Emu dream

I had a dream last night we raised emus. Not for money or whatever else one would raise emus for, but rather they were just always there and we had always done it. We had built them a home in the backyard (which looked suspiciously like a live action version of farmville) and they just hung out back there.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an emu in real life. My dream emus looked more like ostriches.

They were big birds and took up a lot of space back there, so I was always worried about that. Then it turned out the food we were giving them was wrong so I was online looking up what emus eat and someone runs in the house and is like, the emus have gotten out. I wasn’t giving them enough water, so they jumped the fence and were drinking out of the neighbor’s pool.

We corralled them to our side of the fence and gave them water and they were happy, until one of them (a baby) died and so I had to clean up a dead bird. (I have to do that all the time in my back yard. But I clean up baby pigeons, not baby emus. Obviously.) Finally, I fell asleep in my dream while holding an emu. Apparently, it was my favorite one.

Then my dream shifted to scorpions and I watched a scorpion creep up the dream bedroom wall.

SCENE!

OK. So. I get scene. I get it. I am confident I can write a scene with the emotional charges and the conflict and the desires and the ups and downs. Scenes make sense to me.

However. I cannot seem to translate this to a massive critical paper. I know it. So why can’t I just write it? What in the hell is wrong with me?

I have three weeks to fix my paper, write a new story, and revise an old one. Looks like I picked the wrong time to put the brakes on my prescription pill addiction.

Someone get that kid out of the fire

That night wasn’t even the worst night. The kids were jumping through the fire. One tripped, fell, and laughed. He rolled around and then seemed to pass out within inches of the flames. There were a ton of different groups out there that night. There was the main floor–the fire floor– and everyone else was in their groups with their friends.

We were like, “Someone needs to get that kid out of the fire.”

It was funny because he didn’t get hurt. No one got hurt. That’s why we continued to go back. We didn’t suffer consequences.

The critical paper. It keeps going and going….

I didn’t know it was the Super Bowl this weekend. I am not rooting for anyone, not even the commercials. When was the last time there was a truly amazing and clever Super Bowl commercial?

Received the critical paper feedback this morning. I have a lot of work to do. A whole lotta work to do before March 1. The thing is sitting on my desk fully intact, but I have to cut it up into pieces and then sew it back together. The problem is that I suck at sewing.

In Home Ec class in seventh grade, our final project was putting together a pillow. There were many shapes and sizes and colors to choose from. I chose a banana pattern. Some girl (not my friend) made a lewd comment about why I would choose a banana. She was not trying to make a joke with me, rather, she was making a joke at me to her friend who was next to me.

When I was a senior in high school, I got into Peer Leadership. Or, wait. It was Peer Group. Something like that. I wanted two things. I wanted my picture in the yearbook more than once and I wanted to go back to the junior high and be in the vignettes about drinking and driving and drugs like I had seen high school kids do when I was in seventh grade.

By this time, the junior high was a new junior high in a new building, but the teacher was my old teacher. Vignettes were part of days gone by. We sat in the front of the room and the kids asked us questions about what it’s like to grow up. I was wearing a long skirt with flowers on it, dumb shoes, and a sweater. I think I looked like a nerd. It was probably clear I was still a virgin.

I don’t remember the specific question, but I remember answering several girls questions like this: I was chubby back when I was your age, I had no friends, but I got good grades, and I still get good grades and I will be a success and all those dumb girls who laughed at me are pregnant now.

There was a rash of pregnancies among the alt-cool chicks in my school. Anyway. My agenda that day was clear.

After class let out and the high school kids I came with were all getting ready to leave, the teacher who was my teacher said she just remembered that I was quiet, not that I was a super freak. I was like, yeah, well, that was how I felt inside. She shook her head. She said every 11 year old feels that way.

Then I wondered if I didn’t just make it all up. Was it that bad? Or was being 11 and 12 and 13 just so charged with hormones that everything feels bad? Were there good parts to those years? People who are 11 and 12 and 13 have good times. I had good times. It was all good then. I’m making it negative because I am a negative person. Right? Is that what is going on?

