Respite
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Mindfulness

After I microwaved my Yves Veggie Bowl this afternoon, I discovered it had mold growing in it, even though the Sell By Date wasn't until the middle of next month.  I pitched it and ate half of a very disappointing, watery purple plum (NOT a Dragon Plum, which I have recently discovered and never found lacking!) and a bunch of grapes, and tried to go back to work.  I've been surprisingly focused the last three days, but I couldn't seem to settle back in.

I haven't seen my therapist in more than two months, but I remembered her mandate that I should be eating lunch mindfully and meditating or doing something relaxing during my lunch break.  I don't regularly take a lunch break, but decided today to go outside and listen to the pond and the trees.  It is a gorgeous! autumn day here.  Not a cloud in the sky, temperature somewhere in the low 70's, and dry, clear air.  It seemed like every time I looked down into the pond, I saw something I hadn't seen before.  First, I saw a frog splayed out on the surface dead-man-float-style except that its face was out of the water.  Then, a second, smaller frog crouching on a sunny rock with half its body submerged in the water.  Next, I realized there was a carved wooden turtle sitting on top of one of the containing wall rocks that had weathered to the same shade of grey as the stone, and, oddly, I don't remember ever having noticed it before.  (Of course, that doesn't mean I haven't noticed it before, only that I've slept since then, so I can't be sure.)  Somehow, the first frog disappeared when I wasn't looking and didn't return.

In addition to watching the water, I also spent a substantial amount of time looking up into the trees.  I even tried a few partial backbends to see the tops of trees behind me and get a better perspective on the canopy.  While I was arched over backwards, a turkey vulture flew directly over me, front to back or east to west, but I don't remember my Homer well enough to know what kind of omen that was.  (I'll assume it was good!)  I also watched a male cardinal for a few minutes.  There have been at least two playing in the garden behind the house for most of the morning.  And then I realized it would be good to move rather than just stand, so I turned toward the only loblolly pine in the front of the house and tried to mirror the motion of its trunk with my body.  There is a strong breeze today, causing the leaves to rustle and the deciduous trees with their multiply-branched branches to dance in large, billowy motions.  The loblolly, though, has no branches at all on its bottom forty feet, and the the branches on the top forty feet didn't seem to respond greatly to the wind.  The trunk, though, swayed and undulated, which was exactly the amount of effort I felt like expending.  It was fun!  Hypnotic, even.  I could have spent the entire afternoon out there, but I somehow managed to drag myself back to the computer.  (I opened the windows, though, so I can still hear the wind and the water!)

Happy, peaceful day, All!

Ask & Ye Shall Receive
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Writing

Well, well, well.  I had only to post a request for my rejection to arrive in the mail and my request was answered in less than 24 hours!  Carolina Wren Press, http://www.carolinawrenpress.org/, did reject me, and, no, I was not one of the three finalists, and, no, there was no handwritten note of encouragement.  The most disappointing is that the award isn't even launching a career.  The woman who won, Jeanne M. Leiby, is the editor of The Florida Review, http://www.english.ucf.edu/~flreview/current3.html, and an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida.  She's a native Michigander and a fellow U of M alum, with an MA at Bread Loaf School of English/Middlebury College, and an MFA at the University of Alabama.  So she's already got creds and a career.  Sigh.  

That means the memoir has, if memory serves, officially been rejected 25 times: by 22 agents, several of whom asked to see more than the first chapter; by default by 2 agents who asked to see the entire manuscript then never responded to it before I moved to North Carolina; and now by a small press.  Only 75 more to go before I can completely give up on it!

All I can say is that it's good I'm writing again.  I have to believe that I will get better and that eventually good writing finds a home.

P.S.  If I sound bitter (which I really don't think I do), that's okay.  Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird gave me permission to be.

Feminist Rhetoric and Gender Fluidity and All Those Same Damn Insecurities
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "Run" by Snow Patrol
Topic: Writing
I started writing again.

