My paper of record

Why I just can't bring myself to trade in my chubby, scuffed-up planner for a slick, simpler new gadget

By Jennifer Egan

Topics:Made

In our era of sleek, glistening, multifarious multitasking handsets, I’m still lugging around the same chubby, scuffed blue leather planner I’ve owned since around the time of Operation Desert Storm. It’s cumbersome, unsightly and not terribly functional; the address pages are falling out despite the fact that I’ve fortified their frayed binder holes with Scotch tape, and the book is so bulky that it’s often hard to cram into my purse or backpack, forcing me to leave it behind.

I fantasize about the days when I, like everyone else I know, can immediately locate that great florist I used one time in Chicago (without having to search through years of e-mail for the original recommendation); or the water park someone told me about in New Jersey, or the reasonably-priced roof repair guy we hired years ago. I long to be able to make a plan without having to say, “I’ll let you know after I check my book,” and to not have to copy out addresses and directions to bring along with me, so I don’t have to weigh myself down with it.

But whenever I consider actually buying a new device, I put it off. Partly I dread the data entry and the learning curve, but I strongly suspect that the luscious gadgetry — not to mention my new, streamlined existence — would eclipse all that. Besides, plenty of data I wouldn’t need to transfer — the blue book is bloated with dead information that is largely responsible (along with the bulky leather cover) for its ridiculous weight. By going electronic, I would shed the addresses and phone numbers of people whose names I only dimly recognize now, or not at all! — “Books, rare: Robert 480-2138″ — not to mention defunct businesses: World Gym on Lafayette Street; Nada theater on Ludlow. I would eliminate countless more entries belonging to folks I fondly recall but have been long out of touch with: previous bosses and colleagues; friends of friends; even people I was once was very close to, but whose lives disengaged from my own. If I wanted to find them, my address book would be useless — the information is hopelessly obsolete. I’d be better off looking on Facebook.

The entries of friends I’ve known longest have been endlessly amended, in microscopic writing that crawls up the sides of the pages, to record moves, marriages, breakups and career changes. When someone’s entry becomes impossibly full, I’ll paste a snippet of white label over the outdated stuff and add the new on top. These labels have accrued throughout the book like layers of old paint; if I peel one away (or if the labels fall off, as they sometimes do) I find myself glancing back through the strata of friends’ lives — old apartments, former cities, obsessive or dull or cheating mates — and each former version of their lives instantly invokes an earlier point in my own.

The dead information in my book includes, of course, the dead. The first entry under “E” is still my father, Donald Egan, who died in an accident in 1996. It’s been many years since I’ve dialed the 800-number at his Chicago law firm that family members were allowed to use, and been greeted by the oaky voice of his longtime secretary, Sally. But the numbers are still there, exactly as they were when he was reachable, and my eyes still pass over them in the course of my daily life.

My stepfather, Bill Kimpton, is still under “K,” his topmost layer a label crammed with details from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he was treated for leukemia in 2000. I included his blood type, O+, along with instructions for those who wanted to donate platelets for him. Now and then I’ll glance at those details — so practical, so specific — as I turn pages on my way to someone else, and I’ll dimly recall the furor of dealing with his sudden illness; e-mailing everyone I knew with a connection to Houston in search of eligible donors; my deep conviction that it would all work out in his favor, because anything less was unimaginable.

Of course, when I go electronic I can save these meaningful pages and look at them whenever I’m moved to — probably never, or rarely. That’s how it is with my datebook pages, which I save at the end of each year, removing them from the book and sealing them in an envelope with the year written across the front in black Sharpie. A heap of those envelopes has amassed behind a row of books in a cupboard outside my office. I know what I’ll find if I look inside one: appointments scrawled and crossed out or rearranged, arrows, exclamation points, notable discoveries (“pregnant,” I remember scrawling in the winter of 2000, wanting to record the exact day I found out) — ragged textures from a scattered, labile life, all of which will be processed away when my schedule is converted to a series of efficient colored blocks.