This is what I remember: My home life was shit because of El Stepdad. I didn’t have friends. Boys made fun of me for being chubby. Gym class was a fucking nightmare. A girl in my Home Ec class suggested I was making a banana pillow because I wanted a boyfriend.

I’d be curious to find out what other people remember. Do we all hate ourselves in junior high? Do we all think everyone else hates us? Was it so horrible?

My sophomore year of college found me boozing and partying and what not, and I remember planning a trip back to my hometown and trying to connect with old friends. Everyone was on the cusp of finding entertainment outside the hometown, but there were still plenty of us coming in every weekend for parties.

I called this girl who I thought I had been friends with senior year and I was like, I’m coming in, she said, wow, ok, I’ll be around too, and I said, I want you to know that I have changed. I have had sexual intercourse, I have tattoos, I smoke and drink and I’m a rebel now. I was That Girl all over the phone. My non-friend friend was like, um…call me I guess. I tried calling her all weekend. In high school, she had tattoos. She slept with guys. She smoked. I wanted her to think I was the shit. I left her messages all weekend. I never talked to her again. Never. I went back to college and I was like, holy shit. I am still a super freak. I am a needy, pathetic, freak that needs so much approval all the time. That’s how I always got sucked into those unhealthy friendships where girls would just shit all over me because I let them, because I thought that made me likable. It’s why I had terrible relationships with guys. Because I wanted them to like me so bad that it hurt me, it physically caused me pain.

So what have I done? I decided to become a writer, a career that constantly seeks and needs attention and approval. Good choice.

On the mysteries of manners.

This afternoon I finished reading Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor. Her ruminations on the craft of writing were less encouraging and more admonishing. I felt like she was speaking to me from on high, saying writing is this and if you don’t have this then just stop it. I don’t know if she was admonishing me personally, but rather the whole world. Look, F.O. gets writing. She is good at it. She knows it. She deserves to be where she is. She has smart things to say and everyone should want to listen.

Oh, and she’s into peacocks.

I liked a lot of what she had to say. For example, “It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.” Dude. True. I had a friend of a friend approach me and ask me to review a letter she was writing to get into some trade school thingy. I told her I wrote fiction. Like…that’s kind of it. But she really wanted me to look at it and so I did and I was like, “I don’t know. That’s great.” People have asked me to review their resumes, review their cover letters. Um…I can’t even write my own cover letters and my own resumé is probably a nightmare.

F.O. had my ear until about the end when she tossed in this whole jam about Catholics and writing and morals and Catholics and Catholics and the novelist and Catholics. In previous sections, she’d written a lot about the southern writer and how the southern writer needs to respect the region and how the southern writer has a reputation for the grotesque. I don’t know what she had to say about the Catholic thing because I skipped it. I was like, no way. No thanks. I’m all set. I have nothing against Catholics. I just don’t care about what F.O. has to say about them. And, of course, F.O. is a Catholic. So, really, her book about writing is really just about herself. I can appreciate that.

After I put the book away I wondered if I should go back and read it for the sake of reading it. It’s part of the book, I should read it. I paged back through some of it. What I think happens is that she talks about how the good Catholic in this day and age (she was writing in the 50s and 60s) can produce a novel that keeps with “his” (she uses the pronoun he and his when identifying writers, which I think is interesting because more modern craft books and writing about writing books use the pronoun “she” and “her” when referring to writers) religious doctrine.

I’m not a religious person, so I don’t battle my religion when I write. I don’t know a lot of people who do anymore. OK, I know one person, but that’s a different post and it’s kind of a different situation.

Anyway, the part with the Catholics was boring. It was boring because it had no immediate interest for me. But then I started feeling guilty. Just because it’s not about me or whatever, I should still read it.

