Odd and Curious Thoughts of the Week

April 15, 2012 By

This is a new series I thought would be fun.  At random times, I will share odd and curious things that entered my mind over the course of the last week.  They have no rhyme or reason to them, except to prove that I am actually, quite a bit, more-times-than-not, maybe-a-teeny-bit insane.

  • Today, I saw two grown men buy a cartload full of generic-brand grape soda.  Who likes generic soda? They unloaded cases of the stuff into their expensive car and drove off, and I was left scratching my head.   What in the heck are they doing with all of that?  And why didn’t they buy it in a variety of flavors? I almost stopped them to ask them a series of questions.  Are they just going to drink it?  Are they making cheap vodka shots out of it? It’ll rot your teeth, you know. Then I realized I don’t know these people. Move on, you weirdo, staring at other people’s groceries.
  • I saw a fox on the way to my son’s school last week.  Just crossing the street like it belonged there.  I felt I stepped into Aesop’s fables.  I expected there to be a bunch of grapes hanging on a tree somewhere and for the fox to learn a valuable lesson.  Okay, I didn’t actually expect to see a bunch of grapes hanging on a tree.  That would be weird. But then again, I didn’t expect to see grown men buying ten cases of generic soda.
  • I almost stepped on a scorpion last night.  I screamed like a baby and made my husband go kill it.  I couldn’t even wrap the dead little bugger up in paper towels and haul it to the trash because the stinger might still be active and pierce through the paper.   Those little pinchers are evil.  Do I really think scorpion poison can sear through paper and miraculously penetrate my skin causing extreme pain?  Do all my rational thinking skills evaporate after 9 pm?
  • Friday night, I invited friends to dinner fifteen minutes before I asked for them to be there.  As in – “hey – it’s 5:45 pm.  Wanna meet up at 6?” Because other people certainly have no life and sit around waiting for me to call.  Even if they didn’t have plans, they’d have to take the bat mobile to make it across town in fifteen minutes. Where are my manners? But how cool if it had worked out?
  • I made kale chips the other day.  Tossed them in olive oil and baked them until they were hot and crispy. I sprinkled them with salt and crunched every last one down.  My family made faces at me and said they were more than happy for me to eat up all that hot wrinkled lettuce.  “You go on ahead,” my husband said.  Whatever, people that I live with.  Those suckers were tasty.
  • A friend recently informed me that store-bought pie crusts are full of lard, which I didn’t think I cared about but it turns out I do.  I drove many miles to a store to buy whole-wheat, lard-free pie crusts, only to discover they cost five bucks each and I wouldn’t be home for hours.  It was a waste to leave them in the car to thaw.   So yes, I actually drove to a health store with every intention of buying pie crusts, and then changed my mind and left empty handed.  I am now dreaming of quiche and I wasted thirty minutes of my life last Tuesday.  I did manage to grab a free sample of hand lotion on my way out, so it wasn’t a total loss.
  • I asked my husband what type of bread he wanted me to bake tomorrow.  Did he have a special request?  What about sourdough?  Did he have an affinity for honey? He gave me a strange look, akin to find a new hobby or maybe go out more.
  • I placed numerous items (I won’t mention how many) in an online shopping cart at the most amazing/funky clothing store on the universe.  I wasn’t planning on actually buying them, because I am not cool enough and don’t have that much cash, but somehow adding them to my cart seemed entirely appropriate and not at all frivolous.
  • I was so desperate for something sweet the other night that I took a spoon and dug it into a jar of peanut butter.  After I finished the spoon-o-peanuts, I was a bit embarrassed with myself.  Have I really sunk to this?
  • Last, but not least, I received a response from an incredible literary agent in New York who said for me to be patient with him and that he promised to read my manuscript in the next few weeks.  I looked back at the version I sent him and noticed a glaring spelling mistake in the first paragraph.  I sent him and his assistant an apology email asking them to read the attached version with no spelling error.  I then made another error in the email to the agent, which caused a third email that simply said “I swear I know how to read and write.  Please believe me.”  And yet they don’t have to.  That’s the funny part.

Onward to next week, where more insanity will (very likely) ensue.

Filed Under: Humor, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

ribbons

March 20, 2012 By

I have articles from the Department of Justice sitting all around my ankles, sprayed out like a fan in neat little piles.  I haven’t strayed far from the computer for hours and a babysitter is attending to my daughter.  A half-started and half-witted attempt to summarize the laws of Medicare fraud lies unattended on the screen in front of me as deadlines await.  Deadlines that amount to paychecks, that amount to more gardening supplies and summer sundresses and art camps.  I will finish it on time.  I will somehow find the energy.  God let me finish.