We all know that history inheres in objects, but this seems more keenly true when the object in question unfolds over years and records their passage. Time is always invisibly seeping past, but we perceive its passage abruptly — with surprise, even disbelief. How can my kids be 7 and 9 when they were babies so recently? Keeping a physical record of the sequence of hours and days that articulate what later seem like inconceivable changes, reassures me. Even if I seldom look at those old datebook pages, they’re a physical link to the actual days whose textures they heedlessly narrate.

And my fat blue book, accreted over many years, helps to answer a question that dogs me more and more often, now that I’m in my forties and time seems to careen past: How did I get here? As long as I’m still actively using it, the book feels alive, connecting me organically to my early years in New York, the people I used to hang out with, the people I thought would be here always. The minute I put it away for good, as I surely will — probably soon — it will become an artifact: historically suggestive, but disconnected from my actual life. It feels like a big step. So I wait.

Jennifer Egan is the author most recently of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” as well as “The Keep,” “Look at Me” and “Invisible Circus.” She lives in New York.

: Jennifer Egan is the author most recently of "A Visit From The Goon Squad," as well as "The Keep," "Look At Me," and "Invisible Circus." She lives in New York. More Jennifer Egan

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A real table for my imaginary family

Building a table for Thanksgiving, I was armed with power saw and a dream. It wouldn't be nearly enough

By Shalom Auslander

Topics:Made

Some years ago, I decided to build a dining table.

“With what?” my wife asked.

“With my hands,” I said, holding up my hands. “With my hands.”

“I’ve seen hands before,” she said.

It was six weeks before Thanksgiving, and I had invited my parents and siblings to our home in upstate New York for the holiday dinner. That was probably what accounted for my wife’s surliness. But while her expectations for a stressful unnecessary failure were mired in the cold mud of reality, I pictured us all gathered around the completed 8-foot-long traditional harvest drop-leaf cherry-wood table, laughing and joking, eating turkey and drinking wine, our wide-eyed children listening in rapt attention to my grandma’s stories about holidays past. We didn’t have children, wide-eyed or otherwise, both of my grandmothers had been dead for years, my family had never gathered around anything for longer than 10 minutes without trying to kill each other, and my father was a violent drunk when I was a child so the wine was probably out of the question, too. Still, though. That a few details of this idyllic tableau were slightly unrealistic only made my desire to build a very real table even more pressing; here was a detail I could control, something possible from that impossible picture. Perhaps, I thought, making such a table a reality would do the same for the rest of the image?

It was worth a shot. I was determined to build the table. I had a power saw and I had a dream.

It wouldn’t be nearly enough.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve hated Norm Abram, the pot-bellied, plaid-shirted, soft-spoken master carpenter of “The New Yankee Workshop.” Norm was calm and good-natured and gracious to those around him. I wanted to kill him.

My father and I had very few shared interests. It was unfortunate. He didn’t like baseball, and I didn’t like getting hammered on Kedem wine and slapping the hell out of my older brother. His workshop was the only place we bonded. My father was a talented woodworker, and together we built tables, bookcases, cabinets and decks. We spent hours together in that fluorescent-lit cement-floored garage, master and novice, father and son.

“Piece of crap,” he said to the wood.

“Lousy hunk of junk,” he said to the table saw.

My father spoke to his materials as if they were alive and he wanted them dead.

“Blow it out your rear,” he said to the drill.

Which is why I hated Norm Abram. It was true that the times I spent with my father were more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell, but they were all I had, and as imperfect as they were, I loved them. And yet there on PBS was Norm Abram, in his stupid shirt and his stupid beard and his stupid workshop, soft-spokenly speaking about how important it was to respect the tools my father had just verbally abused.

Just once I wanted Norm to slip on the table saw and cut his arm off. Just once I wanted Norm’s shirt to get caught in the industrial planer, and watch from the edge of my seat as the machine pulled him in after it, grinding him slowly into plaid-colored dust. Just once I wanted to see Norm stumble drunkenly into the workshop, ask his assistant where he put his lousy tape measure, call his lathe a piece of crap and suggest that the goddamned drill press blow whatever it was out of its rear.

“You OK, Norm?” his assistant would ask. “You smell like J&B.”

“Blow it out your rear,” Norm would say.

Just once.

