You're still here?

I am. I set out for a bike ride, thinking I'd get over my lethargy once I warmed up, but a mile or two into it I still wasn't feeling it. So I did some yoga and proverbially picked up the paper.

The New York Times Op-ed page asked Op-Ed page asked people "whose résumés overlap with the candidates’" to discuss the qualities they’ve drawn on for their jobs as they would apply to the White House.

Rest easy, those of you who are sick of my political metablogging. While the origin of the Times' exercise was election-related, I plan to draw on it for something I do that is highly personal: writing about my family.

Contributor Mary Karr wrote about memoir writing:

Fact: as a child, I watched my mother set fire to all my toys then menace me with a butcher knife. Fact: my mother adored me and even in our backwater town imbued me with the sensibility and curiosity to become an artist. Recreating both those facts in Technicolor strains the bounds of reason. It demands that I dig deep into my own experience, yet simultaneously view it from other angles entirely. But to demonize my mother or to deny my childhood torments would have made a shallow, dishonest memoir.

Fact: My mother never set fire to anything or menaced me with weapons. She often slams doors and throws things and otherwise lets her temper get the better of her. Fact: My mother cultivated in me a sense of social responsibility and an appreciation for art and literature. She paid for and chauffeured me to art, dance, and other classes. She also, when I failed to show signs of excelling, verbally beat out of me any sense of confidence I would have developed in those areas and subsequently, for better or for worse, did her best to hammer into my head and soul the idea that I'd best channel my education and energy into making myself fit for a day job in which art or literature would have no place.

It would be simple to say that one-dimensional people are boring; I'll go as far as to say they don't exist. I'll give you this: Two-dimensional people are boring.

Very often it's the same characteristics that are at the root of one's good, bad and ugly. What makes people-- and families-- complex and imperfect is what makes them worth writing about.

Stay tuned: In less than a month, I'll head to Boston for my mother's birthday. I'll let you know what happens.