It’s not that words are hard to come by.  I live in words. I both admire and abhor them.  I want to stomp on them like ripe grapes and feel the juice squirting out between my toes. The problem with words is that I simply can’t escape them.  I am drawn to words that make me laugh or cry or feel something different.  Legal writing doesn’t invoke that same emotion, which is why I drift into my daydreams.   Dreams of stories and beauty and adjective-filled rooms filled with light.

When I lie in bed at night, with dishpan hands and a tired back, my fingers tap away at some imaginary keyboard in the sky.  I can hear the repetitive sound of my hands striking the letters like summer storms on a metal roof.  Rapping and pelting and beating down while I’m trying to sleep or pray or just lie there in peace.  I try to shake them from my head, but like the ringing in one’s ears, it’s a fool’s game.

So I keep driving to the grocery store, or to the bank drive-through. I drop off my husband’s dry cleaning and help my daughter cut out caterpillars out of yellow construction paper. But sentences keep forming like ribbons out of my brain, some constant output I can’t seem to shut off.   My daily life is so busy I don’t often do  anything with them.  They are just mental litter, thrown away like discarded trash. There are times I just want words to leave me be.  To allow me to sit silently without thinking, or hearing that incessant tapping of the keys, or the phrasing of sentences.  I want to scream at them to shut up already.  Sometimes, I just want to sit and not think of all those stupid, stupid words.

But we all have our gifts, whether we are paid for them or not.  We all carry with us some unyielding urge to create, albeit in different forms.  I firmly believe that God chose to give each of us the gifts that we were meant to have, and there’s little way around it.  According to Exodus, the Lord told Moses that he chose Bezalel, son of Uri, to oversee the task of building the tabernacle. “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.”  Exodus 31:3.  Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 12 that all the gifts we have been given “are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one just as he determines.”

I may, or may not, ever get paid for my words.  The novel that took me years to finish, with nights of sobbing and mornings of great exaltations, might never be read by the New York Times or by a single woman in the suburbs of Chicago.  The words that plague my sleep and dominate my fingers might be small to most.  But they are ultimately from God.  They need to be used and cultivated so that when they spring forth from my head, they are as tulips rather than dandelions.

I thank God for words, even though sometimes they feel like a burden.  But when the burden is for a higher good, and the purpose so great, can one really complain?

Lord, please let my words and the aching of my heart be acceptable to you, in your sight, and in your most perfect glory.  Thank you for these ribbons that flow from my thoughts.  Help me piece and string them all together as jewelry fit for a king.   

Filed Under: Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

new beginnings

March 8, 2012 By

I quit my job.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie.  I walked out of my job as General Counsel for a large and wonderful company to stay home more.  To bake and volunteer and write.  And take the occasional calls from my former company that might crop up that they find useful to ask a lawyer.  But working from home in an oversized t-shirt billing by the hour, taking occasional phone calls from doctors that have questions, isn’t the same as really working.  I’ve always worked.  I went to law school to earn a great salary and feed my brain and wear heels.  I love heels.

But finally, I admitted to myself that I couldn’t keep up. There were select toilets in our home that even our dog wouldn’t drink from.  I was forgetting to pay bills and couldn’t seem to pack lunches and was always screaming at my daughter to get her shoes on.  I almost cried when I tried to bake homemade bread one weekend and the dough wouldn’t even rise.  My life was starting to spin out of control.  With two small children and a brain that never shuts off and writing that was finished inside my head but not yet recorded on paper, something had to give.  I was tired of running.  I was tired of yelling.  I was just flat-out tired.

So I stopped.

It’s been exactly four days since my newfound freedom.  I sent my son to day care every single day, which perhaps I should feel guilty about.  But I don’t.  I did heaps of laundry and sent off thank-you notes and made some tea.  I read some articles I’d been meaning to read and unpacked boxes of law books I schlepped home from my office.   I took a nap and read to my daughter and opened my eyes to what I’d been missing all this time.   Peace, really.  And clean toilets.

So here I sit.  I can feel a dozen years of legal experience begin the slow process of atrophy.  I can see that hanging on to my old world will not last forever, although billing by the hour is nice.  I feel God tugging on my sweater and tapping me on the shoulder, like something is just around the corner – up ahead.  I just can’t quite make it out with all the fog around me.  I’m defogging.  And praying.  And trying to learn how to bake bread.  For real.  Someone needs to send me a better recipe.

