2011: A Look Back In Bemusement

Hi there! Today is New Year's Eve and I'm out celebrating or filling out even more grad school paperwork or attempting to take a nap or possibly all of the above all at the same time, because that's just how I roll these days, so for your consideration, allow me to continue a tradition and present for you my self-selected Best-Of-2011 collection. (Hey, if you want to nominate a favorite, then you leave me a comment, capisce?)

• January: Worrywart
• February: Bury My Heart In Hohman, Indiana
• March: Reply Hazy, Try Again
• April: In Which The Writing Major Gets Indignant
• May: Wack-a-doodle-doo
• June: Rapunzel (A Love Letter, Of Sorts)
• July: Challenge: An Exercise In Self-Acceptance
• August: Five Stages and Worth A Thousand Words (those two are my best posts of the year, and I think some of my best writing ever)
• September: Obliviously On She Sails
• October: Compulsive
• November: Crap On A Cracker
• December: Pretty Little Liars

And not that you asked, but my four favorite pictures from the whole year are these (in no particular order):

Happy New Year, everybody!

In Which The Writing Major Gets Indignant

I regularly listen to a podcast out of Seattle called "Too Beautiful To Live" -- TBTL for short. It's pretty cool, if you are like me and spend a lot of time driving and you think that an imaginary radio show which is basically about nothing but which is nevertheless unfailingly entertaining is a good way to spend a commute. TBTL has a blog, and a recent blog entry links to this Slate article about how the usage of language changes the meaning of words over time.

(Yes, this is probably going to be a week where I write about nothing of interest to anyone except me because I don't have any good pictures. Deal, McNeil.)

Basically, the gist of the Slate piece is that the meanings of words change when the words are used incorrectly by enough people over enough time. Not necessarily fake made-up words like "eleventy" and "stategery" and "agreeance" and "refudiate," but actual real-live words that currently exist in the English language, like "disinterested."

To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I believe that this phenomenon is referred to as "the principle of common usage." And this will come as no surprise to anyone, but I don't like it. I admit that I am something of a pedant when it comes to the English language. You might not be able to tell here on Ye Olde Blogge, because I try to write conversationally -- basically, I talk to myself when I am writing these entries, and sometimes I even talk to myself right out loud, and believe me when I say that hilarity does not always ensue, either -- but I know full well that there are Rules. Spelling, grammar, and mechanics count in real life. Anybody who tells you otherwise is at best uninformed and worst outright lying.

Look: I did not read Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary in the sixth grade for my health, people.

So I suppose it goes without saying that I have Thoughts about the Slate story. Ugly thoughts, most of them involving cuss words and liberal use of pejorative terms for "persons who are not very intelligent." It's not because I disagree with the author of the article in question, either, but because I think he should fight harder to protect the legacy of the language. We all should. Words have meanings, and just because a bunch of bozos with basic-level Power Point skills think that "duly noted" means "I agree" does not make it so. Just because some wonk in a corner office thinks that it's perfectly fine to use "irregardless" with abandon does not make it a correct word.

I mean really, it's a single word with a double-negative built in. No one but me sees the problem here?

Right now, of course, I am not Mom-the-Grammar-Nazi, but believe me when I tell you that once Shae gets into elementary school and we start with the Language Arts, there will be a fairly strict enforcement of the Rules in our house. We're not going to let her slack off on the math and science homework, not if we ever expect this kid to have any part of Winning The Future, and you better believe that Spelling and Grammar and Mechanics Rules will be strictly enforced. I abandoned the "no sugar" edict ages ago, but a self-respecting Writing major must have some standards, dammit.

• Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
• Misusing "i.e." and "e.g." will be punishable by death. OK, not death, put possibly the loss of dessert.
• One space after a period in emails, two spaces after a period in academic papers, unless the assigned stylebook prescribes otherwise.
• No, you cannot use Comic Sans for your book report. What are you, a Visigoth?
• No, you cannot use 18-point type and 2-inch margins to make your paper "fit" the length requirements. Do you think I am stupid? Do you think I have never tried that myself?
• If you are talking about the liquor, it is "Scotch." If you are talking about the people, it is "Scots." Trust me on this one. Your "History of Great Britain" professor from Glasgow will not think you are funny. It doesn't matter if your MS Word grammar-checker doesn't find the error.
• Know where the quotation marks and other punctuation marks go in relation to each other. Know when quotation marks are required and when they are not. Ditto apostrophes.
• "There" does not mean "their" does not mean "they're." "Too" does not mean "to" does not mean "two." "Its" and "it's" are not interchangeable.
• Learn to properly diagram a sentence. Hardly anybody does this any more, but it is a useful skill for a writer to have, it will help you when you begin studying a second language, and it is a surprisingly effective party trick in college. Engineering and architecture majors love girls who can diagram things.
• Have at least 50 words in your vocabulary that are more than three syllables and ten letters long. Know what they mean and how to spell them, and be able to use them in a sentence. I suggest starting with "onomatopoeia" because it is highly descriptive and useful and also my very favorite word.
• If you ask me what words mean before you look them up in the dictionary, I am going to lie to you. Consider yourself warned. And yes, I will know.
• I don't care what the other kids' parents say: YOU are going to do your History report at the library, using encyclopedias that were published before you were born, exactly as God intended. Wikipedia is not a reputable source for information. Nothing on the Internet is.
• Reading the CliffsNotes is not anywhere near the same thing as reading the book itself. Are you trying to give me a stroke? No, I don't care that you think that Chaucer and Shakespeare are not written in "English."
• No Notre Dame or Yankees fans in the house. Ever. (No, this is not technically grammar-related, but it's a rule that cannot be spelled out often enough.)

Of course, I can have all the rules in the world, and none of it will change the fact that I will probably spend the rest of my career taking orders from people who don't know an ellipsis from epilepsy, and who have never even heard of subject/verb agreement, let alone know how to employ it correctly.

"Irregardless" will always make me get up and walk out of the room, though.

The Big Dig

The world is collapsing around our ears.

