Days

We all have them – the ones when it’s hard to believe we bring much good to the world, when accidentally driving over a bridge might not seem so bad.  It’s not a real desire – any more than the desire to kill off an inconvenient relative or spouse is, though we may have those ideas sometimes too.  And they make you ache the worst when something goes horribly wrong with no intent, no malice.  The thing you say wrong in front of someone who didn’t know crucial information, the moment you step on the cat after a hell of a long day and it just makes you feel like a horrible, horrible person – and the fact he’s so dear and forgiving and purrs up on you almost instantly only makes you feel all the more evil and guilty.

Remorse – I think it’s the most horrible feeling.  Remorse when I broke that vintage bakelite radio that my dad actually got to work when we were kids.  Remorse when the cat himself broke the most beautiful earthenware bowl, given to me by my best friend, a piece which had belonged to her singular, beautiful, beloved mother.  Remorse when someone I love is in pain and there’s nothing in my power that can possibly make it better.

Remorse carries the doom of sitting outside the principal’s office (I never sat outside the principal’s office, of course) with the desolation of helplessness, of powerlessness.  Remorse when you are alone is particularly sere and dessicating.


As you might guess, it’s been a stressful week, and I keep doing idiotic things like losing a knuckle in a cheese grater and getting frustrated at people because of miscommunication – and being mean about it.  I was mean to the cat and the dog both, for which there simply is never an excuse.  I can’t breathe well and keep having problems swallowing and/or choking.  My back’s been killing me for weeks, so I’ve neglected my home – it is a serious pigsty, and I’m running perilously low on socks at this point.  The sink is full both of clean *and* dirty dishes, and the dry leaves that blew in probably DAYS ago, I haven’t picked up nor even looked at twice, in the kitchen.  It’s a neglected house, and it’s the first sanctuary both of my worship, and of my stewardship in life.  It’s the concrete blessing I know I need to take care of, and lately, I just have not.  And, just as I did when I was a child, when I am clumsy and something goes wrong (a constant thing, for someone physically graceless as I), I sometimes, tantrum-like, throw it further and make things worse.  I miss the shoe rack putting away my shoes, I throw them at the back of the closet.  I have a problem taking care of some little task, I QUIT – because who can make me do it all, and who’s it going to hurt but me?

I pray every day, more than once, “may I bring satisfaction and joy.”  To my G-d, to my family and friends, in my work, to those who will someday read my novels, to strangers I just deal with in the routine of life, to X, for whom I have so little to offer really.  It’s not because I’m saintly in the least; rather, it’s because I’m selfish, and the way people make ME feel, who can do this thing for others – I want to make people feel like that.  I want to be the source of the kind of gratification *genuinely* nice people generate in others.  Yeah, morally and spiritually I certainly aspire to it.  But mostly it’s a self-oriented prayer.

And even knowing that, I still blunder into other people and make a mess of more than my stupid shoe rack.  And indulge in remorse, which is only more self-absorption.

Then I find myself driving toward home, cogitating on this post, a beautiful second day of spring, my windows open, Leonard Cohen singing with that inimitable, unhurried cadence – and he says to me, “forget that perfect offering.  There is a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

The older I get, the better I am at recovering from remorse’s drama and compulsion and license, to spend attention upon my tender, all-important expectations.  The only way to get past it is gratitude – and nobody can say my life is not abundant with blessings for which to be grateful.  I’m many things, good and bad, but I am humbled at the people who put up with me.  And, at the end of the day – if I don’t get on with things, that house will fall apart around my ears (and even I am not so dramatic as to hope for that).

And, if I don’t get on with things, the estimable folk who take the time to care for me … will find reasons (and they’ll be valid) to be otherwise occupied.

Bad Author Moves

We read the occasional but pretty regular stories about ignorant unsigned authors who throw public tantrums regarding feedback on their works.  It's a lot less usual for established authors to use thin veils to scarcely obscure fake identities, with which they then bestow silly praise upon themselves and heap scorn on their peers.

It is, however, quite a good way to earn even more scorn than those shrill, bitchy noobs bring on their own heads.  So, congrats, R. J. Ellory, on a very bad idea indeed - and the contemptuous teasing, with your own identity showing regularly, over a course of four years.  All class, all the way.

Author image from The Daily Mail

R. J. Ellory.  The man who singlehandedly inspired the Crime Writers Association to introduce a code of ethics.

I'm Coming Out

Since having to say goodbye to the calm, beautiful, dear, and fun Siddy-La on July 5, there seems to be a constant stream of anxiety and difficulty, enough to be actively embarrassing.  A period of high productivity both at work and on the novel has crashed into a period of uncharacteristic (I hope, anyway) middle-aged middle-class chick fretfulness and melodrama, lost sleep, rash decisions, and second-guessing (that one is definitely atypical for me).