It’s a huge leap to quit a career.  It’s easy to tell people it’s for the kids.  So you can be a better mother.  But I didn’t think I was a horrible mother before.  I think it’s more about finding your footing.  Making sure the place that you stand is the place you really want to be.  Right now, in this moment, I know I’m heading in the right direction.  That’s something.  Even though it might not involve heels.

So here’s to freedom, wherever it takes me.  Probably to the grocery store.  And the bathroom, to clean more toilets.

Filed Under: Career, Motherhood, Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

blog envy

February 27, 2012 By

Let’s talk about blogs.  Some are snarky and edgy.  Some are serious and make you darn happy you don’t have a seeing-eye-dog.  But most are just fun and pretty, with creative names like “farm-girl-flower-power-cookie-pants” that make you want to stop by and visit, like you’re an old friend popping over for tea.  Except with handmade sugar cubes and madelines and hostess gifts wrapped in brown paper and twine.

If you search for half a second, you’ll find some beautiful blogger who lives on a farm and dedicates her life to building joyful memories for her children.  She bakes heart-shaped cinnamon rolls and wheat germ chicken nuggets.  She dreams up craft projects that instill character and creativity in a three-mile radius. She collects odd and beautiful things like wooden spoons or pewter vases or antique hats.   Who in the world collects antique hats?  And in case a picture is worth a thousand words, she captures the process of making buttermilk pancakes with her Nikon, the finished product displayed on a vintage china platter with little turrets of syrup running down like an afterthought.

I hate this perfect person, sipping with glee on chilled raspberry lemonade.  There’s no way I can hold in my stomach or put makeup on or get all my laundry done, much less make paper lanterns.  I tell my children to find something else to do that doesn’t involve screaming or coloring on the floor tiles while I scrub the dried baby food off the chairs or fold bath towels.  Never once do I sit down and make a wreath of dried flowers. Or have a discussion at the dinner table that’s worthy of blogging about.  Our dinner topics usually center around how many bites of a given vegetable are required before an excused exit.

“Eat your asparagus.”

“But I hate asparagus,” my five-year-old moans.

“You don’t hate it.  You might hate things like monsters and evil and rotten fish.  But this is asparagus!  It’s yummy and grilled!  It’s dusted with sea salt!”  She just stares at me like monsters and asparagus are on the same exact level.

So when I’m trying to conquer unrelated piles of old bills and insurance paperwork, mixed with children’s artwork and coupons, I feel like an utter failure.  Why am I not tying a towel around my childrens’ necks and snapping pictures of them jumping off the coach like superheroes?  Why are we not eating frittatas with arugula, or making a may pole?  Those pretty, cooking, farm-loving, crafty bloggers make me feel all inadequate and un-motherly.  And to top it all off, they make me laugh one moment and tear up like a Hallmark commercial the next.  One has a rare blood disorder and adopted three children from Vietnam.  How can I possibly hate that?

It says in Ecclesiastes that all the toil that comes from envying one’s neighbor is pure vanity and is just striving after the wind.  4:4.   So if I dropped what I was doing and made a fabulous batch of cinnamon scones, does that mean it’s all for not?  I think it depends on who I’m trying to impress.  And what recipe I used.

Hate, after all, is reserved for monsters and evil and rotten fish.

Women bloggers are lovely strangers, blessed with wildflowers that bloom every spring, with great recipes for chicken pot pie and peanut butter bars.  They are just mothers, like me, who have moments of brilliance and beauty and joy amidst the unfortunate discovery of shriveled-up hot dogs found under bedcovers.  I am glad they are raising up such strong and spirited children that make the world a better place. They are trying to live simply, and have the guts to write about it. We should all strive to reach that balance, and to plant this world with the same rich heritage seeds.

Thank God for these writers, and discovers, and healthy recipe hunters, who give us ideas and motivation and encouragement.  One rainy Tuesday, when I think of a craft project out of the blue for our two edgy children, I’ll thank them.   Our daughter will beg to watch television and our son would rather eat more applesauce or stick his hands in the dog’s water bowl.  I’ll be the one left sitting at the table gluing shards of paper onto coffee filters, and dinner will consist of scrambled eggs and toast. But still. Thanks all the same.

There’s always tomorrow, when we will have lemon buttermilk pancakes with sugared walnuts.   Too bad my camera battery’s dead and no one will ever know.

