Exposure Value

Exposure Value: in photography it's a number that represents a combination of a camera's shutter speed and f-number, and something I can't explain too well or understand much better but basically, it allows you to underexpose or overexpose your image. I imagine it doesn't mean much to all of us digitally raised or
re-programmed, but it seems a good way to sum up the over and underexposure world in which we live.
Exposure: the condition of being presented to view or made known. The President has constant exposure. Most hard-working honest people have little or no exposure.
Value: relative worth, utility or importance. It doesn't matter if  you never are liked or followed or have another person say, beautiful! to your well-curated image.  We are all of value.

leaves, finally! and perfect exposure

So that's the possibly lame working title of my November novel (not really - I'm in the "rebel" category) for NaNoWriMo, which a friend told me about and which I've decided to participate in because, well, September and October went by in a horrible drought of output, except for many notebook pages of ineligible scrawling. I couldn't figure out how to fit in sitting down in front of a screen after a day of doing the same at a full-time job and commuting and the unpaid jobs of helping with V (who makes everything else exponentially more labor-intensive, like 25 loads of laundry a week...) and the ordinary stuff like dinner and papers demanding attention and a dog who pleeeease needs another walk and by the time I have free time I collapse with the daily bad news or a Netflix binge to escape it.

Like many people I don't feel like I have enough time and resent that my creativity needs to be carved into little pockets, but that's better than nothing and the only way to make that grow is to keep pushing aside everything else that I can, including plenty of time wasters that come with having endless access to screens, where reading an illuminating in depth article can quickly leads to shopping for noise reducing headphones or  getting lost in the vortex of horrific "living while black" stories (napping/shopping/golfing/swimming /studying/babysitting... there's a never exhaustive way to show your racism) which I want to keep up with, and now a bomb that has me wanting to move to Pittsburgh, where there seems to be a bumper crop of decency among its citizens..

Soooo..for the few people out there, welcome! I'll eventually get more upbeat.  Please feel free to read when and what you want -  I'll try to remember to use tags and titles, so you choose what is of interest, although as I often find when I read in print rather than on line - and one of the gifts I think we're losing by not having real newspapers - is that you can end up reading something you didn't think you'd find interesting and learning something really useful, or discovering about something or someone new.

Like Halloween,  that most bittersweet of holidays - the cloying sweetness of the candy offset by the sense of separation I feel from the phenomenon of families enjoying their walk up and down the street, kids in costumes all excited as they get to the door, in direct proportion to their ages: tweens are jaded, teens don't even pretend to wear costumes, but the little ones, well, what an awesome holiday to go up to strangers' doors and have them smile and give you candy!  I do like Halloween, it was a favorite back in my childhood of full size candy bars, an entire suitcase size bin of them under the bed I recall.

No one coming to  our door knows that we don't do Halloween ourselves, not that I need them to understand, but it's one of those things that feels isolating, that most people never stop to consider all that  it requires to accomplish this feat: the social skills to go up to a door, ring a bell, look someone in the eyes, grab a few pieces of candy or wait for the grown up to put it in your bag, smile and run off, when parents remind you to say thank you. oops, thanks! and then go to the next house....and really, why should you know what this night was like for us? That if you have no social skills or impulse control Halloween is a bad joke  I've gotten over it long ago but there's always residual grief, though we haven't attempted Halloween for years there's still a bit of sorrow and wistfulness, the remembrance of the times we tried, V in turn terrified or running inside people's homes, and you can't forewarn people - hand them a piece of paper, "please be understanding of my son with autism if he runs in your house and sits on your sofa" because frankly it gets exhausting to be an ad-hoc educator. And it can get lonely not to be part of a group ambling down the sidewalk.

Exposure Value is about the the limits of #metoo and this inaccurate sense of egalitarianism, that we all can tell our stories and have the same access to an audience. That most stories are lived and told in quiet dark rooms, and you have to take the time to notice, to open your ears and minds so you can listen.