It's always tricky getting back to oneself when emotions run high, particularly negative emotions, and remorse - being a smartass - is a remorseless one.  When awful things happen, even without intent, women like me run the risk (or the likelihood, in the case of the MANY of us trained to embrace martyrdom and worse) of being consumed with misplaced (or appropriate, sometimes) guilt, selfish fear, the whole self-flagellating nine yards.  Even KNOWING we're "doing it" - even knowing, perhaps, intellectually, that there may be no reason to beat ourselves up, the inexorability of emotion is inescapable.  You have to go through it, and - if you are fortunate - you do get to come out the other side.

After some days now of one of these periods, I'm coming out.

Heh.

Not least of the bouyants in my life are my friends; particularly, these days, my work friends.  There are two women there who are generous and delightful, supportive and deserving of return in kind, and just neat.  One spontaneously sent me flowers after some sad family news some time back.  Another gave me pickles and relish when she canned her own recently.  It doesn't get better than that - and yet, really, it does.  These examples are the least of the kindness they have shared, and I'm incredibly grateful.

It's always good to have kvetch-partners in an office, and sadly right now, having recently incurred some body work on my car and enjoying a new bout of stiff-back, I seem to be the one of us having the best week of all three.  Never a good sign.

Nothing quite like perspective, to drag your head out of your own ... navel ... and remind you your blessings (a trip to the ER can have the same effect, at that).  I pray blessings for these blessings of friends - and surprises, too, of the fun kind.

And for their arrival, too, on the other side.  Everybody - come out:  the grass is greener, here on the other side.

Plan-less

My supposed plans for Friday never materialized, when I could not reach, and never heard back from, my supposed date for the evening.

The neighborly cookout has evaporated.

The call I was going to get today, about a movie tomorrow ... not so far.

Considering I'm the only variable here, I have to assume it's me.  But dang.  I thought I at least brushed my teeth enough SOMEBODY might materialize if I weren't too offensive just to be in a room with.  (Clearly, I'm a bit big for my britches.)


It's not that I mind getting a lot done on a long weekend.  It wouldn't matter a poo if people didn't say they *wanted* to make plans.

But this many blowoffs in such a short space is a little bit much.

I Remember ...

... when this blog used to actually get comments.

Now all I ever see 'round here is Russian spambots.  Apparently, I have become painfully boring.

How Good Does A Whore Have to Be?

... or ... "Yet Another Pop-Culture Critique/Rant/Hypocrisy" ...

When we were together a few weeks ago, I was admitting one of my worst guilty pleasures and we got to talking about reality TV.  He asked me, quite sincerely, because he believes there has to be a reason for things, "What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"  He wanted to know who reality TV "stars" are - or what they do - that people would want to watch.

The thing about it is that he misunderstands the concept of content in this context.  He and I come from a mindset in which "entertainment" is defined by a certain set of expectations, and "content" is a commodity with demands upon it.  We grew up in a world where television (for instance) was more often written than not.  Entertainment was expected to be about something, involve a plot, make a point, cause some sort of emotional reaction.  It wasn't necessarily sophisticated; it was just the mechanism of "the entertainment industry" in a different time.

Human beings, though, are natural voyeurs, and happy to find lazy ways to make money too.  When we learned (a) how wide an audience there is for "reality" - for peering into other people's supposedly "real" lives - we made fortunes for, at first, the Sally Jessy Raphaels of the world, the Maurys, even the Robin Leaches.  Over the years, one hour of "reality" ceased to be enough, and we began to see The Real World and its ilk, and the genius move was made.

All it takes to make a mint, for anyone who can stomach participating, is to find ostensibly pretty people (the idea of what constitutes "telegenic" is another post I may indeed never have the stomach - nor even the hypocrisy - to write) willing to go on camera for "life".

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I can tell you pointblank that watching the Sally Jessy's and the like had an effect on my expectations of myself.  My being a lycra-wearing eighties girl obsessed with whether every man in the world found me attractive in that limited and specific way which seems important to some people (particularly at a certain age) was NOT born of the man who loved and married me back then, nor of my family and lessons I learned from anything resembling life.  It was born of those things I chose to expose myself to, even those things I still pretend to be a snob about and think I am superior to.  It was born of shouty talk shows and Kelly Bundy and commercials glorifying screeching "femininity" and brashness of the sort centered entirely on getting attention, regardless of its type or ramifications.

The diet available today frankly makes me blanche.  I'm daily given reason to be glad I am as old as I am - because if the girl I was then happened to be a girl NOW, I would unquestionably be first in line (in, likely, multiple lines) attempting to sell my "life" so I could be famous, could prove myself interesting, could prove myself "hot", could make money doing so.

The irony, of course, is that my very lack of substance, perhaps to some extent my very lack of certain appeals - that would have been exactly what would have made me what passes now for a wild success.  The tawdriness and emptiness is "what makes these people worthy of a TV show."

Rather than expecting a plot or a point, huge swaths of entertainment now are based on the goal to elicit that glow of schadenfreude which tells viewers they are superior to what they're watching.  Laughs or shocks are always good - and, of curse, there's always that genre of shows pitched at women telling us we are supposed to consider highly saturated magenta and blue lighting on tatty LA mansions as "fairy tale" settings for vicarious love and romance (and, indeed, certainly conditioning younger women and girls in the lessons of hideously distorted gender roles, body image, and social behavior) - but, at the end of the day, SENSATION has come to replace the content middle aged folks like me and X once expected.