In order to rip the wood to size, I bought a table saw. In order to protect the table saw from the weather, I bought a shed. In order to have the shed delivered, I needed to have a 16-foot-by-20-foot pad of crushed stone laid at the far end of the driveway.

“What choice do I have?” I said to my wife.

Some years earlier, I had torn out all our old kitchen cabinets and installed new ones. I replumbed the sink. I installed an instant hot water dispenser. My parents came by for a visit.

“Nice job,” said my father. “Counter’s a bit high, no?”

Some time after that, I cut open the wall in my den, constructed and installed a built-in TV and stereo unit and finished it with oak trim. My parents came by for a visit.

“Nice job,” my father had said. “Terrible glare, no?”

Some time after that, we installed a pool in the backyard. I planted a bed of daylilies around it, and laid a dry-bed bluestone path to the front gate. My parents came by for a visit.

“Nice job,” my father said as he stood in the shallow end. “Floor’s a bit slippery, no?”

To glue up the tabletop, I bought a biscuit joiner. To cut the mortise-and-tenon joints for the base, I bought a set of chisels. To shape the edges of the table leaves, I bought a router.

“What choice do I have?” I asked my wife.

The week before Thanksgiving, I stayed up late every night, staining and sanding, then staining and sanding, then staining again. Then, sanding. When it was done, just a few days before the holiday, it was a small masterpiece: simple yet strong, heavy without feeling intrusive, graceful in an understated way, exuding a rare sense of permanence in this age of particleboard and Ikea.

Thanksgiving Day arrived. My brother and his kids showed up first, then my sister with her kids, then my parents. My father spotted the table in the dining room and went to examine it. I followed nervously behind him. He lifted the leaves, tested the spinners, ran his hand along the routed edge, examined the joints of the base. He stood up, ran his hands over his round belly and nodded.

“Nice job,” he said.

No qualifications. No complaints. No post-compliment criticisms. Just a simple, genuine expression of admiration from the man I desired one from most.

My wife smiled at me, and I smiled back. I turned back to my father, who was now admiring the table’s finish, running his hand over the smooth tabletop. I looked at him then — my father, the man who had raised me, his hair silver now and his face more wrinkled than I had remembered — and I thought: Drop dead, fat man.

Maybe it was my nieces and nephews in the kitchen, complaining loudly about the long drive to our house and asking if there was anything for dinner besides turkey. Maybe it was my siblings in the den, already beginning to squabble and bicker. Maybe it was just the shed full of brand-new woodworking equipment in the driveway. Whatever it was, it suddenly occurred to me that with all the tools in the world I could never construct a functioning family out of the splintered scrap heap I’d been born into; that I’d spent six weeks and thousands of dollars building a very real table for a family that didn’t actually exist; that I had spent 35 years now trying to win the love of a man who wouldn’t genuinely love me if I built the Taj Mahal.

“Nice job,” he would say looking up at the minarets. “A little pointy, no?”

Blow it out your rear, I would say.

I quickly grew to hate the sight of that table. I sold the saw to my brother-in-law, the router and drill press to my neighbor, used the money to buy a 1989 Honda Hawk 650GT, and turned the woodworking shop into a motorcycle garage.

And then, one morning, a few weeks after Thanksgiving, I woke to a heavy autumn rain, which pelted the roof with acorns and knocked the last of the summer’s dying leaves from the trees. Winter was coming.

I put on my coat and boots, pulled on my gloves, opened the back door and dragged the table outside, where I left it underneath the deck to rot. Four coats of stain and a couple more of polyurethane, though, had done their job, and when winter passed and the snows melted, the evil thing had barely warped. And so, early one warm spring morning, I dragged the table to the shop, and, with the one power saw I still had left, cut off its legs and ran the shrieking saw up the middle of the tabletop, slicing the hideous beast in half.

Still makes a hell of a motorcycle ramp.

: Shalom Auslander is an essayist and author, most recently of "Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir." More Shalom Auslander

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Where everything is huge — and deep fried

The joys of shooting the one-of-a-kind State Fair of Texas

By Barry B. Doyle

Where everything is huge -- and deep fried

Topics:Made, Texas

It’s that time of year again, at least in these parts, for the State Fair. Our northern neighbors have seen their own state fairs come and go, due to pending weather, perhaps, or some other traditions. But in Texas — in our own little infernal ecosystem — it’s finally decent enough to walk around outside by mid-October. It’s a hope anyway — some days can still reach the 90s — but there is the expectation that soon things will not simply melt.