You think I'm being melodramatic as usual, but of course I am absolutely not making this up. Our roof is leaking into our bedroom and this is causing no end of emotional, psychological, and physical distress to me. You can probably guess why: emotional, because "oh noes, all our stuff!" (which is totally fine); psychological, because "oh noes, we are forcing our poor child to live in squalor and disrepair because we're terrible people!" (which is not entirely the truth, although I'll let you figure out where the line between fact and fiction is perforated); and physical, because "oh noes, we're beating ourselves up over this!" (which, all that self-flagellation really takes a toll, you know?).

(And oh by the way -- that is A LOT of punctuation, right there. My former English teachers and lit professors are either insanely proud, or insanely appalled, or just insane.)

Of course, most of these things are non-starters. The roofing guy came out to the house today to take pictures and assess the damage and the good news, so far, is that it seems like the damage is pretty minor, or at least it only affects a small area of the roof. It's rained on and off for the last two days and we haven't had any more drippage, but in the event that it does, we already have the big plastic trash can from the office in position. On Friday, when we discovered the leak, we found only a tatty old sweater had gotten wet. As far as damage goes, that's so insignificant as to barely register -- that sweater doesn't fit anyway, and it was about to go into the "giveaway" pile.

But now we're waiting on the estimate and then once that comes, and we figure out how many kidneys and liver chunks and potential first-born children we need to barter in order to come up with however much money is going to be needed to pay to fix a roof on an 83-year-old house with a lot of the original fixtures, and then after that there will be strange people tromping through my bedroom on their way to the busted-up spot, and that means that, at some point probably sooner than later, I will really need clean my room.

Our room is a mess. Not quite a federal disaster area, not yet, definitely not at risk of qualifying as a Superfund site, but  ... we have A LOT of stuff. Right now our room is filled with laundry, clean clothes that need to be put somewhere, but our closet space is limited, and some of it is potentially in the leaky-roof danger zone, plus it's time to switch out the winter stuff for the summer stuff, and I don't really have anything that fits, so I don't know what to keep and what to give away and where to put everything in the meantime. There's just SO MUCH STUFF, and when we try to make some headway (a thorough cleaning would take at least a few hours, even if we were uninterrupted by a four-year-old whose idea of "helping" is basically to move stuff from one end of the room to the other and then jump on the bed), we get about half an hour in, tops, before it gets so overwhelming that we both end up fighting and yelling and crying and "accidentally" throwing away the other one's perfectly fine pair of slightly-used-but-still-good-condition Crocs with absolutely no tread left on the soles BUT THEY ARE MY PHILLIES CROCS, DAMMIT, AND I LOVE THEM.

Plus, one of us might possibly have a slight over-accumulation problem, but that's only because I keep losing one sock of each pair every time they go in the wash and it is my fault that I have to wear socks with most of my shoes so that my feet don't freeze and my toes don't fall off? It's sad, really, that two grown adults -- one of whom is an engineer, and one of whom purports to have a major Martha Stewart complex -- just cannot get themselves together, but there you are.

We've gotten exactly nowhere so far, but thanks for asking. We're planning to make a plan as soon as we get the estimate back and we are both in the same place at the same time when the sun is still up, or at least when it is on the sunset side of the deep dark night, and not the sunrise side.

One good thing has come out of this, though: aside from clean clothes, one other big thing that takes up valuable real estate in our bedroom is stacks and stacks of books (most of them mine, I admit), and our bookshelves are just about full to bursting, and I don't want to start moving the clutter from one room to another, hoarders-style, because let's face it, it's not just our bedroom that needs help, and moving the junk around would just make a bad situation worse because eventually we'd need to move it somewhere else, so I've decided to start culling the collection and start a paperback book swap at work. I took three bags full of books into work this morning, and I am taking more tomorrow, and G said he has some he'll contribute to the cause, and you know, I don't even care if nobody else brings any books in, as long as someone takes these off my hands. So far three books have been taken out of the box at work, and not everything is trash, either -- there are Pattersons and Evanoviches and Sookie Stackhouse novels in there.

And I managed to find a beautiful, untouched, unopened copy of Little Women, which I am sad to admit I have not yet read. That might be the most embarrassing thing about this whole plight -- I'm potentially a hoarder AND I am apparently the worst former Writing major EVER.

Anyway. Send us your thoughts and well-wishes and any spare sacks of money you might have lying around. And also, send shovels.

Geek the Girl

I was going to write about our continuing adventures at swim class today, but that can wait for another couple days, because I need to tell you the following:

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOWZA!

And also: SQUEE!

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I have known how to write, I think. I don't know when I started wanting to be a writer, but I know I haven't ever stopped. All those plans that I have made for the day when I eventually win eleventy bajillion dollars in the lottery? Most of them revolve, in some way, around me basically being able to sit somewhere quiet (with all the necessary distractions, like television and internet and rum and pedicures) and just be a writer for the rest of my life, because that is what I really want to be when I grow up.

Look: I remember reading books when I was very wee, making up my own stories to go along with the pictures that I already knew so well -- that was a kind of writing, in a way. I used to have many terribly exciting adventures with my once-and-future imaginary friend, Elizabeth Tony, effectively scripting my way through many days of my childhood. I was writing poems in the fourth grade for my teacher, Sr. Patrick, to deliver to another nun at her convent who was ill. I kept journals upon journals, some of which I still have, filled with sonnets and scribbles and angst in prose form. I wrote essays and short plays and screenplays and dozens if not hundreds of papers in college, some academic, some philosophical, some just outpourings of emotion. I've been kicking around no fewer than three different novels for the past fifteen years, starting and stopping and scrapping and scrubbing and storing the details in different files over approximately eight different computers. I have a blog. I am, is, are, was, were, and have always been a writer.

And now, finally and kind of accidentally, I am a published writer. Not self-published, either, but actually commissioned. Someone read my stuff, liked it, and dedicated space somewhere for me to be read by other people, people who are not necessarily related to me and therefore not obliged in any way to read me if they don't want to.

It's kind of really awesome.

So, yes, anyway: effective yesterday, I have a new "side gig," as a Lifestyle Contributor on 40MomsClub. Probably it's a bit tacky for me to keep going on about this, but this is kind of a dream come true, and I want to relish the moment for a little bit. This is for real, you guys. I have an official bio on the website and everything. I'll be doing a few columns every month, stuff that you won't see here, that I will be writing specifically for 40MomsClub because somebody asked me if I would. I will be in good company, I think -- the site is growing and already they have three great regular contributors, plus the founder, plus ... well, me. (I am mostly there for comic relief, but still.)