It doesn't matter so much who the whore is, willing to be pimped to unseen watchers for the release of sensation their televised experiences will engender.  It doesn't matter which whore you get out of the phone book, if that's a call you want to make, as long as they fit the general description you request.  Willing to abdicate privacy and a personal life, or willing to perform certain unspeakable services - as long as they are, it doesn't matter who it is.  Success is measured not by talent, nor charisma - but only by the reaching of that sensation, the release, the short-term goal of a disinterested consumer.

It doesn't matter who provides their personal exposure - there is really no "who are these people" factored into this transaction, nor the financial rewards of the industry it has given gargantuan birth to.  As long as a fairly minimal interview with casting agents and a perhaps even more minimal background check is perfunctorily satisfied - the human fodder need not be particular nor honestly individual (*peculiar* is not the same thing ...) in order to satisfy the demands of reality TV.

"What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"

Worth is the wrong choice of words, perhaps.  "Willing to do it" might be more to the point.  And it's a heartbreaking, dispiriting point, really.

I think of the number of women of my generation who wore stripper shoes and tiny dresses on talk shows for one hour of fame back in the eighties, and whose doing so was essentially ephemeral, is now over, and probably forgotten ...  Then I think of the number of women just in a single day, now, whose self-abasement for others' entertainment is likely to live on in a way those talk shows could not have made possible.  I think about how many of them parlay their appearances on The Bachelor or any one of those "Wives" shows or any one of a thousand competitive quasi-beauty or quasi-talent or quasi-game shows into *careers* of selling off further parts of themselves, and it makes me so sad.

And, of course, so superior - about "those kids today" and every possible other middle-aged (having lost my own twentysomething physical appeals) cliche'.  Superior because I escaped the opportunity to sell my entire life like that, and thank G-d I am old enough to have escaped it.  Superior over even the middle-aged, telegenic barbies of my own age, staging hyper dramatic middle school cat fights for a living.  Superior to those who think game shows yield love and commitment worth the name.  Superior to the entertainment itself.

I respond EXACTLY, in short, as I am supposed to.

And it still makes me so sad.  Kicking the whore out of the room when you're done must feel like that.

The Royal Me

Since starting on The Ax and the Vase, I've thought a lot about the point of view and asked myself about it more than once.  First-person is an essentially modern way of telling a story - though it's unquestionably valid, there's a vanity inherent in "I" which is in a way disingenuous to the period.  (It's also something I've been working for years to scrub in my personal life - an ironic observation to make in the ultimate form of *self*-indulgence, a blog, I know.)

First person limits the omniscience of storytelling - but, in Clovis' case, the limitation serves the character in unexpected way.  The limitation provides those blinders a monarchical ruler almost necessarily wears, whether by their own donning or not.  "Must is not a word to be used with princes" Elizabeth I said - and yet, must may be imposed upon them.  Through direct action of those surrounding them, or through the simple working of power - there are those things a prince cannot see.  Will never know, either simply because even the life of a sovereign is subject to mortal capacity - or because not all knowledge may be shared.

There is a plot thread, in Ax, in which a young girl is raped.  Clovis never speaks of her before this event, we don't know her, we scarcely know her existence even provides her a name.  Then, one day, she becomes the crux upon which relationships central in the king's life are forever changed.

We don't really see this girl (her name is Tetrada).  The crime takes place "offstage" and she has not one iota of dialogue.  Before it occurs, she is unimportant to the plot, and afterward she sets in motion things which do not answer to her nor even, after a point, affect her existence.

Tetrada is a catalyst, not a character.  Clovis speaks of her not one bit, and I have wrestled with whether to increase her presence in the novel.  Over time, I have come to the conclusion this should not be done.  (My readers are invited to disagree, of course.)

But here is why I have not developed her.

Clovis is king.  While she is a kinswoman, she is not a living *presence* in his life.  He does not observe her thoughtfully at table, nor consider her relationship to him.  Even in her victimhood (which is in fact itself indeterminate - from the POV of Clovis, she must be the recipient of a rape ... yet it is possible that, objectively, Tetrada participated willingly), the outrage is that anyone WOULD touch the relative of the king.  The law of wergeld sets a high value on her as a childbearing family and community member - but it is her position within the family of *the king* which gives rise to the umbrage and dissolution set in motion by the crime.

First person POV allows me the freedom to leave Tetrada's individuality in doubt.  It doesn't matter - to *the king* - whether she was seduced, lascivious, or raped.  First person provides - even demands, perhaps - the arrogance of egocentricity.  It removes objectivity, and clarifies brightly just how compromised - and biased - the position of a monarch is.