Not magazine articles or queries, but something else.

I have been waiting ten months for Carolina Wren Press to reject the memoir manuscript I entered in their Doris Bakwin competition. The website said they'd announce the winner in August, 2006 so I went to the mailbox every day last month in anticipation of the SASE in my handwriting that would enclose the following letter:

Dear "Writer:"

Thank you for your entry in the Doris Bakwin Award competition. This year more than 325 women submitted manuscripts, and all of their manuscripts were better than yours. Of course, we waited ten months to tell you this in an attempt to spare your feelings. After all, having waited nearly a year for a manuscript to be chosen, you can't really hold out any hope that we would choose yours. Therefore, now that we are certain you have already imagined the worst and given up all emotional investment in the outcome of this competition, we are pleased to announce that Sheila Writesbetterthanyou has been chosen as the recipient of this year's award for her manuscript entitled The View Is Waaaaay Better From Here.

We wish you the best with your writing, even though we knew after reading only the first five pages of the crap you sent us that you'll probably never amount to anything. We hope to see more of your work in the future. Far, far in the future.
Sincerely,
The Weary-Yet-Jubilant Staff of Carolina Wren Press

The letter still hasn't come and the website is still announcing that the winning manuscript will be announced last month. I'm not upset about this because I really do understand the realities of being a small press (since I am the sole employee of one) and I can't imagine the stress of 325 book-length manuscripts demanding to be read and ranked and passed up the food chain. It's a miracle that competitions like these are ever finally decided and that one manuscript really is chosen and published and one career quietly launched....

But the fact that after ten months I am still going to the mailbox looking for that letter IS a problem. It means I haven't lost all emotional investment. (I have given up hope that mine will be chosen, but I'm still clinging to some small hope that I might get a nice, handwritten note on the above kiss-off letter saying I was a finalist, or that at least one of the readers really liked the manuscript but, sadly, had to let it go because it was just a little too "___" for this press.) It means I've put all my eggs in one basket. That I don't have enough irons in the fire or enough balls in play. That it is time to start lobbing other pieces of writing out into the world so they, too, can be rejected and returned to me so I can repackage them to some other editor with a form letter just waiting to be shoved into my hopeful SASE.

So I started writing again. It's a tentative writing, but I can honestly call it a writing practice. It has a set begin time and end time and I start by doing a timed writing warm-up in my Natalie Goldbergesque spiralbound notebook. It's all much more ritualized than I've ever worked before, but I needed a routine to get me started.

I think I'm writing the first in a series of short stories for which I have a great title, but I don't want to jinx myself by actually revealing that title. I'm not sure yet, though. It could turn out to be an essay. Since I believe a story finds its own form and wholeheartedly embrace Pam Houston's approach to writing - she says that 90% of her nonfiction is true, and 90% of her fiction is true; it's a matter of which 10% is false that determines whether she calls it fiction or non - I don't think I have to know yet. If it turns out to be a short story, it might actually also turn out to be the fourth story in the series, rather than the first, since I think I may have begun writing this particular collection of stories back in 1989 with a very bad short-short about having to pick out a wedding gift for an ex-boyfriend I was still in love with. (That story, and maybe the second one also, even though the second one has been published, would definitely need an overhaul. In fact, I don't think I still even have a copy of it, unless it's in one of the boxes of stuff I saved from USC....)

To get back in the flow, I began my practice by writing long-hand on looseleaf college-ruled paper with my favorite brand of pen, a blue medium PaperMate. This is how I started writing back in grade school and I wanted that reimmersion this time around. I wrote like this at the dining room table every night this week until tonight, when I decided I had a solid beginning for this story/essay and could step up to writing on the computer. I didn't begin writing on a computer until grad school - and I still refuse to write poetry on a computer. It took some getting used to, but now it's second nature.

Of course, working on a computer brings another layer of distraction, though.