Then the guilty spiraled into my yearly inner chastising for never having read the Bible. The Bible is one of those things I always think I should read, but I just don’t want to read it. I got the major parts of it in CCD but every so often people throw out Bible references that I don’t get. Or else I’ll read a story and love it and think it’s so original and someone will say, “Well, that story came from the bible. The Book of John such and such.” I feel lame.

I also feel lame that I’ve never read Moby Dick. I don’t want to read Moby Dick. But I feel guilty that I don’t want to read it, like, I’m not a real writer if I haven’t read Moby Dick or the Bible or F.O.’s long section about Catholic writers.

Could I write a book about writing? What do I know about writing? Maybe I don’t know anything about writing, but I could tell you a lot about reading. I know what I like to read. I know there are thousands of books out there for me to read and each one of them has about 30 seconds to catch me.

I am broke and you so paid

I have been sitting here for twenty minutes, toggling back and forth between my empty gmail and this stupid blinking cursor trying to think of something to write. I got stuck in a story yesterday morning and since then I haven’t been able to think of one single interesting thing. I feel blank.

I opened up a bunch of stories thinking I’d find some excerpt to post. When in doubt, copy and paste. There is nothing. There is nothing good or interesting in this entire computer.

My guess is that I should get off the computer and go read something. I had a credit at a bookstore and I went this morning and picked up two books I wanted. I then added those two books to the 14 on my bookshelf that I haven’t gotten to.

I’ve been by myself too much lately. I’m understimulated. When I am understimulated I get super high strung anxious for a few days and then that settles down into blahness because being super high strung anxious for a few days in a row (the kind that keeps me awake at midnight, sitting in front of HBO, watching the end of Notorious) is tiring. I remembered the East Coast/West Coast fued. I remembered being underage inside The Lumberjack House grinding with some guy during “Hypnotize.” I remembered a girl at the end of my hall obsessed with Tupac. She dressed like Tupac. Tupac covered her dorm room door. Tupac music came out of her dorm all day and all night.  I think she had a roommate for awhile, but the roommate moved out. Rumor around the hall was that Tupac had something to do with it. I seem to think I stood up on the bar at San Felipe’s and danced it out for California Love.

Tales of sickness

The absolute worst part of sickness is the morning. I’m about 95% over the junk, but I’m still waking up in the morning with a stuffed nose and coughing. That shit lingers. I’ll be doing this all week. My tasting is still off because of the old sinuses. Everything is just sort of bland. That’s depressing. Also, my ears on better, but now instead of feeling like I’m coming down in an airplane with ears that won’t pop, I feel like I’m on the ground with ears that still won’t pop. They are crackling, but not popping. Stay tuned for updates.

A few years ago, my husband and I went to Rhode Island with his family. I had a cold the week before we went but was mostly on the mend by the time we left. Do not go on a plane when you have a head cold. I’m serious. I was in tears by the time we landed. Tears of pain and sadness. My husband looked over at me and he was like “Holy shit. What is going on.” I just shook my head and pointed to my ear because I couldn’t speak.

Yesterday we went to see a movie. Up in the Air. It’s good. Kind of sad. But real. I love that about movies. I was chewing popcorn and swallowed wrong. A bit of the kernel scratched my throat or something because first I was choking, but then I was coughing. Like, hard, throaty, wet coughing. It was so embarrassing. I coughed and coughed. I was boxed in and the trailers were running so I couldn’t get out, somehow didn’t want to get out, and I just coughed and coughed until it was over and there were tears streaming down my face, not from crying but from the force of my body trying to get out whatever has been lurking in my lungs. Totally gross. Totally not cool in public.

My husband, on food

ON DONUTS

“What did you do with the last donut?”

“I threw it away.”

“Oh my god. Why? Why would you do that?”

“It was hard. It’s been sitting there for two days.”

“You don’t even know anything about donuts. You put it on a plate, you put it in the microwave for 10 seconds and then it is just as fresh as it was on Sunday.”