When I first started writing Ax, I questioned whether using first person was a good idea more than once, and never did quite "justify" it in my mind as I completed the manuscript.  The only conclusion I came to about it was that it did not *fail* to work, and after a certain point I considered myself committed to the choice.  Now, looking back, I can reverse engineer all sorts of excuses onto the decision.

At the end of the day, though, it comes down to an author all to familiar with arrogance and vanity - writing a character whose position positively demands a certain level of personally pre-eminent thinking.  A monarch, outside the niceties and protocols of The Royal We, is in the end entirely about "I".  I think it worked, both to bring Clovis to immediate presence - and to provide some of the bias, limitations, distortions, and self importance necessary to the character of a reigning (and, indeed, acquisitively *conquering*) monarch.

Stunner

This week has been a stunner.  Good and bad and almost impossible to comprehend.  Four days later, I still can't even believe I saw X again.  Nothing is like laughter with him.  Nothing like a day in springtime.

Work has been almost beyond a challenge.

This morning I needed a coat, but it's been 90 degrees when I leave the office at the end of the day.  Outside right now:  thunder.

My head would be spinning anyway, but the throbbing is only one more thin peel in an endless onion's worth of layers.  It is Thursday night, 9:48.  One week ago right now, I was contemplating the possibility of seeing X again, and it'll be another hour perhaps before I can say it's been a week exactly.  Since I knew it would happen.  Since I began packing.  Since those hours which were the last ones in the almost three years since the last iteration of "the last time I saw him."

Four days since I actually saw him.  Four days ago, we laughed in the same room.  He left.  I got a good night's sleep, got on a grey and misty road, sped away ... from the last time I saw X.

I have hardly stopped moving in two months or so now.  Family visit, RavenCon events, heavy work schedule, always a demand.  Weekend before last, the first "normal" (boring) one I have had in a long time.  If the life of a single, middle-aged woman is supposed to be dull with routine, I have been doing it all wrong.

Lots of writing (and de-writing), but little of it these past seven days.  The truth - none this week.

There'll be bastard-brother subplots to gut next.  The bit with the fever and trichinosis.  I still don't know how to rework the rape of the kinswoman and estrangement between comrades.  At least I know how just to approach the work at all now, though.  More than I had for all too long there.

This weekend, I want to spend time with a friend.  Be steward of my hearth and home.  Get outside on a warm night, for loud music.  Come home, rest, and spend Sunday working on Ax.

Then time for the headaches again.

But, I suspect ... it'll be a long time again before another week peels away so many onion layers.


***


I still can't believe I saw Mr. X this week.  And now I can't believe I don't see him anymore.  Mmmmmm.  Hm.

Dovetailing

The conversations I had last week were the culmination of many weeks' anger and confusion.

They weren't the result of these things.  But they were an almost too-tidy culmination of the effects of forty-four years' self-censorship, anger, fear, and hideous frustration.

I'm unaccustomed to living in a state of anger, so to find it in myself - as suddenly and overwhelmingly as I did, when it came - was confusing in the extreme.  I didn't understand its source - I understood its trigger - but not its roots, not the depths from which the anger sprang, and grew.  And so I had to search it out.

Erick's been the only person I could talk with about the full panoply of everything that went into last week.  He didn't even point the way; but just something about his brain works with and against my own in a way that seems to stimulate mine.  He makes me work in ways I could not, before I knew him.  And what that has given me, I'm so grateful for.



The harasser resigned this week.  He had another offer.  So I know this isn't the result of my painful decisions.

I still did the right thing.  He can't take that away from me.  It *is* a shame the next employer may be exposed to the risk his behavior represents (I know I was not the only person he upset).

But mine isn't.  And my employer is the one who matters - and not only to me.

And, however it dovetails - or absolutely doesn't - the risk is removed.

Not eliminated.  I'll pray about that part.

But removed, and from me.  Interesting, that.  I'll pray I don't take credit for it, but give thanksgiving anyway.

Sunday Morning

It's not as cool as it should be for late March - but it is at least cool, and the grey wet day (not actively raining, so evocatively still) lends a layer to Sunday morning time.  I'm hunched forward over the laptop on the beautiful coffee table, glasses perched low on my nose, peering sporadically over the rims at "Law & Order" circa Lenny and Julia Roberts' ex boyfriend - an episode, oddly enough, featuring a supporting role with Jennifer Garner, whose charm and talent have always been lost enough on me I can't particularly deny them, nor care.

Revisions depress me.  The work as it goes feels like progress; then I back away, look at the whole thing, and see how little I have done.

Another friend excitedly said, "Oh, I'd love to be a reader for you" this week, and - when told what it actually requires - evaporated.  This happens.  Sigh.

The birds are the one most consistent thread of noise, of life, these days.  They're quieter today.  But still making sure I know it is spring.

Today will be a bit of cleaning.  As little as I can make it, and still feel I have done enough.  A bit of revision.  Hopefully more than it seems to ever look like.  Never enough.  And, perhaps, the final few pages of my last "lunch book" - the novels I take to work, and read over my non-lunch hours, this last one close enough to its close I brought it home and took in a new one to replace it.  When they get close to the end, it's best to read them to completion without interruption - without the office setting.