The story is about me taking a questionnaire in college that said I was more gender identified as androgynous than as either female or male. So, I typed up what I had written by hand, went back over it a few times to get the rhythm right, and then decided that 1) I wanted to verify that I was using the word "rhetoric" appropriately (yes, I have a Master's degree and I still worry that I'm using specific terms incorrectly and have to check myself) and 2) that I wanted to see what a Google search on the term "androgynous" brought up.

Suddenly, writing becomes Googling and following links and before you know it, I've lost all the energy I had for the story and now I am all concerned that I have to find a way to specify that my sexual orientation was never in question, just my psychological connection with one gender or the other. (I have always been female, but I like spending time with males much more than I do females. This whole gender thing has become much less of a question as I've gotten older, though, because the more time I spend with men, the more I realize I have a truly feminine brain. I simply see things differently than they do, and I am convinced it's based on brain morphology and chemistry.) I took notes on terms like "androgyne" and "bigender" and "ambigender" and "gender fluid." None of these terms are likely to be useful in the short story I'm writing, and the fact that I suddenly know them makes me want to use them and that makes it more likely that the piece I'm writing will read like an essay, and even though I've said I don't care which I'm writing, I think I really do hope I'm writing a short story. Having the Internet so readily available when I was writing Your Mileage May Vary was awesome because I could easily look up facts about towns I was writing about without having to break focus for very long. If I truly am writing fiction, though, I may have to develop some kind of mechanism to keep myself from hopping over to Google in the middle of a writing session.

And now I've spent more time writing about my writing session than I did actively writing during the writing session.

The Super Me
Mood:  flirty
Now Playing: Superman by REM
Topic: Daily Eruptions

When I went to Michigan for Chad's wedding, all the guys were busy comparing notes on which superhero they were according to a quiz one of them had circulated. I have since been allowed into their secret male society (or so they would have me believe), and was able to take the quiz for myself....

My results:

I am Superman

Superman 85% Spider-Man 85% Wonder Woman 75% Supergirl 70% Robin 65% Hulk 65% The Flash 55% Green Lantern 55% Iron Man 55% Batman 40% Catwoman 40%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

 

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Hans is absolutely NOT going to buy the "mild mannered" bit! 

And, if we were going strictly based on gender, I would be Wonder Woman, which I would actually prefer.  At least then I could put my experience wearing a push-up bra to good use!

Creative Eplorations
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I am so lucky that I got to spend part of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 looking into the faces of some very beautiful children.  It was my first day working with elementary students in an afterschool program.  My goal is to get the children to think about creativity as it informs their entire lives, and to understand they can be creative in many different ways and enjoy doing it.  Creativity and art are two separate things, so we will be playing lots of games to get the children to immerse themselves in spontaneous creation without worrying about the end product.

The kids I'm working with range from kindergarten to fifth grade and it is a really interesting experience to be surrounded by kids with that range of development.  The younger children are so open, even if they're shy, and you can tell that even though they just met you, they trust you.  The older kids are a little more reserved and skeptical, and there are two people in particular I may need to win over.  They may be just a little too cool for me and my crazy ideas, and they are already setting themselves apart physically from the rest of the children.

We played the name game I learned in a college psych class where you choose an adjective that begins with the same letter as your first name and go around in a circle and have to remember all the name combinations of everyone who came before you, except that I was the only one who had to remember and that loosened the kids up some and got them laughing.  We ended with a game where we all stood in a circle and each person in turn performed a movement, then we had to do all the movements in sequence like some silly dance.  The kids loved it and jumped right in.  The scary thing is that even the younger kids know hip hop moves I can't reproduce!  I can tell already that my eight hours with them are going to go too quickly!

