says, “She’s right, that’s actually happened a few times now.”
“Well, I don’t remember it ever happening, and if it did, the schools I attended were of a different caliber.” I say goodbye and hang up, and return to my audiobook. I am walking under trees and, although it is still before nine, the day is already hot.
The plot of the audiobook advances slowly. Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know. I’m not far into it. The characters are affluent and terribly English. They’re the dour and sober-minded sort, not self-effacing and witty, which is how we foreigners expect the English to be. Also, their lives seem a bit drab, possibly because of the weather, or possibly because they’re starkly aware that their ancestors were too law-abiding to be transported to Australia. Distressingly, no character has made a joke yet. I’m becoming concerned.
The characters in this novel evidently work in academia or the literary arts. I assume they inherited their wealth because they drive luxury brands of motor vehicles and eat quail and mushrooms, and enjoy expensive wines. Normally, when a narrative is populated with people of this class, the only way to make them do anything interesting is have them murder a vicar. What do our social betters do all day, when they’re not preoccupied with their extramarital affairs, their boozy lunches, or confessing their quiet desperation to therapists? I can’t tell you — I don’t normally read books concerning these sorts of people. But Ian McEwan has a certain wotsit, as PG Wodehouse might have put it, so I’m forging on.
Wodehouse had a kindly wisdom that, among other things, prevented him from taking the British upper class seriously. I have no idea if Ian McEwan is cut from the same cloth. Don’t spoil it for me, if you happen to know.
My concern, going into this, is that the author is compromised. Perhaps he has friends with names like Clive or Penelope, and they call him ‘Darling’, and say things like, ‘Priceless!’ all the time.
I’m only a few chapters into this novel and, troublingly, one of the characters is a poet. You know, I’ve actually never met a poet? I’ve traveled all over the world and lived in four foreign countries, but somehow, if I met anyone whose main source of income stemmed from poetry, they had the basic decency to keep it to themself.
Now, I’ll admit to you, here, in the spirit of old-fashioned hypocrisy, that I myself have written a few poems. And they’re a bit funny, but not a lot funny, which is why you don’t know anything about them. Humor can redeem a thing, even poetry. Sometimes, to amuse my children, I speak in rhymes. And in moments of distress — for instance, being forcibly obliged to speak to one of my daughter’s teachers — I will, beforehand, panic and speak in mostly monosyllabic rhymes, like Dr. Seuss.
“I do not want to go to school,
the teachers seem like silly fools.
I saw them all, in younger days.
I thought this chore was just a phase!
I’m sort-of bored of this, you see,
I thought my time belonged to me.
But now it seems I must attend,
more school events that have no end,
and now —”
Then my wife interrupts: “Half the reason we have to go to this meeting is because Hattie repeated something you said.”
So, I put on my shoes and go out the door. Nobody warned me about any of this, before I consented to having children.
Back to the Ian McEwan novel. For several dozen pages, I feel as if the poet has been perilously close to unrolling a piece of parchment and reading a poem to his silly friends. Except it’s not parchment, it’s vellum, which is either made from animal membrane (that’s what vellum is, by definition) or some other, newer, fancier isotope of expensive stationery that they’re calling vellum, these days, out of pure nostalgia. Either way, it made me wince. It made me think: perhaps the conservatives are right, and we’re becoming too permissive as a society?
You know, if I had a friend who wrote bits of poetry on calf-skin, and tried to recite from it in public, I’d wrestle them to the ground and do my best to talk sense into them. And failing that, I’d lock them in an upstairs bathroom until they could see the error of their ways. But my point, I suppose, is that despite the troubling affectations of its upper class characters, I’ll keep reading the novel, because I’m an optimist. Also, I want to know if the poet gets murdered in a vicarage.
But you know, that phone call from Hattie has left me troubled. I dislike sending her to school. It’s such an awful place to be, school. When I was Hattie’s age, the most useful thing I had learned in the school yard — and I’m being serious with you — was how to defend myself with my fists.
It’s a different world today. The government has implemented some strict anti-bully initiatives in schools, and so abuse, today, is mostly emotional in nature. Boudica, aged 12, endured all sorts of homophobia from her peers in primary school. It was all social exclusion and verbal cruelty, whereas I had to learn unarmed combat, as well. This is progress. Or it’s the State securing its monopoly on human violence; I leave it for you to decide.
I would home-school them, if I had a knack for teaching, or the patience, or even the time. It would also require me to postpone my writing career by another seven years. Bear in mind, what I do with my time is gravely serious stuff — this newsletter, for example — and then, obviously, there’s Wrongcards, which parenting often requires me to neglect.
My ecards website is easily the best of its kind on the internet. It’s a bit like operating the most important website devoted to pictures of cats that look like Hitler. Obviously, it’s a great public service, but still, it’s time-consuming.
A month or so ago, I noticed Wrongcards’ mail queue looked a bit wobbly. I turned it off to tinker and, almost immediately, received a message via the contact form.
“The send feature is not available. Have you changed your business model?”
I sat in honest stupefaction for several minutes, trying to decipher what the words meant. Then I typed out the following response: “I’ve turned off card-sending for a few days, while I work on the server (intermittently). Out of curiosity, what is a business model, and do they apply to ecards that you ought not send to anybody?”
By ‘intermittently’, I had meant that I wouldn’t be able to work on Wrongcards for more than ten minutes without interruption from my daughters. And, of course, after an interruption, I would need at least twelve minutes to refocus, simply to get back to where I was before the interruption. I mean, I think it would require twelve minutes; in practice, they’ll interrupt me, again, well before that.
After a little while, I received the following reply: “I was wondering if you started selling memberships.”
Selling memberships for ecards that are wrong for every occasion? Can you imagine?
I responded immediately.
“Wrongcards has existed for roughly 18 years, and I’ve made close friends promise that if I should ever attempt to monetize the website, they should lure me into a church and call an exorcist.”
They wrote something nice and supportive as a reply, and then my daughters interrupted me again. I tried to fix the mail queue some more, then another interruption, and so on.
Many are unaware how difficult it is to send emails reliably on the internet. Behind the scenes, Wrongcards is a terribly complex beast of almost 10,000 lines of code.
The trickiest part? Bad actors attempting to use the site for nefarious ends. I enjoy messing with them. I don’t delete their ‘marketing’ messages, but I have automated systems that change words around. Sometimes those words seem to imply that the sender enjoys unnatural relations with goats. Another reason I enjoy programming.
The issue is, I don’t have much time any more to create actual cards for Wrongcards. So, last week I decided to build a much simpler web application, or at least one that would require less of my attention. This is why you didn’t hear from me last week; I was coding a new back-end that is simpler, but more limited in scope. Users can now only create messages — and share links to those messages — but nothing else. There is no mail queue. It’s more secure and less fuss, so perhaps I can use my time to make more cards. Anyway, I’m testing the application in production as we speak.
It’s mostly working. It has one bug I haven’t fixed yet. What happens is, well, when a nefarious actor tries to create a message that appears to be selling something, then the message transforms into a short essay about how dolphins are just gay sharks. It’s a bug, as I mentioned, and I’m not sure how to fix it yet, but I’ll get to it.
But first, I have this audiobook to get through, and so far, the vicar hasn’t appeared, let alone murdered anyone in a Conservatory. I’d best get back to it.
With chaste affection,
Kris St.Gabriel