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: Barry B. Doyle's book, Dallas Iconography, was published in 2009. More Barry B. Doyle

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How to write a TV show, sort of

From youthful plagiarist to HBO writer: Here's how we translate scattered big ideas into small-screen magic

By Jonathan Ames

Topics:Made

I’ve never been good at making things. I’m not mechanically inclined. My hands are tormented grasping instruments that struggle with the most basic motor functions. In kindergarten, it was noted on my report card that I was “poor with scissors.” As I walk through a park, I often envy the dexterity of the common squirrel, who can grasp and fondle acorns with grace and ease.

But I do like to make up stories, which, though not very craft-oriented, is a form of making. In the first grade, I wrote my first tale — it was about an astronaut stranded on the moon. Somehow he attaches an engine from his broken-down spaceship to a rock and flies home. In addition to the text, I provided cartoons. I’ve always liked to doodle. I can’t handle a screwdriver but I’m not bad with a pencil. I then improved upon this classic bit of science fiction, many years later, during my sophomore year in high school, when I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut-inspired apocalyptic short story, titled “Keep Out of the Reach of Children.” As a sign that I had a future in the arts, I lifted the ending from an Isaac Asimov story. I submitted this bit of fiction and plagiarism to my English class and received an A+.

In college, I wrote a Hubert Selby-inspired homo-and-hetero-erotic novella, titled “I Pity I,” which became my first novel “I Pass Like Night,” published in 1989, and then I struggled for many years, nine to be exact, to put out a second book, due to various mental problems. Eventually, the mental problems troubled me less — I became more adept at suppressing them — and I produced seven more books. Along the way, I would also “make” vaudeville shows — gathering musicians, magicians, dancers and writers, and staging odd performances at nightclubs in Manhattan. In my mind, I would pretend that I was a sophisticated impresario.

Then a few years ago, I started making a TV show called “Bored to Death,” which is based on a David Goodis-inspired short story I wrote of the same title. And now, after all this written throat-clearing, which is a very dangerous thing to indulge in for a piece on the Internet, where things can’t be too long, I can get to the point of this essay, which is how to make a TV show. Or, rather, how I make a TV show, and I should add that I only have two seasons of TV under my belt, but, anyway, this is how I make a TV show:

1. For two months or so, write down on various pads and scraps of paper numerous ideas for the show, and by ideas, I mean: images, bits of dialogue, character arcs, situations and locations. I use many different pads and notebooks because I’m terribly disorganized and never seem to have the last pad I used nearby.

2. Gather all these pads — usually fearing that the notebook with the best ideas has been lost — and type up everything as one big document.

3. Gather a team of four to five writers, present them with this document, and then lead a discussion of how to shape these ideas into discrete stories. This takes about two weeks and these basic story forms are called “capsules.”

4. Once the general stories have been determined, a new discussion is begun — breaking the stories down into specific outlines, scene by scene (our episodes will generally have about 15 to 18 scenes). This probably takes two to three weeks.

5. Taking the outlines, the writers and I break off to write the episodes. I write several and the writers write several. I then take the writers’ drafts of episodes and do what is called my “pass.” This takes about two to three months. Along the way, I receive “notes” (feedback and suggestions) from HBO and I do my best to accommodate its wishes.

6. As the scripts are being finished, schedules for shooting begin, casting starts, sets are built, locations are found, costuming is discussed. I have dozens of very talented people working with me in an endless variety of departments.

7. Shooting begins. A typical workday is 14 hours. I sit at the monitor with the director and watch the actors perform. There is almost no rehearsal for the actors. They have to be ready to go. The first few takes are essentially our rehearsal, and the crew is like a benevolent artistic army. Each department — props, cameras, lighting, etc. — has its own hierarchy and power structure.