I may do laundry; I know I'll ignite some lights around here.  I may even swipe a few windows with some cleaner, because the dinge is depressing me.

Just a few hours.  The weekend will be over.

Quiet Sunday time.  Not a bad place to be.  Never a slow (as long-lasting) as it promises you it will be ...

Lugging

Siddy is restive, because she did not get her nice long walk tonight.  Even last night's stroll was short; she tried to spin me like three or four times.  I can't go but so far after a good leash-yanking.

She's not being punished as a matter unto itself.  I just have too much crap to do around the house.

There was the hand-washing I needed to do before I even got around to dinner, and then there was the shade (its bracket fell down last night - when it did) I had to drill back into the sill.  Not my finest carpentry project, but the thing is up - and the shade is down.  And the skirt I hope to mend before the night's out.  Oh, and the laundry (one load down, and a bedspread now hanging to dry), which I am just to cussed to carry up and down stairs one sock at a time.  So I carry the damned basket.  And that doesn't feel great.

And here I sit, with the novel's handy little drive all plugged in the laptop ... not quite getting round to opening it.  And it's coming up on 9:00.  Which ... how in the devil???

Good lord, in an hour I'm going to be setting myself up for bedtime.

What an endless day.   *ZONK*

Rain

The day started off cool and heavy with rain, and by the time I got to work it had begun.  A good, proper rainy day - and we had thunder and deluge off and on too.  By one o'clock, there was a bit of sunshine, and when I left the office at four to go exchange the rental car (and ended up being able to pick up my own **), it was plenty overcast, but not actively raining.

Tonight, though, it is a thick sky.  All the way down to the ground.

It's hot out, for one.  Probably sixty-five at least.  And the rain, so copious has nowhere left to go.  The ground is saturated; a pudding, a morass.  It can't take in any more.  And so the air is left to hold the bag - and it is misty, heavy, almost impossible to see through - almost impossible to walk through.

Breathing it is almost as bad as not breathing.  Suffocating.  It is nasty.

Still, the Lolly needs her walkies - so the air must be braved.  And I need my walkies too, really.  In over a week and a half without enough exercise, the challenges to breathing don't get thinner with poor habits.  I've even put back on three or four pounds, which is frustrating but more a motivator than really dismaying.  Easy enough to rectify.

As to the reason for the decline in exercise, of course my back is finally getting better.  Sadly, still I'm not at my best.  I did notice starting around Sunday evening that the little pains I was noticing were the muscle soreness of new exercise or unaccustomed use - I was feeling, not the pain of my back, but the sore moments of those parts of me which have been compensating for that pain over time.  A good exchange, that.  And encouraging, after cleaning house on Saturday, which wasn't easy (and, since I am a *stupid* and stubborn brat, happened to involve a lot of laundry-lugging).

Less encouraging was my mom's diagnosis with a chronic, incurable disease - and her more immediate, acute issues with a very temporary but still far too impressive illness.  By yesterday, she was sounding subdued, passive, very quiet.  In short, noting like herself.  That was  little sobering, and though she seems to be on the upswing herself from the more immediate illness, the other one is probably going to come into daunting, depressing focus.  It's especially dismaying, because mom has been working so hard for a while now to work out, to lose weight, to eat right.  So to get a bad report makes that seem like wasted effort, and it has been a lot of effort.

Add to this that my stepfather too is not so well these days, and the impotence I feel regarding my loved ones is a bit much.

It's odd, though - this rarefied Leap Day, this heavy weather, this irksome business with my own fallout since the collision - these things with my family, and how hectic work has been - I have been feeling particularly sanguine today.  Not joyous.  But grateful.  Content.  At peace.  Quietude, even if it is not satisfaction, is much to sink into, to enjoy.

So it goes.  And another day almost over ...



**The only problem with picking up my own car was the ding they left on the passenger side - which I was prepared to overlook - and the extreme amount of CREAKING in the read - which I was not.  Even during the couple of days I drove it after the accident, before it could be dropped off, it wasn't sounding like that.  So this is disconcerting.  And disappointing - given that I thought getting to pick it up was finally the end of being stuck in rental cars.  Blah.

Off It

The story I chose to tell, in Ax, was one I chose - beyond compelling fascination with Clovis I - partially because it has not been done to death.  The truth is, it hasn't been done at all in American publishing; and the fact is, that mystifies me.

And yet ...

When I encountered someone recently online, whose own main characters is a seriously important one in Clovis' own life:  I can admit, my initial response was one of irrational jealousy.  He seems a nice guy.  I'm not a total emotional basket case over my story.  And it's possible I could even come to enjoy finding a neighbor in my little backwater space.

Plus, he didn't put Clovis front and center.  So I don't have to be *too* jealous.  Right?  Heh.

I've been struck by how funny a sensation  it is, though.  You think you are alone - and suddenly the solitude is broken, the illusion gone.

