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Elizabeth Zelvin
In general, I’m a good packer. I take plenty of changes of easily washed underwear. I don’t forget my migraine pills or the charger for my electric toothbrush. For the first leg of my first book tour, I threw six copies of Death Will Get You Sober into my suitcase, the air traveler’s equivalent of the proverbial box of books in the trunk of the author’s car.
By Day 2, I was glad I’d taken the books. At the first bookstore where I was scheduled to appear, the copies they’d ordered had not arrived. The bookseller was reluctantly ready to cancel when I offered to bring my own books. She was glad to work it out so the books people bought at the event registered as genuine sales, essential to my publisher’s good opinion of me. Books, I thought, that’s the essential, just as experienced authors had told me.
By Day 5, I’d decided the essential was the GPS. I owed that tip to the master of book tours, Joe Konrath, whom I don’t know personally but whose 600-bookstore tour a year or two ago is legend. I got the GPS in January so I’d have time to practice, fell in love with it immediately, and quickly became completely dependent on it. Her. I call her Sadie. (I’ve since learned that almost everybody names their GPS, talks to it, and feels as if they have a relationship with it.)
Unfortunately, my own Sadie developed laryngitis the day before the start of my trip, so I had to rely on my rental car providers for a GPS. My first experience was good: Avis provided a unit that was less advanced than my own, but when I turned it on, there was Sadie. Same voice, same patience with my mistakes on the road (“Recalculating,” she says calmly), same perfect navigational timing.
Next state, next rental car: Disaster! Alamo is a lot cheaper than Avis, and their GPS is correspondingly less advanced. Not only did this strange woman—not my Sadie!—fail to announce the names of streets, but she failed to pick me up on satellite as a went around and around confusing airport boulevards, ending in a Walmart parking lot having a meltdown on the cell phone to my husband in New York. “I don’t know where I am!” I wailed. (He’s used to this. His daughter once phoned from Bruges to say she was lost, but that’s another story.)
Not-Sadie finally located me on satellite and guided me more or less to my hotel, which turned out to be a little inn so secluded that I drove around the block several times before I figured out how to arrive, as opposed to being almost there and lost again. I did ask: the next-door neighbor had never heard of it. It’s that hidden. You have to walk through a jungle to find the office. I was still getting lost between bed and breakfast the next morning.
Let’s see, what else on Day 6? No air conditioning in my tropical room. They offered to move me, but considering I still have bricks—I mean books—in my suitcase, I settled for a fan. My next-stop bookstore canceled because their books hadn’t arrived, and being a chain rather than an indie, they couldn’t make do with my copies. I called my 88-year-old cousin, who had invited her book club to that event. She didn’t think they’d mind—actually, she said she didn’t think they’d care—but there was a hitch to our plan for a nice familial visit: she was about to go to the hospital for an emergency procedure.
At that point, I decided that if you can only take one indispensable tool, forget the books. Forget the GPS. Just make sure you pack your resilience. The book tour will kill you without it.
Showing posts with label GPS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GPS. Show all posts
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
I'm Lost
Sandra Parshall
When I tell people that I can get lost in my own neighborhood, they laugh because they think I’m joking.
I’m not.
I have what is quite possibly the world’s worst sense of direction. What dyslexics suffer through with words on a page is similar to what I endure when trying to find my way through the physical world. When I’m in my own house or yard, I know which way is which – early morning sun hits the front of the house, so that must be east; the back of the house receives late-day sun, so that must be west; our screened porch gets sun for most of the day, so that’s south; and the side where nothing but hostas will grow in the yard – I’m willing to bet that’s north.
When I leave my own property, though, all bets are off. I become disoriented and I’m likely to get lost if I deviate from certain often-traveled routes.
If you’re giving me directions, please don’t say, “Drive southwest for 1.2 miles, then turn east.” This is gibberish to me. Instead, paint a three-dimensional picture. Tell me what businesses, schools, churches I’ll pass on the way. Describe what’s on the corner where I’m supposed to turn. And please tell me whether to take a left or a right.
While my sense of direction is especially bad, I believe most women see the world as a collection of landmarks and topographical features. Have you ever called a doctor’s office or a business and asked directions from the woman who answered the phone? She undoubtedly gave you directions that made sense – “Turn right at the Olive Garden restaurant” or “Go past the building with the arch that looks like a toilet bowl and take the first left” or “Drive past Fresh Fields and turn right at the Wachovia Bank.” In the wilderness, a woman might memorize her route not by tracking it on a mental compass but by noting the big oak tree that’s been scarred by lightning and the jagged boulder with lichen in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s profile.
Men and women simply don’t see the world the same way. That statement might be heresy to Gloria Steinem, but its accuracy has been confirmed by several scientifically structured experiments. While some individuals of both genders will think like the opposite sex, the majority of women use landmarks to find their way around, while the majority of men use maps, compass points, and calculated distances.