I'll link to new stories when they go live, either here or in my Twitter feed, or you can push the fancy new button I put over in my sidebar to go right to the site homepage. Poke around over there, say hi.

And then, if you'll excuse me: now is the time on Sprockets when we do the dance of joy.

Sound of Silence

My husband started his new job last night -- well, his new shift at his new job -- and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to start taking sleeping pills and going to bed at 8:00 now, just so I can deal with the soul-crushing quiet. We have a three-year-old in our house, an HDTV, satellite service, multiple computers. So why did I spend the evening washing dishes and folding laundry just to have something to do?

It's been a long time since my husband worked nights, since before Shae and probably years before that, and I'm not used to it any more. I know how weird and codependent and neurotic it makes me sound to say that I don't really like it -- but I don't really like it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad he has a job, bonus that it's one he actually likes, and I know this swing-shift business is only temporary. It's not even as inconvenient as it could be, because he works 3pm-2am, four nights a week, Mondays through Thursdays. He's getting up to take Shae to school in the mornings, and he'll be home at night on the weekends, so we can still do our running amok and our visiting and our catching up with all the shows on our TiVo and sitting in the same room on two different computers playing World of Warcraft.

But my house is creepy at night, especially now that it gets dark so early. It's cold and drafty and last night Shae wasn't feeling well so she basically put herself to bed at 6:00 and left me all alone. The cats kind of hang around, but it's just the girls, and they're not particularly noisy. Bossy, yes, when they have a particularly irritating itch that needs to be scratched, or if they're out of food and water. But mostly last night they just followed me around so they could be where I was and ... I don't know, stare at me, I guess.

It made me miss Owen a whole hell of a lot, that's for damn sure.

I made dinner basically in silence. Shae sprawled out on the couch and watched The Sound of Music and didn't move until it was time to eat. When we sat down to supper she just sat there, pathetically staring at her plate, sometimes poking at the scalloped potatoes, occasionally whimpering. No conversations. No negotiations. No noise. Very awkward and Stepford. I packed up the leftovers and put them in the fridge for his lunch tonight and never once had to tell anybody to get their grubby mitts out of the candy jar.

Not even mine. It's no fun to cheat on your diet if nobody is going to catch you.

Once Shae was tucked in, I kind of wandered around the house, trying to motivate myself to do some of the housework that desperately needs to be done because for yet another year I failed to get maid service for Christmas. I washed and dried and put away two full racks of dishes. I scrubbed out the chili pot and scraped the cookie sheets. I rooted through the cupboard and made a menu plan for dinner for the rest of the week. I gathered up the rest of the clothes Shae got for Christmas, removed all the bags and tags and wrappers, and folded all her laundry. I even laid out the clothes that I wore to work today so I could hit the snooze button this morning.

Well, okay, so he could hit the snooze button this morning. He's closer to the alarm clock anyway; that's his job. I didn't get married so I would have to do that kind of thing by myself.

And then I went to bed. All alone. With nobody heckling my ratty T-shirt or my old-lady slipper-socks. There were no random fits of laughter coming from downstairs, from him talking to his friends over Skype while they play video games together. No lights, no footsteps on the stairs, no bathroom sounds. The toilet didn't even run, not once. It was strange to lay there and have to rely on myself to know when to go to sleep, having to act like an actual adult and not someone who plays one on TV. I'm a bedtime reader, and when I get really into a book, I can go for hours, uninterrupted. But if my husband is lying next to me and I have the light on, he grumbles and groans and grouches and makes me settle down, instead of staying up until half-past midnight reading Catching Fire again when I should have been asleep hours earlier.

Don't even get me started on how strange it is to try go to sleep in that bed all by myself. Normally it feels like our queen-size bed is so small, when it's him and me and the cats, trying to get comfortable, staking out a section of our own, clenching the covers so someone else doesn't steal them, fighting over which setting on the electric blanket is the correct one, accidentally kicking each other or elbowing each other in the face. There was no breathing, no random bits of hours-old conversations brought back up to be rehashed, no rude involuntary bodily noises startling us awake as we drift off through the myoclonic jerks.

Instead, it was just me and two cats, and I felt like some kind of crazy spinster with her furry four-legged children sprawled across the afghan, sleeping in the middle of this great big giant queen-sized bed, all by myself. I went to sleep with an itchy back because there was no one there to scratch it for me, just in the right spot, right how I like it, aaaaaaah right there between the shoulder blades.

And I especially missed my kiss goodnight.

When he gets home from work he comes to bed and I'm sure he kisses me, but I'm also sure that I'm three-quarters asleep, grumping about having to move now that I've finally gotten comfortable, so I don't appreciate it. Plus I have my night-time bruxism guard in, so I'm doing goofy things with my mouth, and I always have some kind of sinus cold, so I'm pretty sure my breath is not so very pleasant. It's just not the same as kissing him goodnight with minty-fresh teeth just before we settle into a mutually-soothing breathing rhythm.

Today Shae is feeling better and I expect that it's going to be a completely different scene tonight. We'll fight over how many bites of noodles and sausage and vegetables she needs to eat, whether or not she can have a treat, whether I will let her stay up until the end of the rest of The Sound of Music or if I will make her go to bed right before the part at the convent. We'll wrestle over bath and hair combing and going potty and tooth brushing and saying prayers properly and lights being turned on and toys suddenly appearing in her bed. I'll wash some more dishes, fold some more laundry, diddle around in FarmVille and WoW, and probably stay up too late reading again, because now I'm reading Mockingjay and I can't stop when I get past the good part because the whole book is basically one big good part.

And I still won't get my kiss goodnight. And I don't really like it.

So It's Come To This: A Clip Show

Continuing an annual tradition that didn't exist until last year, I hereby present to you the "Next Annual rockle-riffic Year In Review" -- a self-selected best-of-the-blog-in-2010 collection. Please enjoy these while I'm off eating shrimp or taking a nap or something.