8. Each episode takes six days to shoot. Once an episode is done, we immediately begin to shoot the next one, and while shooting that one, I begin to work with the editors on what has just been shot, while also casting and preparing for the other episodes down the line. At the height of the season, we are working on all the episodes at once, each of them in a different embryonic state of development. This whole shooting process (creating a total of eight episodes) takes about two-and-a-half months.

9. Once the shooting is done, “post” begins — the final bits of editing, music, sound, special effects, color correction and so forth. This takes about two months, and the whole process from jotting down ideas with crazed handwriting to listening to just the right level of a car honk (sound editing comes last) is about nine months, which has obvious birth significance.

10. The final tasks are approving the various promos and marketing campaigns, as well as doing press for the show. So that’s about it. I think it’s pretty good that I broke it down to a 10-step process. Ten, being the number of fingers we possess, is always a good figure, even if one’s hands aren’t much good for anything, except for chin-stroking, typing and doodling. I should add that every step of the way there is a maddening and stressful fear of failure, but since making a TV show is such a collaborative art, there’s also a great deal of camaraderie and holding onto each other for dear life.

Anyway, over the last few years, I’ve never quite gotten a break from “Bored to Death,” but I don’t mind. The world is completely mad and careening and hurting itself more than it is helping itself, and so I feel privileged to be afforded the opportunity to try to entertain people, to be a clown, and to simply make something. Or, rather, make something up.

: Jonathan Ames is the creator of HBO's "Bored to Death," which begins its second season on September 26th. His most recent book is "The Double Life Is Twice As Good: Essays and Fiction" (2009). More Jonathan Ames

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A jar of her magic

I pickled the dilly beans with Nana when she was still alert and active. What will happen when I throw them out?

By Rebecca Traister

Topics:Made

When I was a child, I spent weeks of every summer on the farm where my mother was raised, making things with my grandmother. There was so much to be done: wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and, once, gooseberries to turn into jam; beets and eggs and cucumbers and beans and crab apples to pickle, pies and zucchini breads to freeze, tomatoes and wax beans to put up in watery jars.

All those years ago, I didn’t think it unusual to spend so much time making stuff. This had a lot to do with my grandmother, a woman who, when she was not preserving produce, was ceaselessly creating other kinds of goods. She spent her evenings at her handwork: The needlepoint and cross-stitch samplers she’d frame and hang on walls; she hooked rugs and sewed the odd quilt, made Christmas ornaments and wine cozies and doorstop covers. As a little kid, I followed her lead, pulling thick yarn through big-holed plastic patterns of butterflies and strawberries, later graduating to friendship bracelets, some small needlepoint and, briefly, origami. But eventually I graduated altogether, and grew into a young adult who did not spend the bulk of her time in the production of material goods, instead wiling away evenings reading, talking on the phone, watching television. I was not a maker.

Perhaps it is this mysterious but stark divergence of my adult experience from my grandmother’s that accounts for the fact that I have a jar of dilly beans from 1999 in my refrigerator. Because despite the fact that I no longer did much material fabrication on my own steam, I never stopped loving making things with my grandmother on the farm.

As a young adult, in the years before Nana slipped into dementia and my mother and her siblings moved her to a different home, in the years before they rented that farmhouse with its gardens to tenants who could maintain it through the harsh Maine winters, I still visited every summer. And I marveled at my 80-something grandmother, who could still bend at the waist and pick tiny wild strawberries from the ground for hours at a time, then meticulously clean and hull them, stir them up with pectin and sugar and pour them into sterilized Mason jars, covering the ruby red gel with a thick layer of protective wax.

During one of these last sociable sojourns, I asked specifically to make dilly beans, the crisp, cold snappy green beans that, along with everything else that sat still long enough to be dunked in brine, my grandmother made into pickles and served as a side dish. I don’t remember why I wanted dilly beans in particular. Perhaps there was a profusion of the verdant legumes, and I could not stomach the idea of putting up the limper, blander version of simply canned beans. Maybe I was just in the mood for them.