And isn't that why we write at all?  Composition:  co, to be together, position, to put yourself there.  I didn't want to tell this story because it could interest nobody else.  And I didn't want to tell it only to myself.

Kind of cool.  Kind of scary.  Just like the rest of writing.

Lost and Not Lost

The internet is an amazing tool for obliterating the barrier between ourselves and the past.  It's rather a terrifying one for obliterating barriers between people (there are friends and others from my youth it took me many years to manage to lose touch with, and it is a little daunting to realize just how easy it is for that effort to go for naught, these days), for creating personal and financial vulnerability, for learning things it once might have been impossible to ever find.  For reunion with memories long past.

I did something this past week which represents both something I find kind of mystifyingly wonderful, and which also in a way goes against (some of) my beliefs.


I saw a photo of a weir the other day, and was brought to mind of the source from which I learned the word.  It was a book about a British boy, coming of age, and growing in friendship and attachment to an elusive girl he saw when exploring a weir out in the country.  The book was called The Otherwise Girl - something I'm pretty sure I bought at a library booksale when I was twelve or so - and one of those books I read at an age, and IN an age, when reading could still be so intimate and so singular an experience that it felt nobody else in the world could have ever known the story.

Reading was not, in the 1970s, especially for kids, really a blockbuster experience.  YA lit was backwater stuff, not the driving force in the publishing market it is today.  Until I discovered "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret" and S. E. Hinton, I was unaware of anything I had ever read (other than the Bible) which had ever been read by anyone else.  And so books, for me, were an extraordinarily personal adventure.  Every story I had ever read was, for me, precisely and wholly my own object and memory.  I still write as if, all marketing notwithstanding, my work is unheard and unseen, existing only for one reader - for myself - or for some imagined fourteen-year-old-boy staying for a summer at his great aunt's, who discovers this dusty old thing on a bookshelf and reads it, and somehow loves it.

What I mean to say with all this is that  The Otherwise Girl  represents something of a personal genre, a story only I have ever known, and which, because I lost it decades since, was one of the beautiful ephemera of the universe.  In some way, that enhances its strength and its appeals, its soft lines and gentle lessons, its eerie loveliness.  Its absence, like that of my youth itself, is a part of what underscores its place in my heart ...

The Otherwise Girl is, of course, not the only story of its kind for me.  The Underside of the Leaf is another.  A seamier tale.  A memory of reading something, still back in grade school - I must have been about eleven - which seemed shocking and almost forbidden.  These coming of age stories came when I was very young - before the modernity of Judy Blume, or the edgy sixties-hip of Hinton's Outsiders.  They came before I even aspired to literary sophistication, when I was very much a little kid.  They came to me utterly innocent, and told me tales both of sweetness and of tasted sorrow.  I recall, from Leaf, the intensity of feeling I had about a girl liking a boy who somewhat frightened her.  I recall a description of his sweater.

It's never occurred to me to attempt to recapture these fragments, the flotsam of a childhood I bless but am content to know has been decades-since left behind.


***


And yet.

This past week, I ordered copies of both these books.  The picture of the weir did it - and got me looking, too, at Madeleine L'Engle too (great books, and fantastic, gripping titles).  I went to Amazon to buy the Book of Common Prayer I've had on my list for a bit now - and ended up coming away with these two, too.

Otherwise has arrived already.  It is the same edition I had then; a blue upon blue turquoise cover.  A girl in shorts.  A ghostly reverse image.


I wonder whether generations since my own will ever even have the opportunity for loss like this, the kind of progress through life that shapes my own entire existence, the kind of irretrievability which overrides free will and exerts itself merely by dint of time.  Life isn't the quiet backwater it once was, and I wonder what the experience will mean for my nieces - for the marvelousness that is nostalgia, the beauty of sentiment, with its ghost of melancholy making it such a beautiful feeling.

I try not to feel generationally superior - that These Kids Today have lost the very experience of loss.

But I do wonder.  Ephemerality is at the core of life's urgency and emotionality.  Being able to order up one's own preadolescence for home delivery is both wonderful ... and itself almost wistful.  I won't recapture the girl I was thirty and more years back.

And yet.

I never lost her, either.  She's still such a part of the woman I am day to day.  And if I didn't bless the fact I could give her a little nibble - could find these memories at all - I would not have placed that order.

I believe in the impenetrability of lost youth.  But I also believe in the joyousness of memory.  And reading.

Silly Strings

Okay, this was just about the funniest combo of search strings for my blog I have ever seen.  Not showing, though I can see from the URLs it was in there too?  "What do Klingons dream about?", for which  query I have become a major (hah) hitter.  But here's the rest:

Y'all thought I was kidding when I said I contain multitudes ...

Profiling

My friend, the communications goddess, at work wanted to profile me for our newsletter. I thought I would share the questionnaire just for fun.



Name:
Diane Louise Major

Title:
Administration Specialist Senior (best. secretarial title. ever.)