As for the rest of 9/11/2006, I finally feel I have my artistic response to the WTC bombing.  It took five years, but I know what I need to say now.  (I may be ahead of my time in some ways, but I am very slow in others!)  Of course, "knowing" what I want to say, and actually saying it are two different things, and I haven't actually written my response yet.  But I will.  Hopefully, this week.  Then there's a question of dissemination.  I think my response needs to be physically manifested onto a small artifact (also not yet designed) and mailed, which will mean time spent creating the art and gathering addresses for people I don't have currently on file....  It might mean I won't have time to design and make holiday cards this year.  Or it might mean I spend a year creating the response and the mailable artifacts and that my response goes public in time for 9/11/07. 

I don't know yet.  But I am happy, at least, to have some coherent idea at last for my response.  Other writers and poets and artists were articulating ideas within days of the bombing, and I was amazed they could process so quickly and questioning my own artistic merit because I was just overwhelmed and speechless.  Holding my infant nephew on my lap as I watched the towers collapse was the only thing that gave me strength five years ago, and thoughts of him and the children he will grow up with are still my primary sources of strength and hope now.  Listening to Sherman Alexie and Naomi Shihab Nye speak at Hugo House in Seattle a month after the attack finally stopped my emotional hemorrhaging.  Maybe writing this and mailing it into the world will allow me to finally remove the bandages.

OS X
Mood:  spacey
Now Playing: "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Apparently the problem I'm having with Tripod really does have to do with working on Mac OS X.  I can blog from my PC at work and get all of my formatting to come out right, but when I blog from my Mac at home, I can't get my line breaks to appear.  Very frustrating, but at least I know now what the problem is....

Time to Change...Nothin' Stays the Same
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Daily Eruptions

Chad's wedding a week ago stirred a lot up.  Playing with my hair and makeup and designing my own slightly "out there" earrings was fun and I enjoyed feeling like a girl again for a few hours.  This morning I exploded a little more than I should have when Hans said he wasn't interested in hearing me tell him about a disorder where people can't remember faces, even faces of their own children, spouses, or parents, and I realize now that I overreacted because I felt he was editing me.  He was saying I'm interested in this part of you, but not this part, and that totally pissed me off.  I'm feeling boxed in and defined again - and he has a lot to do with where the walls and the definitions are.  So I came home from the park, still pissed off, and decided to burn off some energy with music.  Somehow, my fingers landed on Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood CD from 1989 and I cranked that and danced around the house singing, in part to piss Hans off because he hates the way I sing.  I freaked the dog out some because she's not used to seeing me jump around like that.  She really wanted to play, too, she just couldn't figure out what the game was. 

So what I know now is that it's time to redefine myself again - for myself, because I'm feeling bored and stagnant with who I am.  Scott and Rich helped me with that after I came home from U. S. PIRG in 1993, going to USC in '94 helped again, and the Big Ride was my last big remodeling project, but that was in 1998.  I feel like I finally learned my last lesson from that experience last summer - seven years after the end of the Ride, which, BTW, is exactly how long I anticipated it would take me to fully process the seven week journey - and now I'm ready for another life-changing experience.  Doing the triathlons in 2001 and 2002 helped some, but they were really just extensions of the Big Ride.  It's time for something new and wild, I just don't know what that new and wild looks like yet.

aargh!
Mood:  d'oh
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Tripod changed the way users enter blog posts recently, and I don't like the new format.  My last post refuses to accept paragraph breaks no matter how I try to enter them!  Even worse, everywhere I try to enter a paragraph break, the program deletes all spaces altogether, so the two lines I'm trying to separate actually run together....  Just goes to prove, especially where technology is involved, "the more I know, the less I understand."

My Day of Beauty
Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: I Feel Fine sung by Curtis Stigers
Topic: Body Awareness

I woke up this morning dreaming that I was spending the day at the spa, and at the end of my beauty treatments, I got a full body massage.  Wishful thinking!  I have never had a day at the spa, nor a full body massage from a professional massage therapist, but what a dream that would have been compared to the day I actually had!

I am leaving for Michigan and Chad's wedding in four hours and twelve minutes.  In preparation, I took a vacation day to try to get beautiful.  What a joke!  What happened to the days when I could order a dress in a size 8 from a catalog and have it fit perfectly, spend $10 on lipstick and eyeshadow, put a coat of polish on my own nails by myself, and make an appointment to get my hair styled at a salon and look beautiful in about ninety minutes? 