Whatever the reason, we made the dilly beans. There was nothing particularly profound about the process. My grandmother was slightly forgetful, very stooped, needling me in the way she did in those last cogent years about how I planned to find and keep a man. She probably did the bulk of the work: briefly blanching the beans, popping the garlic and dill and peppercorns into the jars, pouring the hot vinegar solution into each steaming glass vessel. I was probably slightly annoyed at her, slightly worried about her memory troubles, slightly anxious to get away from the farm, to take these beans and escape to the Maine coast, where my then-boyfriend and friends were already ensconced in a vacation rental house, a world away from the remote hill farm from another century. With my friends, I would eat the beans not as a side dish at supper in Aroostook County, but as a garnish in the strong bloody marys we would make throughout each day back in the real world — my world.

I’m sure I did take the dilly beans down country with me. And I’m sure we went through most of them during the hard-drinking remainder of our week. But somehow, one jar of them didn’t get eaten. They followed me back to Brooklyn, N.Y., and have stayed with me through two moves, two jobs, three cats, one book and now a marriage, all of which is more than I can say for my grandmother, who has been lost to dementia for years now, who knows nothing of me or my husband or my home or my work.

I cannot bring myself to throw the beans out, though I will never dare to eat them. I look at them crowding one corner in the back of an overstuffed fridge and think not that I made them, but that my grandmother did. They’re her beans grown from seeds she put in the ground. They’re in her once-sterile Mason jar along with her dill, grown on the hill that I haven’t climbed for far, far too long now.

I live in Brooklyn and it’s not like we don’t have dilly beans here. Here in the outer boroughs of New York, a world so far away from Aroostook County, we now live in another century of food preparation, and I make more of my own foodstuff than I have in decades: tomato sauces and jams and bacon and pickled onions and seltzer. I could find a (possibly superior or more fail-safe) recipe for dilly beans and whip up a batch from the organic farmer’s market in about an hour.

But my grandmother’s hand would not touch those beans, her hot water, drawn from the well deep beneath the hill, would not scald the metal lids of the Mason jars; they would not cool on her round kitchen table, and her spidery handwriting would not adorn the identifying sticker on the outside of their jar.

And there is some magic in there. Something of her that I wonder if we accidentally pickled alongside the beans, more than a decade ago. Of course it’s this imagined spell — a child’s love for her grandmother combined with a child’s tendency toward the maudlin and the overwrought — that has kept me from tossing the beans. But I will not pretend that I haven’t also wondered — in these sad years in which my grandmother’s strong, flexible body has continued to function but her mind and recognition and mental capabilities have been extinguished — if I have perhaps had a hand in keeping her alive longer than necessary. That if, perhaps, I threw out the dilly beans, my grandmother’s empty body might mercifully follow.

: Rebecca Traister writes for Salon. She is the author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" (Free Press). Follow @rtraister on Twitter. More Rebecca Traister

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My proud little Siamese freak show

Out from the shadow of a family of artists -- and Martha -- I forged one reliable trick that never fails me

By Sloane Crosley

Topics:Made

My sister once told me that no one good was born on her birthday. She said this as casually as you and I might recite the last four digits of our Social Security numbers, as if it were an indisputable and long-standing fact. By “good” she meant “famous” because that was the nature of our conversation.

“That can’t be true,” I protested, in a mock effort to find fault with an argument that didn’t matter either way.

“I think one of the guys from Chicago has my same birthday.”

“Oh. That is desperate.”

“Well,” she sighed dramatically, “not all of us can have Martha.”

Oh yes, that’s right. The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it’s the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha. Our immediate neighbors to the past and future are crafty as well (see also: Yves Saint Laurent, Andy Warhol). I’m not sure when God set aside those seven days to create the world, but from a decoration standpoint, it was probably the first week of August. But despite all this general creativity floating about, it is Martha and Martha alone in whose perfectly stenciled shadow I live my life. And my tributes to her have been, in a word, poor.

For a long time I wanted to draw, but I could never get the proportions right. My still life sketches were the artistic equivalent of someone who has misjudged the space constraints of a postcard, the handwriting shrinking uncomfortably at the bottom. So I tried to make vases and bowls instead but I mushed the clay. Or spun it so fast on the pottery wheel, it flung itself onto the wall in protest. I tried my hand at painting but still don’t understand the concept of acrylic paint. And yet, despite all evidence of my artistic stunting, I thought it would be a good idea to create a series of large Plexiglas dioramas based on the essays in my first book. Then, for my second, I crafted paper dolls, spending hours hand-painting and folding, trimming and gluing. The results are not terrible. But, alas, there’s a difference between psychosis and talent, between perspiration and inspiration. Sometimes the line can be invisible to both the artist and the viewer … but usually the artist knows when he or she is full of it.

