Random Quote Wednesday

"I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. You can think without writing, of course, as most people do and have done throughout history, but if you can condense today's thought into a few symbols preserved on a surface of some kind--paper or silicon--you don't have to rethink it tomorrow."

~~Barbara Ehrenreich

~~Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Lynn Anderson

For everyone who wondered but didn't ask: That middle-aged woman you saw sitting in the silver van in the grocery store parking lot with the windows up and the engine running for ten minutes belting out "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" on repeat was totally me. 

When I heard over the weekend that Lynn Anderson had passed away last week at the age of 67, I rifled through all my mixed CD's until I found the one with her signature song on. Sure, it wasn't quite the same as hearing it on the scratchy vinyl of the K-tel Country Superstars* album on the stereo my sister and I got for Christmas in 1979, but it was pretty awesome all the same. The baffled looks on passersby? Added bonus. 

Rest in peace, Ms. Anderson.



Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Nostalgic. 

*Seriously? Check out that tracklist. Who even knew you could squeeze so much cheesy goodness into 12-inches of vinyl? I did, that's who. I have this album in a milk crate full of other cheesy goodness in my bedroom right now.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Sunday, November 2, 2014

Today's unedited excerpt from my Spiral Notebook Journal features me lecturing myself about that thing I always lecture myself about most: writing. Or not writing, as the case may be. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunday, November 2, 2014

Considering how often I disappoint myself, it's amazing I am not entirely immune to my own disappointment in myself at this point. Though I suppose if I were really susceptible to my disappointment, I might endeavor to disappoint myself at least a little less often.

I meant to write today--a lot and much earlier in the day than 9:15 p.m., which it is now. I also meant to write yesterday and the day before and pretty much every day last week and for that matter every day since the last time I wrote. But I allowed myself to get distracted--and not even really all that distracted, honestly, because no matter what else I'm doing (in this case, DVR clearing and Q*bert playing and squeezing in a movie with Hubby, which I couldn't have cared less about--some X-men sequel or prequel or presequel or some damned thing), all I'm really thinking about is how I should be writing.

More disappointment still--now that I finally forced myself to pick up the pen, I'm spending what little time and energy I have to talk about how I should've been here sooner.

Has Anyone Seen My Wagon?

...I seem to have fallen off of it and the bloggy wagon has rumbled along without me, as it always does. 

As always, I miss blogging more than it misses me and find myself sprinting to catch up. 

I could blame my long absence on all sorts of things and, honestly, it really is the product of all sorts of things--busyness, exhaustion, lack of motivation, lack of inspiration. 

The more important question, really, is on what can I blame my return? What is the point of blogging? Despite numerous long absences* and whole periods of spotty-at-best posting, I have not yet been able to give up on blogging entirely. Why? 

Blogging is such a weird thing. It is talking to yourself and inviting others to listen in. It is shouting into a crowd and hoping to be heard. It is a community of isolated, solitary individuals, tapping away at keyboards together alone.  It is writing practice and social networking. It is the study of human nature, your own and everyone else's. 

It is, like most things, the sum of its parts and then some. And I have missed it. 

*This latest absence is by far the longest. We were sneaking up on a year at an alarming pace.

Asymptomatic

As of August 5, when Daughter-Only drove away shortly before noon in search of fame, fortune and a college education in close proximity to her boyfriend, Hubby and I are officially Empty Nesters. 

We've been temporarily Empty Nesters before, when Daughter-Only moved to an apartment less than a mile away, but we suspected from the start that arrangement wouldn't last and even while it did last, Daughter-Only came and went unexpectedly at all hours so our nest never felt all that empty. This time, though, Daughter-Only, our youngest, has moved across the country and her brothers are all fairly settled in away from home lives as well so...Empty Nest.

Hubby says to me the other day, "You know, I miss the kids. I really do. But...I'm really enjoying peeing with the bathroom door open. And...I can even walk from the shower to the bedroom without having to put a towel around myself!"

Be It Ever So Humble

Hello, my bloggy friends, let's begin with a little survey: Where do you stand on weirdness? Do you think it's best to ignore it and hope it goes away? Or do you feel as though blurting out how weird something is somehow takes the edge off the weirdness, at least a little bit?