Now I have to spend HOURS trying on dresses with various undergarments to try to find something even halfway flattering.  For this wedding I ended up going with separates because my upper body is a larger size than my lower body.  I also have to spend hours searching for what might be the right shades of eyeshadow, lip color, and blush before I come home and spend hours experimenting with all the different powders and pencils and creams trying (and failing) to achieve the youthful, natural look I used to get in less than ten minutes. 

The biggest reason for this is that I simply don't wear makeup in my real life any more and so it just isn't second nature.  When Hans and I started getting serious, he made it clear that he thought I looked most beautiful "natural."  He likes my hair best straight and down and just after I've woken up before I've brushed it.  He thinks the message I send to the world when I wear makeup is that I'm insecure.  He thinks nail polish - especially on toes - looks trashy, while I LOVE to look down and see a bright color on pretty hands.  I stopped "doing" my hair because it is so thick and heavy that it requires massive product (or a perm, which Hans really hates) to hold a style and Hans is allergic to any product that has fragrance added.  Needless to say, I haven't worn perfume in the last twelve years.  I started to feel after awhile that I was missing a big part of myself by banishing all beauty products from my life, and I rebelled.  Unfortunately, I now find myself allergic to most eye makeup and products with fragrance added, so the last time I bought makeup was seven years ago for my own wedding.  The thing that broke my heart the most is that Cover Girl stopped making the Candlelit Dreams eyeshadow kit!  I discovered this four-pack of mauves and pinks when I was nineteen and it was the only eyeshadow I wore until I was thirty!  Now I don't know what I'm going to do....

So I spent the day doing my own manicure and pedicure and coloring and highlighting my own hair.  I got a really good cut two weeks ago that Hans also likes.  He tried to convince me that I had a nice, natural halo of highlights around my face already from a summer spent in the sun and that my gray hairs weren't noticeable.  I, however, see only my grays when I look in the mirror and insisted on coloring my hair.  I didn't think we could afford for me to get it done professionally, so I agonized over the choices available at CVS before finally buying a color and highlight 2-in-1 kit that said it was for dark brown to black hair and that it would minimize red/orange tones.  The allover color is a pretty good match, fairly close to what my hair naturally looks like in February.  The highlights, however, are a completely different story!  They turned bright orange!!  

I panicked and called everyone I could think of for advice - including Loreal but their line was constantly busy, apparently because many other women in bathrooms around the ccountry were flipping out over their results, too - before finally realizing that I could bury the most glaring of the orange patches (in my bangs!) by parting my hair on the other side.  Then I put my hair in a tight ponytail and headed outt for the post office because I had books I absolutely had to get in the mail today for work.  My intention was to go straight from the post office to the first hair salon I could find - I'm still going to a salon in Wake Forest 90 minutes away because I'm too afraid to let anyone else cut my hair, but I didn't have time to drive there today.  I don't know anyone in the town where I live or within a  forty minute drive.  I bonded with my neighbor one afternoon when I thought Hans had left me because she's the only person I know in North Carolina who is going through a divorce and I was in desperate need of a consultation, but she wasn't home today and it might have been too weird for me to show up at her door a second time all freaked out and asking for advice.  So I went to the person in town who probably knows me best - the postman!  Him I see a couple times a week and we chat about all the places we've lived and the weather and so when he was weighing my books today I asked, "Your wife doesn't by any chance run a beauty salon, does she?"

"Why?"

"Because I just died my hair orange!"

He protested that he didn't see orange, so I took the ponytail down and fluffed the hair around my bangs, and he still said he didn't see orange. 

At this point, a woman came out from the back and said, "I have dark hair, too, and I pay someone a lot of money to put that color in my hair." 