_______________________________

ON CHOCOLATE COVERED STRAWBERRIES

“Here, eat this last one. I can’t eat it.”

“It’s dark chocolate.”

“So what?”

“I don’t like dark chocolate.”

“You ate that one. Look, you ate the whole thing. There is nothing left but the leaf.”

“The difference between you and me is that I eat things I don’t like.”

“That’s dumb. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it.”

“Look. I’m reasonable. You are not.”

This is more for me than it is for you.

I’m working on a new story. (Pause for applause.) Anyway…

I don’t really like talking about my stories, mostly because I’m too awkward to articulate what any of them are about. I think I become visibly anxious when someone asks me what I write about. I’ve never been able to actually say what I write about. I think what I want to say is: I write about me. But that doesn’t really work. And I don’t really always write about me. It’s me, but then it’s not. It’s weird. I usually say I write about life, which is super generic. Then they’ll say, “So, like, what about life?” Then I start shaking and they’ll say, “Just tell me about the last story you wrote.” And I’ll say, “Um…it was this girl…and she…you know, has this thing…and….” for the past six years, I’ve been trying to come up with a good answer to what I write. Right now, I’m using “literary fiction.” Whether or not I write literary fiction is up to the eye of the beholder. Let’s just say that’s what I’m trying to write. What are my subjects? Anyone I find interesting.

Here’s a little gem from Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor:

“You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will.” – Flannery O’Connor

I love this quote so much I want to take it to bed.

Last semester I experimented with POV. I wrote two stories in the third person and they were flat and dead. I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating. I’m saying that because I know. I’m not sure if they were flat because it’s just not in me to write in another POV or if I wasn’t using the right subjects.

I just started a story where I’m trying to, at the very least, submerge the “I.” It’s a “we” story, which I have always been intriguing to me. I’m doing my best to leave the “I” out of it and I have a vague notion that by draft two or three it could be a third person story. Like, I have to trick myself into writing a third person story maybe.

The story comes from a Daniel Johnston song called “Devil Town.” And the first time I heard it (performed by Bright Eyes) I immediately thought of my hometown. The song goes like this: I was living in a devil town/didn’t know it was a devil town/oh lord it really brings me down/about the devil town/all my friends were vampires/didn’t know they were vampires/turns out I was a vampire myself/in the devil town

Yeah, screams home to me. Right?

So I’m writing a “we” story in the devil town. I’m wrote 11 pages on Monday, but they were all fucking terrible. I got rid of all of it on Tuesday and stared at my computer. Wednesday I couldn’t bear it. Yesterday I got back on the horse and pumped out 8 pages that were so-so. It’s hard to write out of the comfort zone.

It has been raining in Phoenix for three weeks.

My cat is trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what it is. He’s all up in my shit lately, purring and kneading and purring. Last night, he jumped up on my pillow and laid there for about 20 minutes before jumping down. This morning when I got up, he was sitting on my side of the bed flicking his tail back and forth and then he trotted ahead of me into the hall where there was a pile of cat vomit. What does he mean with all of this? What am I missing? His litter box is clean. His food and water are fresh. I gave him cat nip. He gets his little treats. Look, my cat is an asshole and 360 days out of the year he just keeps to himself. All of this means something.  

I’m still sick. What the fuck? I know. I am STILL SICK. Yesterday I started coughing, which is hot. Tonight we have plans and those plans are pre-paid and so I am going no matter what. I’m covered in that sick-sweat, which is foul. You know what I mean? That gross, filmy sheen of sickness that you wake up in, that you can’t shake?

My critical paper is finished, but still marked as a rough draft. I send it to my mentor Monday morning. I have a lot to say about that, but I’m still processing the trauma of it and might not be able to speak of it for awhile.

I am keeping a list of things I want to write about here, but the sickness and the writing of the critical paper keeps my mind occupied.

I love the rain. I want the desert to have the rain. But the cold, cold, gray skies and thick air is not helping the cold go away any faster.