• January: Open Letter and Apples and Froot Loops
• February: Snowbunny and WTF?! Friday: Panty Panic
• March: Litany of Worries and Godspeed, Little Man
• April: Farewell to an Arm and Death by Splinter
• May: Oh My Ears and Whiskers! and Wheels
• June: Ta-Tas Schma-Tas and Hakuna Matata
• July: Deliverance and Feed Me, Seymour
• August: I Used to Have a Life and Parsons, We Have a Problem
• September: Some Kind of Metaphor and Terms and Conditions
• October: Skinny Jeans and Creature of the Night
• November: Type "N" Personality and The Girl with the Split Upper Lip
• December: Welcome Christmas and Greeting Cards Have All Been Sent

Did I miss one of your favorites? Tell me in the comments. Or don't -- I don't care. I'm probably drunk right now, because it's New Year's Rockin' Eve, baby! (False: I'm most likely wrangling a small child or eleventeen. There are suddenly a WHOLE LOT of tiny little people in the family.)

Whatever you're doing today, be careful out there. See you next year! (Snerk.)

27 Days Left: A Poem

The tree is up, our stockings hung,
"You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch" was sung,
The unwrapped gifts sit in a heap ...
And all I want to do is sleep.

We have to check the strings of lights
And make sure the ornaments look right
But that is for tomorrow, I think --
Right now, I really need a drink.

I cannot dream of sugar plums
With so little time before Christmas comes.
I haven't even made a list
Of stuff I'd like to get as gifts.

I have to pick out Christmas cards
And that part will be extra hard
Because my kid's all wriggly;
She won't sit still in front of the tree.

Don't know if I'll have time to bake
The twelve kinds of cookies I usually make
And still find a way to watch all the shows
That are filling up my poor TiVo.

So if you're looking, you will find
Me sitting here, going out of my mind.
Not that this is anything new --
Before Christmas, there is just so much to do.

2009: The Obligatory Navel-Gazing Year In Review

Apparently it's part of the Union Rules for Bloggers to do one of these here look-back post thingies. And so I perused my 2009 archives for something to write about or some way to encapsulate everything that happened, and I basically keep coming back to this line from The Princess Bride: "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up." Ha ha! Get it? Because I never shut up?

Anyway. Originally I asked my husband to poke through my archives for the past year and pick out one post from each month that he thought was pretty good so I can do up a Year-In-Review-Kind-Of-Something, but that did not work out as I had hoped, which is to say AT ALL, so basically you're stuck with this self-edited list of "My Best of 2009" and as you know if you read my blog every day or at all -- I am not very good at the whole self-editing thing.

• January -- 25 Things
• February -- Snowbird
• March -- Three Little Words 
• April -- (tie) Wordless Wednesday: Hallelujah and Just Like Starting Over
• May -- Sweet Caroline 
• June -- (tie) White Hot Spotlight and A River Runs Through It
• July -- Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves 
• August -- Who-ly McWhat? 
• September -- WTF!? Friday: September Already?
• October -- A Very Merry Un-Birthday 
• November -- A Week of Thanks: Day 7 
• December -- Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With Strings 

So. Sorry that I can't count to 12, but I guess you can count those two extra links as "bonus material" on the special edition DVD that was the past year. That's 2009, in a nutshell. Our year didn't suck as much as it did for many other people -- in fact, it was pretty damned good. The adoption was final, we celebrated our 10-year anniversary, and I somehow managed to turn 35 without having myself committed over it. Sure, we had our share of crud, like my husband losing his job and being out of work for 6+ months and the ongoing intermittent bouts of self-doubt, but really, we are luckier than a whole lot of people, because we have each other. And if you don't have each other, what's the point, really?

Coming up in 2010: The First Family Wedding Of The New Decade! More Pictures! A Kind Of Hybrid Project 365 Kind Of Thing If I Ever Get Around To Starting It! Still More Pictures! Possibly A Book Club Which Might End Up Related To My Hybrid Project365 Thing That I Haven't Decided Whether Or Not I'm Going To Start! Even More Pictures! Naps! And Yet More Pictures!

Please stay tuned.

Back in the Saddle Again

Sorry that blogging has been so light in the last few days: someone -- and I am not saying who because it might be me -- ran over the camera cord with the computer chair, and we just this morning got it fixed. We've also been wallowing in our depression over the end of the world the other day, and we're still kind of down in the dumps about it.

Oh, and there's that whole situation where I've been working on two calendars at the same time for Christmas. Boy howdy, what was I thinking with that? But I promise: we'll be back on track this week. Thanks for your patience.

My Toast (Or At Least The Original "Final Draft" Version Before Jaegermeister Got Involved)

Hi everybody. Thanks for being here to share in Michele and Joe's special day.

Congrats, guys. It's been a great day, and I am glad to be a part of it.

I was truly honored when Michele and Joe asked me to say a few words -- and I promise, there will only be a few words. Even though I've been writing this speech in my head since 1978, when I found out I was going to get another sister and not a pony.

So, look: you know I love you guys. We all love you. We wish you all the happiness in the world. Fairy tale, happily ever after happiness.

The only advice I have for you two is really the best piece of advice that anyone's ever given me, and it's the same advice that I gave our sister when she got married, and a bunch of other people in this room, too. It's the same thing I'll be telling Shae and Joey someday, and it's what's worked for [G] and me for the last hundred and ten years.

Seriously, it's simple, and it's real, and it can be applied to everything: be excellent to each other, and party on!

Congratulations. Cheers.

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who lived in a forest. Well, maybe not a forest, exactly -- maybe more like an unruly thatch of land with tall green grasses. Anyway, she lived there, and she had a yellow flower, who was her very best friend in the world. And everything was wonderful and happy and la-dee-frickin'-dah.

One day, the princess and the flower got trapped in a tower, which was terrible and scary, because the bottom of the tower was like covered with spiders and stuff, plus the tower was made of some kind of mystery plastic that was leaching toxic chemicals into the water table and making the tall grass turn brown. Oh noes!

The princess screamed and cried and gnashed her teeth and rent her garments, but then she quickly mended them again, because her mother taught her that it was very important to make sure all one's important bits ESPECIALLY YOUR HOO-HOO BRITNEY SPEARS are covered when one is in public. And then the princess had an idea.

"Why am I crying for help?" she wondered to herself. "Who is going to save me? One of the goober local woodsmen, who looks like a fish? Screw that, and no thank you!" She scratched her head and looked at her best friend the yellow flower and made a very important decision. "We're making a break for it, kiddo," she said.