Years at this employer:
1 1/12

Path to current position:
(It was a yellow brick road, and there were these singing munchkins ...) I've been in mainstream financial services for most of the past decade and a half, culminating in Risk Management at a large securities firm at the time the financial crisis began. When that employer had a merger and a move, I stayed here and went to a local utility for two years. After a layoff there, I remembered having an interview at our employer many years ago; I'd always kept them in the top of the mental list of "if I could go anywhere" places to apply to if I needed to find a new gig, and checked the site every single day, along with my list of 26 regular job hunting go-to's. After three months' unemployment, FINALLY there was a listing, I applied instantly, and last June, somebody in HR got fooled by my resume. By July 19, you guys were stuck with me!

Born (hometown):
It always seems to surprise/disappoint people who like me when I say this, but Richmond VA is a nicer place than people give it credit for!

Favorite pastime:
Just one? I write novels and try to sell them. Sometimes I socialize with people.

Three things you can’t live without:
I'm hard put to respond to questions like this, because I'm a literalist and terrified of committing to limited responses! My loved ones; new things to learn, understand, and be grateful for; the living I make working with all of you guys.

Favorite book(s):
Donald Harington's "The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks" is my favorite picaresque ... Parke Godwin's "A Memory of Lions" is the best historical fiction I have ever read ... Mary Stewart's Arthurian novels ... Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently AND Hitchhiker's novels ... Ursula L. K. LeGuin's "Left Hand of Darkness" is the best world-building adventure story - oh, and it's sci fi. Depending on my mood, any one or all of these are favorites.

Favorite movie:
I'll say the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" reboot, but this again is hard to quantify!

Favorite music artist:
If I had any sense at all, I'd just say the Beatles and leave it at that. You are killing me here ... (Since I have no sense: Bowie, Adele, AC/DC, Daft Punk ... oh, and the Beatles ... Yes, I know.)

Favorite food:
Mediterranean/Greek/Italian (I am aware putting Italy last on this list will get me in trouble with some of our management!)

Worst pet-peeve:
Reductive profile questions ... ?

Three words that describe you:
One of our managers calls me Tenacious D, I like that description. Two more might be articulate ... and resourceful.


Good grief, this was hard ...

Scattershot

Being a bit lazy and obvious in my tastes, I sometimes forget that the breadth of my musical tastes is not merely an amusing oddity, but actually makes me a little smarter about music than I like to give myself credit for. My radio station at work this morning took hits at Cameo, Dre, TSOL, John Denver, and Anthrax right in a row, and for me it didn't really skip a beat, though I did hit skip on JD, not being in the mood for the country road just after TSOL's wildly indulgent vocal style. Probably the strongest songs for my mood today were Keep Their Heads Ringin', a fantastically seductive California gangsta track, and Anthrax's Joe Jackson cover, "Got the Time" - not exactly a similar pairing, but somehow harmonizing for my tastes.

Anthrax has always been an odd one for me. On the one hand, if I'm not listening, I always seem to dig their sound - but, sometimes, paying attention to what they have to say (and this is a metal band that indulges in Having Something to Say) can be detrimental, because I actually find myself a little embarrassed by the music, looked at for its component makeup. I have this problem OFTEN, which is interesting, considering how much I am able to enjoy some artists whose components I find downright silly - and yet, there's an awful lot I prefer not to look at critically, and just listen to without allowing myself consideration or a technical view.

This probably explains the fact that I can enjoy Type O Negative so much, and appreciate the satire more than I worry about the violence or misogyny.

It doesn't explain why I cannot hear a note of Toni Braxton's strange nasal-grunt-as-emotional and hollow head voice singing without being mortified - but so it goes. I guess having certain taste excuses us from maintaining too much integrity (it's not as if Peedah Steele was prone to naturalistic singing - and if you watch that clip, it's obvious I don't require "pretty" amongst my musical predilections as a baseline requirement ...).


The thing about all this is that I usually plead musical ignorance if the topic of any particular style ever comes up in conversation - and I make a lot of fun of myself for being a middle-aged suburban woman dancing in the office to g-funk ... but the fact is, as oddly composed as I seem to be, and as incongruous ... I'm no less valid a consumer than anybody else.

At the end of the day, though, I may fit in a more predictable-box than all this likes to defy. I married a hair metal musician once, and that wasn't an accident; I like it loud, I like hair, I like things that make me want to bang my middle-aged suburban head - and I like cranking it in my car.

It may not seem a lot less incongruous, from the outside, for a woman dressed for a drone-job, outside the 80s and significantly far past 30, to be as interested in thrash as in Ice T (and T had a metal band of his own, after all), but contextualizing the age and everything, it probably at least fits *better* anyway.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to admit that as self-effacting as I am about my musical taste and its weirdness - it is of course a source of self-appreciation, if not actual pride or vanity per se. My blog even says, "I contain multitudes" and it's no small part of my satisfaction in my own skin ... that I shed certain "skins" from time to time, wearing one or another - and that I can do that. The facets of my taste reflect the facets of my tendencies, and I am a bit insufferable on the point of my own multiplicity.