It's always weird when I come back to the blog after being away for an extended period. My voice sounds kind of echoey and hollow here in this wide-open space and the only relief for it is to keep typing away until the space is a little less empty.

I've spent the vast majority of the day reading piece after piece of flash nonfiction in an online magazine called Brevity. I discovered Brevity in one of those moments of literary serendipity--this blurb in a magazine led to that book which had another blurb which led to a different online magazine which had a link to Brevity and I fell deeply in love. Today's back issue binge was courtesy in part of a new-to-me laptop, which makes spending the day reading a screen ever-so-much more (way too much more, I think) comfortable than sitting at my desk in my office.

The new-to-me-laptop is courtesy of a promotion at work and I have spent the day using it for personal things under the guise of acclimating myself to the new-to-me technology. (I've been strictly a desktop girl up to now--no tablets or e-readers or even a fancy phone to connect to the internet with.)

The constant reminder of my day job has been comforting since the pieces on Brevity are mostly so well written that they are both awe-inspiring and extremely humbling. Please understand, it's been a very long time since I've harbored the illusion of making a living as a writer--probably since fourth grade when Mrs. Wentz had us do a what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up project. Mrs. Wentz was nothing if not thorough and as part of the project, we had to write down what we expected to get paid for our work. Planning to be a novelist, I calculated that I should earn one-third the cover price of every book sold. I figured one-third for me, one-third for the publisher and one-third for the owners of the stores who sold the book. For reasons I didn't understand at the time, Mrs. Wentz was amused and delighted by my formula and made sure to share her delight and amusement with my mother at the next parent-teacher conference.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've imagined quitting my day job and writing for a living as anything other than a far-fetched fantasy, which is good since the pieces on Brevity were, as I said, awe-inspiring and extremely humbling. The cumulative effect of that much good writing all in one sitting was to not only utterly destroy any microscopic lingering illusion of my making a living writing, but also to make me question the wisdom of continuing to write at all.

If I cannot write like this--lyrically with subtlety and grace--what then is the point of writing at all? I try to imagine the amount of writing practice that would turn my writing into that sort of writing--and the answer I smash headlong into each time is no amount of practice or time will turn my voice into voices like those.

This is not false modesty or a fishing expedition for reassuring comments. Instead, it is a clear-eyed evaluation of the skills I possess and the ones I don't. I realize, or I think I do, that my writing has certain strengths. It's just that those strengths are not subtlety or grace or...any of a million other intangible things that I have spent the day admiring in the work on Brevity. 

I can't ever come to the page with the same life experience, the same worldview, the same talent as those other writers. What I can do is sharpen my prose, choose stronger verbs, tighten my sentence structure, dig deeper and dare more in hopes of coming ever closer to making the words on the page resemble the images in my head. And so, finally, again, I discover anew something I've known all along: the point of writing practice is not to learn to write like other people, but to learn to write more like myself.

Nighty Night

Home late after cramming five days of work into a four day work week. (In other news: FOUR DAY WORK WEEK and TEAM TRIVIA!!!!!) So very ready for sleepy time...

Z is for Zzzzzz

Proofreading The World

While driving through town this afternoon, I noticed that the scrolling marquee at the bank on Main Street was advertising a local performance of that beloved children's classic: "Charlottes's Web."

Now, I understand that not everyone has the same (rabid) interest in proper punctuation, spelling and grammar that I do. And I understand that many people lack the aptitude for such things. What I don't understand is why so many of those people are the ones in charge of posting signs and notices.

Y is for You've Gotta Be Kiddin' Me!

And Two To Go...

You know that feeling that combines both "I thought I'd never get here" and "How the heck did I get here so fast?" Well, that's how I'm feeling about A-Z tonight.

X is for X-ing Off The Days

Random Quote Saturday

"Writing is the way I ground myself, and it's what keeps me sane. Writing is the way I try to make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident, reasons why what happens happens--even though I know that why is a distraction, and meaning you have to cobble together yourself. Sometimes just holding a pen in my hand and writing milk butter eggs sugar calms me. Truth is what I'm ultimately after, truth or clarity. I think that's what we're all after..."