So the princess and the flower jumped from the top of the tower -- which fortunately was only maybe two feet off the ground -- and they ran and ran and ran and ran and made a couple of loop-de-loops in the tall grass and eventually they got bored with running and they wandered off together to look for bunnies and butterflies and bumblebees.

And the beautiful princess and her friend the flower lived happily ever after. The end.

For a waaaaaaaaaaay better version of this story, check out "The Paper Bag Princess" by Robert Munsch. You won't be sorry.

Hitting the Wall

The other day, I tweeted this:


And the thing is, I wasn't kidding. I am bored. Although "writer's blocked" might be a better way to put it.

For at least ten years, maybe longer, I have been kicking around ideas for my very own Great American Novel, but I can't ever get anywhere. Basically, I have two stories in mind: one involves setting a car on fire, and another involves buying a boat and/or an island. One of these is a drama and one of these is a romantic comedy: I'll let you choose your own adventure here. In my head, and sometimes even on paper, there is a general outline, characters, sentences, dialogue partially written.

But when it comes time to actually write everything out, to get it all in page and paragraph form, I end up with a fat load of nothing. No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I push, I never really get past the first chapter or so, never get beyond the first 5,000 words. The most I've ever been able to commit to is two and a half chapters -- in one attempt, I managed to write the first and last chapters, and part of the second, all told about 20 pages, but I ended up scrapping everything after about a week.

Last year I even tried to participate in National Novel Writing Month, to maybe give myself a kick-start and some virtual community support, but ... well, let's just say it didn't end well. In fact, it didn't even end at all: I only actually wrote anything for about three days, pretended to give it the ol' college try for about another week, and then gave up completely on day 10. Because I suck, and because I have the attention span of a toddler gnat on amphetamines.

I want to blame MTV, the Internet, ADHD, the New England Patriots, high fructose corn syrup, the Palestinians, NATO, the Communists, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Roger Clemens, red dye #40, the slow and painful death of the newspaper industry, Wal-Mart, and/or drug addiction for my focus problem, but I don't think any of these are what it really is. I don't even think it's an attention span issue -- that's just what I say it is, using my usual "armchair crackpot diagnosis" method. I mean, I've been playing the same character in World of Warcraft almost every single day for the past year and a half; I am pretty sure I am capable of commitment when it suits me.

Truth be told: I really think the problem is that I have totally unrealistic expectations of the novel-writing process, creativity, and my own level of talent.

Personally, I think some of my tweets are absolute genius. Like this one, or this one, or maybe this one. Hmm ... OK, so maybe you had to be there. But some of my blog posts are good: I am really proud of this one and this one. It's just that when I get into something longer, something with multiple pages and chapters and an actual plot, it's then that I hit the wall and crash and burn and start speaking in clichés like all those dudes from SportsCenter and jumping Jesus on a pogo stick do not even get me STARTED on Linda-fucking-Cohn.

So. Anyway. I'm going to think about an attempt to maybe get my shit together and try again. But I've decided -- see the tweet above -- that this time, I want my story to be bad. I want it to be god-awful. I am deliberately attempting to write the worst novel ever written in the history of literature, and I include The Lucifer Gospel* in my points of reference.

And this novel is beginning like this:

I can tell you this much: they day I got fired from my job was not the best day of my life, no matter how much I want to pretend that it was. I mean, yeah, I hated that fucking job, and I hated my dickhead boss, and I hated his stupid wife, and I hated that shithole apartment in that bumblefuck town, but nobody wants to get fired. Not even if I did go down in a flaming tantrum, right in the middle of a staff meeting, immediately after my ex-manager and his cunt of a wife tried to take credit for my work.

Honestly, I can't recall my exact words, but I'm pretty sure they went something like this: "You cannot be serious. Really? Are you serious? What kind of dumb-ass motherfuckers are you two? You didn't even bother to take my name off the PowerPoint slides, you goddamned fools! Honest to Christ, you are the worst fucking thieves in the history of ever. This is bullshit! I can't believe this. You cannot be fucking serious!"

Or something like that. Needless to say, I never made it to the end of the meeting. And I didn't know we even had a security guard in that building, but apparently we did, because he escorted me to my car. They claim that they FedExed my things to me, but they're a bunch of filthy liars. I couldn't possibly care less about most of that stuff, but I still want my "Gryffindor Quidditch" cap and my Magic 8-Ball back. Probably they're lost in the Seventh Circle of Postal Hell with my last paycheck, which I never got either.

(Oh, and there will be a lot of cussing, which will not actually improve the quality of the story, but it will definitely improve my word count, because I know a lot of swears.)


* I will not link to that book, because it is honest to God the worst book that I have ever read in my life, worse even than Hemingway and Faulkner, but it's on Amazon if you care to look for it. I strongly recommend against that course of action, however.

In Bed

It's hard to believe that it was 20 years ago that I first read "In Bed," Joan Didion's essay about migraines -- suffering from them, living with them, functioning in spite of them. It wasn't long before I read that piece that I had started getting migraines of my own, that I started understanding what it was like for my mother all those days when she was incapacitated with exquisite pain, that I could completely empathize with the wish "for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call."

I still think about Didion on days like today, when something in the air -- too much sun, too much air, too much pollen, too much stress, too much life -- turns my body on itself, when I start to feel that all-too-familiar pounding behind my eyes, when I start to see that hazy ring of colored light encircled by and encircling concentric rings of pure white brightness, when the sound of my own breathing makes me want to curl up and put my head between my knees and kiss my ass goodbye.

Or, as Didion put it, far more eloquently than I ever could: "That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing."

Like most migraine sufferers, I never really know when or why they're coming, but suddenly at 6:22 one Thursday morning or 2:49 one Tuesday afternoon, there you are, lying in bed or sitting at your desk, cowering under the covers or covering your head, hoping that soon, very soon, it will all be over, one way or another. Sometimes going back to sleep helps, or hiding in the recesses of your cubicle with all the lights turned off, but global thermonuclear war seems as good an option, in the moment, as anything else.