But really, at bottom, beyond all my egotism about being a nonconformist, or at least being weird, I genuinely enjoy variety. The limits we choose for ourselves seem in many ways so constricting, and I revel in creativity, surprise, and certainly in unpredictability in certain aspects. I'm not a mercurial, elusive, arresting archetype of the Strange, Unattainable/Maddening Ideal our culture has created - but it would be a job to pigeonhole me with any success. It would be too unspeakably boring to be ANY one thing all the time - the object of romance, the doting aunt, the competent professional, the silly girl, the hard working homeowner, the author, the six-ways-to-Sunday nerd, the devoted friend, the lazy, entitled, middle-aged, well-off American. I have to be all those things, and I have to try other things too, and sometimes I have to think about some of them and wonder even about myself.

Then again ... sometimes I have to walk the dog.

And from everything I am hearing: now is getting to be one of those times.

Seek to Understand ...

... so many wise people have said. Seek to understand - not to be understood.

I have sought to do what I thought was right.



It isn't the same thing. At all.

Hiatus

It's been hard to say much since jury duty completed last Thursday, but I am hoping the discipline of a return to routine will help shake it off. I made it through the process undaunted, without even pausing for a great deal of concern ... yet, when it was over, the impact of having to take away the hope of a whole family was deeply depressing. Even into yesterday, I found little motivation to move - only Mother's Day really got me up and running this weekend. Other than that, I sat at home, accomplished one single query, read nothing, did nothing, never even mowed the grass nor cleaned the house. I felt unpleasant, because impotence is not a suitable state of mind for me.

As it isn't for most people, to be sure.

Still, I am a pouty little girl, and hate unfairness even at my age, and even on top of the hateful feeling of "having" to basically just be mean to someone ... I protest at the thought I've had quite enough impotence to deal with in my life, thank you.

It's probably no more than anyone has to endure. Where we love, we are impotent sometimes. Where we hate, usually more so. Where we care about anything at all, there's bound to be disappointment and frustration - and what else is impotence made of?

I still feel terribly tired, but am peeking up at the sunshine. And sunshine there is. The days have been dazzlingly lovely - even during the trial, but certainly since then. Right now, the green of the world is rich with golden light, gleaming, lush. Dinner is on (I am up to that much - I'm making actual, decent food), and there are strawberries in the kitchen. Soon, there will be peaches and nectarines; probably my favorite fruits. I know myself blessed.

But even that is a source of guilt, and I hover and hedge and turn away from my thoughts.


***


This week, I joined a histfic website, and got a hit here from an author there. (Squee!)

I got a query out. I got another one rejected. The pitch I still need to work on, though.

Life is moving on. At least that I can't blame myself for. That is no guilt.


Times like this, I miss my dad. Dad was good at pep talks and philosophizing. And I miss X. He was good at being next to me just running end-of-day errands, or walking The La. It was always good to take his head in my lap and give him a head rub - or for him to do so for me. Just bein' (not even a need for the final G).

I can Just Be with Sweet Small Sid. But she sure sucks at giving a head rub. No thumbs, and her breath is no picnic.

Weight

So over the past two weeks or so, I've lost a good bit of that "unemployment" (ahem) weight which has been irritating me by reminding me constantly that ... I haven't actually been unemployed now for about nine months. Erm.

Usually, stress doesn't make me drop the pounds (and only half of the 15 or so I gained are gone), but I guess the niggling is working this time. Or this stress is just special. Ahem. Anyway, for several days now I've just been disinterested in food. It's hard to decide, some nights - you come home, you're alone, you have a conflicting pair of ideas about how to go about dinner, you don't *especially* feel like bothering, you start blogging, and dang if - ... now, how is it 9:01 p.m. now??

Huh.

And you find that is a stupid time to order out, and because you don't feel like dragging around the kitchen, it's simply too late to bother STARTING cooking.


The Big Meeting starts tomorrow, for my team - not in my location, but very much on my plate. We've been working with the tech folks to make up for the fiasco we had last month, we've been working with facilities and planning, we've been working with each other, and all our speakers and participants. The level of work that goes into a meeting like this gives me incredible gratitude for the infantry who do this every day - who get us the rooms, who keep working after that to get us BETTER rooms, who coordinate with security, who do so many things.

And we are doing so many things. This thing has been in the works for three months now, and the addition of the make-up technical event is significant.

So my attention has been absorbed in this meeting for a long time now ... and, by Thursday afternoon at one o'clock, the worst of it will be over.

I've also been watching an extreme percentage of the people I love dealing with surgery and major health events. There's been a great deal of prayer in X's family's direction. I had my own sprain (not much of a motivator, itself, for the wanting-to-get-up-and-do-a-lot-of-cooking).

There's been a lot taking my attention off my belly. And so, my belly has been growing a bit smaller.

I don't pretend I object to this, but it is a little galling that I didn't really manage this in a more reasonable way. Still, the hope now is (a) to ditch the other half of the weight, and (b) to keep it at bay.

Now for sheer stubbornness to step in and keep off by dint of cussedness what my failure in resolve hasn't handled thus far.