Abigail Thomas, "How To Write Your Own Memoir" in O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2008

 

W is for Writing

Random Quote Friday

"They would talk and I would listen. The sound of their voices was a lullaby to me, an assurance that life percolated on through the long night--that I was safe. I would fall asleep with those voices still murmuring in my dreams. To this day, it troubles me to fall asleep in a silent house.

Those long eavesdropping nights made me a storyteller. They communicated to me, without anyone's needing to tell me, that the true apprehension of life's puzzles and pains is not in the living but in the recounting."

 

~~Jacquelyn Mitchard, "All Through The Night" in The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship

 

 

V is for Voices

I'm Lovin' It

[Blurt alert: This post uses some foul slang for female body parts. And also the F-word. But only as much as absolutely necessary. If I could figure out an effective way to tell this story without using them, I would surely do so. But I can't, so consider yourself warned.]

Today, Daughter-Only had to be to work at noon. We left the house at 11:45 and because she'd overslept and hadn't eaten, she wanted to sneak through the drive-thru at McDonald's to grab a cheeseburger to scarf down (I know, I know: the breakfast of champions, right?).

The McDonald's in our town is in the corner of a busy and poorly planned parking lot. Because of this, there is no clearly marked line for the drive-thru cars to wait in. Some people form a line straight off the sign and going far back into the parts of the parking lot intended for other stores. Some people (including me) come in to the line from part of the lot that is set aside for McDonald's customers. (Not only does this feel logical to me, but there is actually an arrow painted on the blacktop to indicate that that is the way to go. However, said arrow is so faded you can only see it if you already know it's there and it can't be seen at all when coming from the other part of the lot.)

Naturally, with all this multi-directional traffic there are issues. For instance, a year or so ago, I was waiting in (what I consider) the correct line for the drive-thru when a woman came out of the restaurant and saw my van sitting behind her vehicle. While she had room to pull out, it would have required some maneuvering. I would have gladly backed up or inched forward for her, but before I could put my van into gear, she started gesticulating in an extremely rude manner and blowing her horn.

I am not normally an inconsiderate person, much less confrontational, especially in public. I feel sure I could muster legions of people, many of whom do not even know my name, who could attest to my random acts of kindness and consideration in retail settings all around town.

But! If someone is blatantly nasty or disrespectful to me, some sort of chemical change occurs within my brain and I become a person I barely recognize and of whom I am not always proud. Which is how and why I refused to move for the woman whose car I was behind until, forty-five seconds and numerous F-words (from her) later, the drive-thru line moved of its own volition.

During our exchange, in which I calmly told the woman that I would not be moving out of her way that very second, this woman called me a "fucking twat."

My first thought was, "I didn't know anyone even used that word anymore." I hadn't heard it since the school bus in seventh grade, when it was the height of hilarity to say "Twat did you say? I cunt hear you."

My second thought was, "What the hell is your fucking problem?!" Which thought came out mouth before I could stop it. Oops. Daughter-Only was with me that day as well and was equal parts appalled and impressed.

Today, as you have probably guessed by now, there was also a multi-directional traffic issue in the McDonald's drive thru. As Daughter-Only and I pulled up to the drive-thru, we immediately scoped out the line to assess her chances of getting to the window in time to make it to work before noon. There were four cars in line, including the one at the sign. I inched forward to position myself to get into the line while she was trying to decide whether we should just drive off and skip the cheeseburger.

Just as she decided that we should leave the line, a big red truck came from the other direction and tried to block me from getting into the line. I no longer even wanted to get in the line, but the set up of the lot meant that I needed to get between the red truck and the black car to pull away from the drive-thru line. As I pulled forward to do that, the young man (or as Daughter-Only referred to him, "the teenage redneck") began gesticulating rudely and pulled alongside of us, thereby blocking us from leaving the line.

I rolled down the passenger window, and he started yelling that he had been in line before us (which I knew was not the case) and that we needed to get to the back of the line. And...uh oh...there went that brain chemistry thing again. I calmly stated that I was in the line and things escalated from there.