Usually I find myself wanting to throw up, because that seems to make the pain dissipate faster, but just as often I catch myself doing some sort of alien pharmaceutical calculus: two of those pills plus two of these plus one of them plus a glass of water equals X. Always solving for X, working out the magic formula that will maximize efficacy and minimize downtime, a micromanager of my own perilous condition. Can I handle caffeine now? How much? Can I stick my whole head in the freezer for a while, or should I just save time and aim for the oven instead?

The worst days are when I get migraines while I'm at work -- there are not a lot of places to find darkness and quiet in a glass office building. The places I sometimes end up would be comical if they weren't also horrifying. I have been under my desk, á la George Costanza. I have hidden in the shower of the executive washroom. Once, I spent 45 minutes lying on the floor of the janitor's closet, thwarting a panic attack by counting rolls of toilet paper and vending-machine maxipads before I dozed off.

In an hour or so, maybe more, maybe less, the half-dozen assorted pills I took will start to do something -- not really stop the pain, or even really ease it, but deaden the rest of my senses so I can shuffle through the rest of my day in a Tylenol-frosted haze. Before I leave work, I might feel well enough to eat something, although at this point I can't imagine what I would want to eat anyway. Mostly I just want to finish my work and go home, where I can crank the air conditioner as cold as it will go, crawl under the comforter, and die in peace.

Pigheaded

This just in from the CDC and the WHO: we're fucked.

Stories about the swine flu are everywhere, of course, what with half the world suddenly dropping dead all around us, and the other half developing a bizarre and inexplicable unquenchable zombie-like hunger for baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacon!

I don't really watch the news any more, but I do listen to NPR on my way into work, and Morning Edition spent a good chunk of today's broadcast covering the developing pandemic; on their homepage there are eight different stories about it, covering everything from school shutdowns, Kathleen Sebelius and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and an uptick in crime in relation to the outbreak.

So in case you've been living under a rock, I reiterate: we're fucking fucked.

As a hypochondriac, this is possibly my worst nightmare. Do you know what the symptoms of swine flu are? According to a handy webpage from the CDC cheerfully entitled "Swine Influenza and You," like they're trying to sell you on the benefits of a new deep freezer or something:

What are the signs and symptoms of swine flu in people?
The symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to the symptoms of regular human flu and include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Some people have reported diarrhea and vomiting associated with swine flu. In the past, severe illness (pneumonia and respiratory failure) and deaths have been reported with swine flu infection in people. Like seasonal flu, swine flu may cause a worsening of underlying chronic medical conditions.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: "The symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to the symptoms of regular human flu." So, basically, that plague I had for the past week or so? The coughing, congestion, upset stomach, tiredness, and general malaise? SWINE FLU. I could be dead in a week. I hope my life insurance is paid up.

That's what makes the combination of hypochondria and internet access so dangerous. I made joking references last week to possibly having emphysema and West Nile virus and Legionnaire's disease and asbestosis and an aortic aneurysm, knowing full well that I didn't actually have these things. What I had, I thought, was a bad cold.

Until I found out that I actually have the fucking swine flu. I don't know how I got it -- I haven't been to Mexico lately, I haven't been around anyone who's been to Mexico lately, and I don't even think I've been around many Mexicans. Well, my husband, but unless he's been doing something he isn't supposed to have been doing, he didn't give it to me. Maybe it's been dormant since we visited Tulum? Back in 2006?

In any case: I just want you all to know how much I love you. Please make sure that Shae is well-provided for; the insurance money should more than cover her tuition at Berkeley in 16 more years if it is invested well. My favorite flowers are peace roses, purple irises, and Gerbera daisies (especially pinks, peaches, and yellows). Bury me in red, and play lots of loud and inappropriate music at my funeral.

Until then, if you need me, I'll be over here in my hole, whimpering and eating BLT's.

Snowbird

BEEP.

"Gert, are you there? [louder] GERT, ARE YOU THERE? It's me, Gladys. [louder] I SAID IT'S ME, GLADYS. [muttering] I don't know, I think she has that damn answer-ma-jigger on, all I heard was some kind of 'beep' or something. [shouting] GERT, THIS IS YOUR FRIEND GLADYS. GLADYS LEIBOWITZ, FROM DOWN THE STREET. [muttering and crinkling] I don't know -- here, you take the phone, Herb. No, you don't need to --"

ANGRY TOUCHTONE NOISES AND A THUD.

BEEP.

"Gert, it's Gladys again. Sorry about that, you know how Herb is with the phone. Honest to goodness, it's not like he [rasies voice] WORKED FOR THE PHONE COMPANY FOR FORTY YEARS OR ANYTHING. Christ, that man, he gives me such agita. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we're leaving tomorrow for Boca. The nice girl from the travel agency, you know her, Pamela, she's Josephine Panto's daughter? Pamela says there is still room on the tour bus if you want to come. It's supposed to be twelve degrees next week, Gert. In Boca it's seventy. And Pamela says the resort where we're staying has shuffleboard and pinochle tournaments and bin --"

BEEP.

"Gert, it's Gladys again. [sighing] I think Herb was listening on the other line and he accidently disconnected us, or else your answer-ma-jigger is broken or something. Anyway, Pamela says there is suffleboard and pinochle and bingo every day and a nice early bird buffet with that creamed spinach you like, and she said if we want to we can even take a day trip to a [whispers] topless beach. So anyway -- [shouting] HERB, PUT THAT AWAY, I already told you we're not going to Tampa so you don't need your pirate sword, did you take your medicine today and honestly aren't you even listening to me? -- anyway Gert, we're leaving tomorrow, so try to call Pamela and see if you can still get on the bus. Okay? By --"

BEEP.

"Gert, I think your answer-ma-jigger is definitely broken. Anyway, just wanted to say goodbye. From Gladys. Gladys Leibowitz, from down the street. And I definitely know there is going to be a seat available on the bus because [loud clatter in the background] HERB I SWEAR TO GOD I AM GOING TO PUT RAT POISON IN YOUR COFFEE TONIGHT AND THEN SMOTHER YOU WHILE YOU'RE SLEEPING, CAN'T YOU HEAR ME ON THE PHONE WITH GERT? Christ! Fifty years of this and I can't ta --"

Click. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

NOTE: Links are to G's Facebook and you need to log in to see them -- and they might not even work, I'm not sure, I'm kind of dim 82½% of the time -- so if you want to take my word for it, they're links to more pictures of Cupcake with babushkas on her head.

