Tales less ordinary

>> A Slate Diary a day can keep the psychiatrist away

by JULIET WATERS

There are habits I'm glad I've given up and some I regret not keeping. Like, I used to read one short story a day because I'd been told this was the mental health equivalent of taking a multi-vitamin. I'm sure back then I felt more alive, perceived the recurring themes in my life more readily, colours became brighter, smells smellier etc. But maybe "back then" wasn't mid-November.

The problem with the short story/vitamin ana-logy is that it doesn't take most people half an hour to take a vitamin. Fortunately, in the middle of a week of deathbed weather, I finally stumbled on something a bit more instant.

I read Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan's diary entry on Slate.com. Currently working for the Washington Post in Mexico City, their description of favourite Mexican colours of housepaint, (bright peach-orange house, "a purple that grapes can only dream about," fireball red, egg-yolk, Caribbean blue) and the experience of dodging a bribe from a Mexican traffic cop brought me right back to a November I once spent in Central America.

These daily entries--which have been assembled in a new book, The Slate Diaries--are about a page long, written by writers and journalists, though also by common and extraordinary folk. Past diarists have included camp counsellors, rock stars (Beck), political figures (Benazir Bhutto), family of political figures (Karena Gore), ex-cons, current cons, a UPS driver, a banker, a holiday bookstore clerk, a sales rep in the classifieds of an alternative newspaper, and the richest man on earth.

One of my favourite discoveries after spending the week immersed in short descriptions of other people's days, is that Bill Gates's is, without competition, the dullest. When editor Michael Kinsley started the diaries, his inspiration was a book by Alan Bennett, Writing Home. As Kinsley explains: "Bennett's subject matter was almost aggressively mundane--a typical day's entry might describe what he watched on television the night before--but completely and mysteriously fascinating." The idea was that every week Slate would choose one person to post a daily "What I did yesterday" journal. Ironically, Kinsley's boss (Slate, for those who don't know, is owned by Microsoft) is almost aggressively extraordinary and yet completely and mysteriously boring.

The week he describes includes: a Time Life 75th anniversary gala where he sits at a table with Sharon Stone and James Watson (the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the structure of DNA); an interview with Charlie Rose; and Gate's first testimony before congress. Yet, through lack of detail and any adjectives other than "fun," "interesting," "intense" and "exciting" he manages to make his life sound about as compelling as that of an average 10 year old.

On the other hand, if there were such a thing as an Alan Bennett award it would probably go to Leslie Carr, a school nurse. She has, in many ways, one of the loneliest jobs ever invented. Carr wonders if she has the "inner-directedness" to make it in this career. "There is no one to say 'Boy you really sized up that situation with Jimmy' or, 'You did a swell job convincing that parent to get Mariah seen by a doctor.' It's an isolated position--not much adult company, no peers to bounce around with."

Yet, Carr has a natural talent for describing the minor pains of childhood in ways that illuminate the deeper wounds. My favourite is "slipper day": "The theme has something to do with 'slipping into the future' successfully, or not letting the future slip away. I don't know. So all students and staff wore bedroom slippers in school. Fuzzy, floppy slippers. Kids are tripping on the steps in clusters. I saw six kids taking sliding falls within a few hours..."

A great testimony to her natural gift as a storyteller is that at dinner her four kids pester her to hear about her day. What she gives them is probably more powerful than any of the Flintstones chewables.

The Slate Diaries, ed. Michael Kinsley, Public Affairs, pb, 378pp, $20.95