I can draw diagrams, and provide additional details to interested parties, but the key highlights are that Daughter-Only was a little late for work, but she did get her cheeseburger. For what it's worth, she got her cheeseburger before the boys in the red truck got whatever it was they were so urgently trying to get.

Oh! And the fine upstanding young man at the wheel of the red truck called me a "fucking cunt" to which I calmly replied, "Do you really think that sort of language is going to get you the results you're looking for?" At that point, he realized the futility of his quest and got into line behind us. There was something disturbingly satisfying about watching the disappointment cross the boy's face when he realized his ultimate verbal weapon was utterly ineffective.

As we pulled away from the window a couple minutes later, both the boys in the truck could be heard screaming unimaginative obscenities at us.

As she got out of the car to go to work, I told Daughter-Only, "Well, now I've been called a fucking twat and a fucking cunt in the McDonald's parking lot. I figure if I can just get someone to call me a fucking pussy, I'll have achieved the lady parts insult trifecta!"

U is for Uncivilized*

*At one point during today's verbal scuffle, after he had flung numerous F-words but before he resorted to the C-word, the boy driving the truck said, "I have to be to class at 12:30!" To which I (calmly) said, "Oh? Is it a class in how to be a civilized human being? Because it seems like you could use a little instruction in that."

Random Quote Wednesday: A Twofer, in Honor of the Letter "T"

"Writing is the first anti-depressant. It came before Prozac or Effexor. And it was cheaper."

~~Erica Jong, Seducing The Demon: Writing For My Life

 

T is for Therapeutic

 

 

 

"Memories screwed up perspective, and the most vivid ones could annihilate time completely while they held sway."

~~Stephen King, Lisey's Story

 

T is for Time

 



 

Ho Ho How Many Times Are You Going To Tell That Story?

[Apparently at least one more time...This is a recycled post, originally appearing on the blog on December 25, 2009.]

The Christmas I was nine, I had pretty much given up on the idea of Santa. It's strange to me that I had not given up on it sooner--I was, after all, the kid who couldn't sit through the Wizard of Oz without harping on the fact that it would've been impossible for all those "people" who'd never met--Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion--to know all the words to the song "We're Off To See The Wizard." On the other hand, I did not seem to have much trouble accepting a talking Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion or, for that matter, a green-faced Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys so perhaps it's not so odd after all.


In any case, I didn't quite NOT believe in Santa but mostly that was the same kind of bet-hedging I imagine many on-the-fence agnostics indulge in--better not to say out loud, "There is no Santa" just in case there is one and he might be offended and vengeful at my disbelief.

So Little Sister and I were in the bedroom we shared, awake late, too excited to sleep, wondering aloud about the surprises there might be under the tree, just generally being kids on Christmas Eve. At some point--and I'm not sure if she was still awake or not--there came the sound of tinkling bells.

They were sleigh bells, of course. No other logical explanation could be found in my wanting-to-believe brain. And that sealed the deal on at least six more months of being right around 85% certain that Santa Claus not only existed but did in fact fly around the world in a sleigh pulled by bell-bedecked reindeer.

By the following Christmas, I no longer believed and I can't remember exactly what compelling evidence pushed me to non-believer status, but there was always this weird nagging doubt in the back of my mind--"What about those sleigh bells?"

Three years or so after I heard those sleigh bells, I was digging for dimes in the desk drawer where my father sometimes threw his pocket change and came across a photo of him with the box of the pinball machine we had found under the tree the Christmas morning I was nine and suddenly those sleigh bells made a lot more sense. It hadn't been a sleigh landing on the roof, it had been my father test-driving the pinball machine.

Thirty-two years later, the fact that I didn't recognize the bells of the sleigh the night before Christmas as the bells of the pinball machine Christmas morning remains one of my most enduring lessons in the power of our wishes and moods to influence our perceptions of the world around us. Though I've not always put it to good use*, the awareness that what I see is often influenced by what I "want" to see was a much longer-lasting gift than the pinball machine or anything else I found under the tree that morning.


*In that way, it's like the gift of exercise equipment--you have every intention of using it and you know it would do you good to use it, but all too often it ends up abandoned in some corner--a treadmill turned clothes rack.