OMG, WTF?

Spotted: a once-sparkling gem of the Upper East Side, now slumming it, acting the fool, and generally making a hot ghetto mess of herself. Careful, GG, or you're going to lose your coveted slot in my TiVo season pass list as quickly as you lost your luster.

Let me assure you, I do not use the term "hot ghetto mess" loosely when it comes to television shows. I am the Queen of Trash Television. Every reality show that minces down the pike gets at least one episode's worth of my undivided attention. Survivor? Check. Flava of Love, Rock of Love, and I Love New York? Check. Celebrity Rehab? Check. RuPaul's Drag Race? Oh my God, hell yes, check!

I have also dedicated valuable TiVo space to other, non-reality shows that people hate / hated: Big Shots. Two and a Half Men. Prison Break, for three whole seasons. So, really, I like to consider myself a connossieur of "zhe gahrbahge." I watch it all. I do not discriminate. The crappier the show, the more likely I am to watch it (except "The Hills" or and of its evil undead offspring because: Spencer Pratt and his creepy flesh-colored beard).

But I don't really know how to feel about a show that used to be so very, very good, and so very, very naughty, and so very, very trashy, and which has recently become so very, very ... not. Like Gossip Girl has. "Disappointed" does not even begin to cover it.

Not sure whether you watch Gossip Girl, but here is the very-brief summary of the beginning: Serena van der Woodsen is a bad girl gone good. She disappeared for a while under mysterious circumstances, and then came back with a new attitude and a new lease on life, and some old secrets that she is not ready to share. Her old BFF is pissed, her new BF is suspicious, and everyone else only knows part of the story. Plus, there is Chuck Bass, who is possibly the root of all evil on the Upper East Side. Oh, and did I mention these kids are all in high school? And completely, sickeningly rich?

For the entire first season, we gradually uncovered Serena's secrets. She was an addict -- drink and drugs. She slept with her best friend's boyfriend, and well as pretty much everyone else. The friend never knew, but Chuck Bass did. She was blackmailed, told the truth anyway, had to make things right with her friend, had to get her boyfriend to start trusting her, had to clean up her act and get her life together ...

... then the writer's strike came, and when everyone went back to work, things got ... weird. Georgina Sparks appeared, an old co-conspirator of Serena's, and she tried to get Serena to stray from the path of righteousness. She tried to steal Serena's boyfriend, starting spreading lies and half-truths, sowed seeds of distrust and distaste everywhere. We found out Serena killed a guy, except she didn't, and we found out Serena's brother is gay, and we also found out that Serena's mom and her on-again-off-again-always-true-love-of-her-life boyfriend's father were former lovers who were almost married. Still following?

And then the season ended. And when we came back -- wait, WTF? Serena and Dan broke up? Now Dan's ex-GF and Serena's BFF's-ex-BF are together? And the BFF and Chuck are doing whatever they're doing? And Serena's mom is married to Chuck's dad, but she's still horny for Dan's dad, and just what in the holy hell is going on here? And why are we in the Hamptons for some reason, where nothing in this show has happened before, and we are dealing with people that we never saw before, and who we won't see again after the third episode?

Listen: these shenanigans have got to stop. At this point, about halfway through the second season, we have discovered that: Serena's mom and Dan's dad have a kid together, which Dan's dad never knew about because Serena's mom went to Boston to put him up for adoption, which makes Dan and Serena kind of related, which makes their sleeping together completely gross; and Chuck's dad is dead and maybe was a member of some weird secret swingers' club, or maybe he isn't dead after all, but nobody really knows; and Blair is trying to get into Yale but she's a complete bitch and everybody hates her and personally I don't really see why she's such a big deal either but anyway she keeps acting stupid and getting caught and she's in love with Chuck and oh my God are we there yet?

So I'm getting confused -- which is saying a LOT because I also watch Lost and hello have you met my boyfriend Daniel Faraday? -- and also bored. And so the point of all this is this:

Dear Gossip Girl,
Act right, or you're gonna get smacked right. OK?
You know I love you.
XOXO!

=====

Added after the fact -- If you don't actually watch Gossip Girl, this pictogram from Wordle will make about as much sense as the rest of this post anyway, plus it's pretty:

Epic Fail

So, I've given up on "winning" NaNoWriMo this year. Or maybe any year, but mostly this year. You may have noticed that the little picture is missing from the sidebar, or maybe you haven't. I don't particularly care one way or the other, which is kind of how I got myself into this mess.

I thought it would be a good idea -- and I still totally do, only it's not a good idea for me. For other people, definitely. In the beginning I thought there was some hope. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which comes out to about a 175-page novel. Not necessarily supposed to be good, just complete.

For the first three days I was very diligent, and I got to 5,208 words, or roughly 10% of the way through. About what you'd expect. And ... then the election happened, and then something else, and then I dinged 70 on my Mage, and then I got caught up in that one episode of that show with the thing, and then I realized I was bored, and then I got to this point, which is where I give the hell up, call myself a loser, and never think of this again.

On the plus side: now nobody is ever going to have to read my novel where a character based more or less loosely on myself drives a car into the "Weston-Peterborough" bonfire and almost burns down the high school. Because believe me: it was going to be stupid. No sex, no good drugs, and very little rock and roll.

Miscellaneous Memory: Inspired by "Lay Your Hands on Me" by Bon Jovi

In October of 1988, when I was in 8th grade at Shawnee Intermediate School in Easton, Pa., I got caught passing a stack of papers to Christy Miller after French class. It was our French teacher, Mrs. Shelosky -- she of the freaky rutabaga obsession and the "vim, vigor, vitality, Geritol" cathchphrase -- who snagged us. We were on our way out of the room, on our way to wherever we were going next, when she stopped us.

Christy had the papers in her hand. We were asked what it was and we both stammered. I don't remember what we said we were doing, but I know we had a French vocab test coming up, and I'm sure that Shelosky thought we were trying to cheat somehow. We weren't, of course -- I didn't become Queen of the Nerds under false pretenses or through subterfuge. But we couldn't exactly own up to anything, either, because ...