They each asked me to turn around for them and they both insisted that it looked good, that it didn't need fixing, and that I should go to Michigan and enjoy my best friend's wedding.  Now, I know this is pathetic, but this is how crazy my life is!  Yes, I really did take the advice of two near strangers at the post office, left my hair free of its ponytail holder, and continued on to Michael's where I bought the beading wire I needed to make the earrings I designed to go with the two-piece dress I'm wearing to the wedding, and then on to the grocery store, where I think one man did something of a doubletake when I passed, but I can't be sure.

In any event, I have prepared Chad that a very colorful, giant, satin shrouded clown with orange, straggly hair and gaudy makeup may be in attendance at his wedding.  He said he'll still love me no matter how I look.  And, how I'll look is still in question, because I have only practiced my hair once - and I did not succeed in putting it up - and I still haven't nailed down my eyshadow combination or tried all of my makeup on all at once.  I'm going to wash my hair six times tomorrow to try to get the color to fade some, and there's nothing else I can do at this point.  It's all quite sad!

Luckily, the wedding is at 1:00 on Saturday so I won't have much longer to agonize about it.  I'm hoping to spend some time with the guys later that evening, and I want to visit the cemetery on Sunday morning.  Then, I will either see Tad or my cousin and his family in the afternoon/evening, and then we're heading back home Monday.  It will be a whirlwind, but hopefully a good whirlwind - just like the rest of my life. 

Now, if I could only get that full body massage....  At this point, though, I have to just settle for three hours of sleep next to a man who has promised to tell me I look beautiful on Saturday whether he thinks I really do or not!

This Morning's Surprises
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

This morning Kaija and I came downstairs to find a small snake resting on a stick on our dining room table.  The snake and the stick were both contained in a 2 gallon plastic jar that once held pork rinds, my mom's gag gift to Hans last Christmas.  Inside the jar, there were also two fist sized rocks and a small plastic lid turned upside down and filled with water.  The very thin snake had the markings of a copperhead, but I couldn't tell by the shape of its small head whether it truly was a copperhead or the non-venomous look-alike that also inhabits this region. 

I find it amusing that my husband, who was so tired when he got home from work last night at 8:30 that he wanted to go straight to bed, took the time to poke holes in a plastic lid and create this makeshift reptile terrarium and then go out in the dark and catch a snake that he knew had a very small chance of being venomous.  Apparently he was so wrapped up in the task, he forgot to lock either lock on the front door before he came to bed - my and Kaija's second surprise of the morning.

If things had gone very badly overnight, we might have come downstairs to find that we had been robbed (although no one would probably want anything but the t.v. and that sucker's so heavy one man would have a difficult time lifting it off the mantle) and been bitten by a copperhead that had somehow escaped through one of the airholes in the plastic jar.

Hans would really like to take the snake to work to put on his desk - and the people he works with now would probably get a kick out of that (plus, it would give Hans a little bit of an edge and make him seem a little less square and normal in comparison with everyone else) - but we agreed the snake would be too difficult to feed.  I tried to get him to release the snake before he left for work this morning because I'm worried about its energy needs, but the best I could get was an agreement that he would let the snake go tonight when he gets home from work.  I checked each of the airholes really closely to make sure the snake couldn't somehow squeeze through any of them - the lid is a very rigid plastic and the holes are all smaller than the snake's head - while I am at work today because if it were to get loose, Kaija would immediately want to investigate.  Even though the snake is small, if it is poisonous, Kaija would be a goner because she is small, too, and young snakes tend to release all of their venom at once, rather than keep some in reserve as older snakes do.

Hans had clearly wanted the snake to be a surprise for me this morning because he didn't tell me about it when he came in last night.  (It's not the first time I've found a snake in a jar in my house.)  I asked Hans whether the "Hey, that's a cool snake on the dining room table," response I gave him when I returned from walking Kaija was the one he was looking for, or whether he was hoping to scare me.  He said if he wanted to scare me he would have put it in bed with me instead.  Aren't boys fun?