These differences are believed to be evolutionary. For most of humankind’s history, men have been the hunters and women the gatherers. Prehistoric males ranged far afield in search of edible prey, and they had to develop a reliable way to find their way back to their caves. They learned to pay attention to the sun’s position in the sky, and to create a mental map of the landscape. Women stayed close to home, and they learned where the berry patches and fruit trees were. (Even now, according to one study, women learn their way around a food market much faster than men do.)
The differences in the way men and women navigate shows up even when they’re working – or playing -- in virtual environments. Female architects, designers, trainee pilots, and computer gamers all function more efficiently when they use 3D graphics that resemble the real world and view them on wider screens that improve spatial orientation. Tests conducted by a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and Microsoft researchers showed that when women used wide screens and realistic 3D images, their performance equaled the men’s.
All of this makes me feel marginally better about my pathetic navigational skills and less guilty about the money I spent on a GPS unit. I wonder, though, whether political correctness will ever allow us to honestly depict such gender differences in fiction and make use of them to propel a plot forward. Writing about a woman who can’t follow a map invites accusations of sexism from women, although the men in their lives may think it’s a realistic portrayal. A male character who meticulously states exact mileage and compass orientation when giving directions would make many women roll their eyes in exasperation.
As with so many other aspects of human existence, the facts may be firmly established for decades before people will willingly acknowledge them in everyday life. Fictional heroes and heroines, whom writers tend to present as idealized versions of their own genders, might never catch up with reality. My heroines possess all the navigational skills I lack. They know where they’re going and how to get there. And if some researcher says this isn’t realistic, I have a ready reply: Hey, it’s fiction!
When I tell people that I can get lost in my own neighborhood, they laugh because they think I’m joking.
I’m not.
I have what is quite possibly the world’s worst sense of direction. What dyslexics suffer through with words on a page is similar to what I endure when trying to find my way through the physical world. When I’m in my own house or yard, I know which way is which – early morning sun hits the front of the house, so that must be east; the back of the house receives late-day sun, so that must be west; our screened porch gets sun for most of the day, so that’s south; and the side where nothing but hostas will grow in the yard – I’m willing to bet that’s north.
When I leave my own property, though, all bets are off. I become disoriented and I’m likely to get lost if I deviate from certain often-traveled routes.
If you’re giving me directions, please don’t say, “Drive southwest for 1.2 miles, then turn east.” This is gibberish to me. Instead, paint a three-dimensional picture. Tell me what businesses, schools, churches I’ll pass on the way. Describe what’s on the corner where I’m supposed to turn. And please tell me whether to take a left or a right.
While my sense of direction is especially bad, I believe most women see the world as a collection of landmarks and topographical features. Have you ever called a doctor’s office or a business and asked directions from the woman who answered the phone? She undoubtedly gave you directions that made sense – “Turn right at the Olive Garden restaurant” or “Go past the building with the arch that looks like a toilet bowl and take the first left” or “Drive past Fresh Fields and turn right at the Wachovia Bank.” In the wilderness, a woman might memorize her route not by tracking it on a mental compass but by noting the big oak tree that’s been scarred by lightning and the jagged boulder with lichen in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s profile.
Men and women simply don’t see the world the same way. That statement might be heresy to Gloria Steinem, but its accuracy has been confirmed by several scientifically structured experiments. While some individuals of both genders will think like the opposite sex, the majority of women use landmarks to find their way around, while the majority of men use maps, compass points, and calculated distances.
These differences are believed to be evolutionary. For most of humankind’s history, men have been the hunters and women the gatherers. Prehistoric males ranged far afield in search of edible prey, and they had to develop a reliable way to find their way back to their caves. They learned to pay attention to the sun’s position in the sky, and to create a mental map of the landscape. Women stayed close to home, and they learned where the berry patches and fruit trees were. (Even now, according to one study, women learn their way around a food market much faster than men do.)
The differences in the way men and women navigate shows up even when they’re working – or playing -- in virtual environments. Female architects, designers, trainee pilots, and computer gamers all function more efficiently when they use 3D graphics that resemble the real world and view them on wider screens that improve spatial orientation. Tests conducted by a team of Carnegie Mellon scientists and Microsoft researchers showed that when women used wide screens and realistic 3D images, their performance equaled the men’s.
All of this makes me feel marginally better about my pathetic navigational skills and less guilty about the money I spent on a GPS unit. I wonder, though, whether political correctness will ever allow us to honestly depict such gender differences in fiction and make use of them to propel a plot forward. Writing about a woman who can’t follow a map invites accusations of sexism from women, although the men in their lives may think it’s a realistic portrayal. A male character who meticulously states exact mileage and compass orientation when giving directions would make many women roll their eyes in exasperation.
As with so many other aspects of human existence, the facts may be firmly established for decades before people will willingly acknowledge them in everyday life. Fictional heroes and heroines, whom writers tend to present as idealized versions of their own genders, might never catch up with reality. My heroines possess all the navigational skills I lack. They know where they’re going and how to get there. And if some researcher says this isn’t realistic, I have a ready reply: Hey, it’s fiction!
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