... well, what I had given Christy was about 20 handwritten pages for a "book" that we were working on. And by "working on," I mean that I was writing it, and she was the editor, or whatever you call the person who makes you do all the heavy lifting and then stands back and admires your handiwork. At any rate, we were both terrified, because this "book" that we were "working on," what Mrs. Shelosky had intercepted, was: SMUT.

There's no other way to put it, really. Long ago and far away, back before I ever had a boyfriend unless Bill Sauerhauffer counts -- and I don't think he does because our entire "relationship" was limited to passing notes during 7th grade study hall and once (!!) sitting next to each other in the auditorium during play practice when neither of us was on stage -- before I ever kissed a boy or held his hand or anything else, I was attempting to become the next Catherine Coulter.

For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with bodice-rippers. I mean, they're not real or anything, but they're certainly a better way to pass the time than, say, trying to have a séance in the rec room and almost setting the entire house on fire, or cooking meth in the basement, or anything like that. And they're definitely amusing, because where else are you going to learn clever euphemisms like "quivering turgid manhood"?

Back then, in 8th grade, when I was bored senseless all the time and so I was reading everything in the house including the backs of cereal boxes and of course every single book my mother brought into the house -- well, Jackie Collins novels were not exactly on the list of recommended reading for school, but that didn't stop me. I had made my way through practically the entire "historical romance" section of the Palmer Library, since even then I did not have a life of which to speak.

But of course having my parents' permission to read that stuff did not mean that they ever expected me to write it. Certainly not because I was a good Catholic girl. And most certainly not at that age. Not that they would have had anything to worry about at that point, because even though I was writing amateur soft-core porn, it was terrible amateur soft-core porn, and anyway, my character wasn't the slutty one. (Yes, even in fiction, I was still a virgin.)

I actually stopped writing for a little while after getting caught, because I spent 24 hours worrying about what kind of trouble Christy and I were going to be in, and while I figured I could reconcile what I did with my parents -- "Look, it's only a book, it's not real" -- I had no idea how I was going to explain myself to the 8th grade principal, Mr. Kish. I didn't have to worry about that, though, because instead of reporting us to anybody, Mrs. Shelosky just asked when she was going to get the next chapter.

Eww.

In an (admittedly weak) show of solidarity for the striking members of the WGA, I would like to point out to TV addicts such as myself that the quality of television will most definitely not improve if we are forced to endure a whole lot more of "unscripted" shows, to wit:

Residuals, people. They're a very good thing.

Oh, and you can get more of Bucky & Rob (plus Satchel, not pictured!) online at Comics.com. (Other great comics, too, that I might borrow later.)

The Netiquette phrase of the day, Gentle Readers, is this: responsible reportage.

My training as a journalist is far behind me, but in my mind (debauched and deluded though it is), I still consider myself something of an ink slinger. Many serious bloggers consider themselves reporters, and I think rightly so; in my own personal case, I think it is perhaps overly generous to say that my byline has moved from the Metro section to the Op-Ed page. I’ve long since made my peace with that.

Here’s the thing: when I started blogging, I made the conscious (and, I hope conscientious) decision to deliberately avoid talking about that category of news that could best be classified as “Somebody Else’s Problems.” And now I find myself smack-dab in the middle of my own little Ethical Dilemma – how do you write about some seriously ill shit that has gone down around you when the drama falls squarely into the realm of S.E.P.*?

First, a little clarification. Better to get it out of the way now than to have to issue a retraction later. I am absolutely and unequivocally NOT above writing about celebrity gossip. In fact, I love it – scandal rags are a personal indulgence of mine. I can’t even call them a “guilty pleasure,” because I don’t feel the least bit of shame when picking up US Weekly and People and whatever the hell else and perusing them in line at the grocery store.

The reason why I don’t actually blog about these things? Is because I think there are so many people out there who cover them better than I could ever hope to. Everything I need to know about the mess that is Britney Spears’s life I get from MamaPop and Perez Hilton and PopSugar and Celebritology. Oh, and The Soup on E! Ditto Lindsay Lohan and Owen Wilson and the Beckhams: other people cover “Hollyweird” so that I don’t have to.

But when I say I won’t write about “Somebody Else’s Problems,” of course I mean that I won’t document the goings-on in the lives of people who are near and dear to me. Not the bad stuff, anyway**. I am willing to bare all about my own personal faults and foibles – of which there are many, believe you me – but when it comes to the people I am closest to, there are lines I don’t want to cross. For their protection, and for mine. You might have noticed that I don’t even refer to my husband by his real name, and most of you already know him personally.

So, anyway, here I am, between the devil and the deep blue sea, trying to figure out how to talk about things that are currently distressing me without naming names and, more importantly, further bruising hearts that are already broken. What can I say that will be specific enough for those concerned to know what I am really feeling, while at the same time being vague enough to throw the uninitiated off the scent? How can I vent my frustrations and pitch my own personal hissyfit without pissing more people off?

Also: am I still being an honest reporter when I use veiled references and weasel words and deliberately ambiguous language? Is it fair to try to protect my sources, even if it means that to do so, I cannot discuss what I am really feeling? Is it right? Am I just pretending to be trying to be objective? Is this really a gigantic fraud that I am perpetrating? Do other on-line journalists ever experience this conflict of interest? How do they deal with it?

And, am I fooling anyone by framing this entire situation as an ethical debate, when the real issue is, I just don’t know what to say?

For now, I think I will hedge my bets and err on the side of caution. I’m not 100% sure how to put all that I am thinking and feeling into words anyway, so it’s probably best to lay off for now, stew in my own juices, and come up with something brilliantly apropros later. (As if.)

Still, I can’t help thinking about what Dante said: “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” Does this apply to me, here? Does being careful equate to being neutral? What if I come right out and admit that I am choosing to say nothing because I don’t want to deal with all the bullshit aftermath? What then?

And when all is said and done, who is going to protect my feelings? Who is going to save me from myself?


* = Not my original concept. Borrowed – or, perhaps more accurately, “misappropriated” – from one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Sorry, DNA.

** = Vicious lies. Sometimes I write about the bad stuff, when I don’t think the subject will ever read what I wrote. Or if I don’t think the subject will care. Or if I don’t give a wet rat’s ass whether the subject will care or not. Suck it, Alan!