Don’t get me wrong, both the dioramas and dolls are my creations and I love them. But I am a sober parent with her eyes open. I know the difference between my brood and truly gifted children. In addition to the Martha Factor, I’m also contending with the more immediate influence of my sister, the jewelry designer; my mother, the painter; my grandfather, the marble sculptor; my great grandmother, the painter; and so forth.

There is but one thing I can do and do very well. One little slice of concrete creation that’s really mine. If we’ve spent more than a few hours together and you’re reading this, you can vouch for me. This talent is totally under the table. Literally. But if you give me a plastic straw in a paper wrapper and two minutes, I’ll give you the world.

As is common among addicts, I started early. I was the youngest and thus the most paradoxically disenfranchised and suffocated of my family. I sat bored and fidgeting at many restaurant tables. I don’t remember the first time I created my wrapper art, but I feel certain it was during one of these social torture hours masquerading as college graduation dinners. I don’t remember reaching for the straw or breaking the seam apart with my thumbnail. Nor do I remember folding it into an accordion of half-inch panels and ripping off the excess. And what I really don’t remember is how or why it occurred to me to make tiny tears into the soft paper, creating negative space that left the shape of a person. But after about 20 years of practice, I will say: I’m pretty damn good at it.

All my feelings of artistic inadequacy melt away. The big reveal is always definite, the results always the same. The certainty of the process is just as addictive as the artistry. It works like math the way nothing else in my life works like math, including math. I unfold the paper to reveal a chain of five to eight tiny people, holding hands. Or, if your mind is sick in persuasion, five to eight mutated babies attached at the arms. It’s more habit than craft at this point. Perhaps it is not art art but it is certainly an art.

There is also an entertainment value in the creative process itself (so much unlike writing where the journey to the finished product is profoundly unfun to watch). My hands move quickly around the fragile paper, like a smaller-scale and less impressive Edward Scissorhands. If you and I are at a bar, you can then stick these thinly membraned bodies around a cool glass. You can dunk them in whiskey or iced tea if you wish to add some racial diversity. If you have a pen on you, well — I don’t need to tell you all the things you can do with ink. The doll chain makes a nice gift as well. A gift presented without fanfare in the middle of a conversation or created while someone is in the bathroom. Often I make them while no one is looking. People assume I am just fidgeting with a paper straw wrapper and then, out of the blue I get to say: Here, this is for you. Then, assuming this Siamese textile freak show survives the whiskey-dunking, people discover it in wallets or pockets days later. The dolls are the gift that keeps on giving. Until they disintegrate.

Their dimensions remain the same. The technology of the source material has not advanced much in the past couple of decades — a straw wrapper is a straw wrapper is a straw wrapper. And yet their impact is malleable. Sometimes their creation comes with apologies to a waitress or bartender for littering her immediate surfaces with strips of paper afterbirth. It’s also something I can do again on command.

This predictability is completely absent from my more regular creative endeavors, just as it was absent from my pottery throwing and fruit-bowl sketching. Even my desserts, those plucked directly from Martha’s cookbooks, never come out quite the same way twice. But in the methodical creation of straw wrapper paper doll chains? I have a go-to activity where I can find assurance in my ability to form and to amuse. Consistency is not the heart of art so much as it is, say, the gall bladder of art. It does not inspire or captivate. It does not win awards or get its own daytime talk show. But having a creative default is an excellent palate cleanser for the artist as well as the viewer. I masticate straw wrappers with my nails so that whatever comes out next might be just a little more worthwhile. Indeed, if I’m lucky enough to see another 60 Augusts, I fully expect to find myself in a soft chair somewhere, drooling on my muumuu, entertaining the night nurses by gesturing at the wrapped straw next to the pudding cup on my food tray and saying: Here, watch this.

: Sloane Crosley's new book of essays, "How Did You Get This Number," is out now from Riverhead Books. More Sloane Crosley

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