S is for Santa Claus

Random Quote Monday

"Ironic that she'd become a dermatologist. She'd always had a personality like a rash, itchy, chafing, the kind of woman who just won't let you get comfortable."

~~Kathryn Harrison, Envy

 

 

R is for Rash



The Artist and His Muse

For the past few years, Daughter-Only has worked in a variety of retail businesses in our small town, managing to amass an alarming number of stories of inappropriate innuendo and outright harassing comments and requests from customers as well as from some of her fellow employees. Some of these things, coming as they did from her superiors (at a job she no longer holds) were legally actionable, or damned close.

Mostly though, they were misguided, socially awkward attempts to strike up a friendship or relationship or, um, let's say "relations" with Daughter-Only. One thing these types of commenters seemed to have in common was an utter lack of awareness about how their interest and the way they chose to express it might actually be perceived by Daughter-Only and those around her as more icky than intriguing, more frightening than flattering.

Currently, Daughter-Only (who will be 20 in June) works at a café in an "arts center" that has studio space for various artists in its basement. She reported to me this week that one of the "artists from the basement" approached her and said, "I don't want to come across as a creepy middle-aged man, but I wanted to let you know that I am working on a sculpture of your face." He then went on to rave about her striking bone structure and to explain that he may be staring at her more than usual in the coming weeks--you know, for artistic purposes. All the while, Daughter-Only struggled to maintain her professional composure.

Now, perhaps--perhaps!--this middle-aged man has a purely artistic interest in my daughter. Perhaps--perhaps!--this man is not just a(nother) creepy middle-aged man expressing an inappropriate interest in my daughter.

But perhaps--perhaps!--this middle-aged man may want to come up with a better opening line, because there's no way that anything that begins with the line, "I don't want to come across as a creepy middle-aged man..." is going to be anything but creepy.

Q is for Qualms

Random Quote Friday

"Patriotism can be good or bad. Knee-jerk patriotism can be very bad. I'm patriotic...but I love my country the way I love a friend or a child who I would correct if she was going the wrong way. Who I expect the very best from."

~~Emmylou Harris, "What I've Learned," Esquire,June 2004

 

 

 

P is for Patriotism

Random Quote Thursday

"I would not have done anything differently.

All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I'm not saying they were all good or that they happened for a reason--I don't buy that brand of pap fatalism--but they have been right. They have been...okay. As far as revelations go, it's pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss, or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self-help movement. Okay won't get me on Oprah. But okay is a start, and for that I am grateful."

~~Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

 

 

 

O is for Okay

Way Back Whensday

N is for Neo Maxi Zoom Dweebie

Numbers Game

When I was in high school, I practiced an amateur and adolescent form of numerology, something loosely adapted from a bit in a women's magazine. (A magazine I probably skimmed in 1984 at the laundromat while my grandmother stood nearby using quantities of bleach that would likely require HazMat clearance were she to use them today.)

I remember that the system assigned numerical value to each letter (based on its place in the alphabet--so A was 1 and Z was 26) and you figured out a person's numerical essence (or whatever) by adding up the letters in his or her name and then adding all the digits together and repeating until you were left with one digit. So, for example, the letters in my name added up to 276 and 2 + 7 + 6 =  15  and 1 + 5 = 6. So, my number was six.

There was, I think, some sort of chart in that long-ago article to indicate which numbers were more "compatible" with one another, but I never really paid much attention to it and instead developed my own (self-serving) system that reliably backed up whatever it was I already believed about the person whose numbers I was running. The fact that Mr. High School and I shared the same essential number was proof of both our supernatural connection and the validity of this style of numerology. (Later, though I had mostly outgrown my personal numerological compulsions by that point, I couldn't help myself from boiling Hubby down to his numerical essence and reasoned that a "4" would be compatible with a "6" because we were both "even" numbers.)

I compulsively ran the numbers for myself and every crush I had for several years along with numbers for my friends and their respective crushes. I do not use that term "compulsively" lightly. I did it so often that I memorized the numerical position of every letter of the alphabet and to this day, that useless bit of trivial knowledge still takes up space in my brain, which is why when I saw the "M" on my calendar this morning for today's post, I thought to myself, "M is 13 and 13 is halfway there."

M is for Mumbo Jumbo