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Ah, Writing

July 27, 2011 By

I think there’s some mystique about writing in the general public, like authors have golden keys to secret cabins in the woods where they can brew hot tea at ten in the morning if they darn well feel like it.   Being an author is carefree.  It means independence and wild frizzy hair, where writer’s block lasts minutes, not hours, and words flow like warm maple syrup over porous paper pancakes, soaking in sentences with gratitude.  It’s a free life, not being chained to corporate America and doing your own thing.  Ah, to be a writer. I have a book idea in my head, people say.  I’ve started a few pages.  How hard can it be?

I’d guess running a marathon backward is hard.  Or cooking a soufflé on a yacht with a hand beater.  Getting the president on the phone is probably a challenge.  Scaling a mountain.  Singing an aria.   Living with your mother-in-law. All tough, I imagine. But writing a book – a really good one at least – is much harder than these things.   There is a reason people give up too easy.  It’s easy to give up.

In my mind, no one chooses to be a writer.  No one longs to work a day job and cook supper and put two exhausted kids to bed, only to trudge upstairs and write.  At least not me.  I’d rather be watching television or eating ice cream.  Going for a walk or laughing with my husband.  Anything but writing.  Or worse, editing words that you’ve seen so many times before.  Cutting out hundreds of pages.  Re-writing entire chapters.  Reworking and rethinking and getting no feedback but your own self-doubt.  You’ll never make it.  You’re a failure.

But there’s a voice, way back in my head in some dusty place, that won’t shut up until my fingers start clicking on the keyboard.  Only then, when I’m unleashing the characters from their prison, does it cease screaming at me.  Finally, at 2 am when tears are pouring down my cheeks – big fat ones that come from grinding out my heart on paper -do I feel somewhat normal.  When I’m finished, exhausted and dehydrated, I can finally rest in peace.  The voice is stilled.

Being a writer is not something I necessarily wanted to do.  I think it chose me, like love or static cling.   Stories nag at me until I listen.  Sometimes characters appear in dreams or situations pop out their ugly faces at me in the shower. Often, plot ideas dangle in my view of traffic like little spiders as I’m driving to work.  I hate spiders.

I occasionally hang out with other writers so I don’t feel so crazy.   Even though deep down, I know I am.  I was talking to a writer friend the other day about how stupid we are for going down this road of writing and editing and rejections.  She got a rejection letter at 6:00 am on a holiday.  I mean really.  Can’t agents at least wait until we drink our morning coffee?

And yet despite it all, I go back.  My secret love.  Sometimes I lie and tell my husband I’m just checking my email when I’m really going upstairs to work on a paragraph.  A sentence here, a chapter there.  After all, it doesn’t edit itself.

I went to a writer’s conference a few weeks ago, which did nothing but fill me with dread and fear.  Agents get so many manuscripts – hundreds a week – that they are forced to be competitive.  “Start off your book with fireworks,” one agent said, “because if the writing doesn’t capture us in the first few pages, it’s going to be rejected. “ I went to Barnes & Noble after work the following week and leafed through the first two pages of every women’s fiction piece I laid my eyes on.  I was a crazy woman, opening and reading the first two pages and then throwing one down and picking up another.

“Can I help you find something?” a saleslady asked. She looked at me like I was off my medication.

“No,” I said.  “Just looking.”  I tried to giggle but it just came out like a squeaky crazy-person grunt. I forced myself to set the books down more gently.  I told myself not to sigh and mutter things like “damn you Brunonia Barry!” and “well sure, start off with a cigarette burn why don’t you, Kristin freaking Hannah.”  My hair was wild and tangled, my hands shaking from the large amount of ingested caffeine.  An empty Starbucks cup was balanced precariously in my purse and I noticed later I had a pair of reading glasses perched on my head as well as balanced on my nose.  I think I took my shoes off at the end of the NYT Bestseller rack and hadn’t noticed that I was barefoot.  Whoops.

I got up the next day and furiously re-wrote the first two pages of my book six times.  “How about this version?” I asked one friend.  “What about that?” I screamed at another.  I was like a gopher, popping up out of holes with a new novel version every time.  Finally, when I was reduced to a ball of tears, feeling like I wasted three years of my life that could never be regained, I went home early from work.  I was so focused that I didn’t even turn on the air conditioning, and in an eighty-degree house, I marched upstairs with a firm resolve.

I can’t live like this, I thought to myself.  I barely had the patience to wait until my computer booted up before firing my book off to ten more agents, sweating and cursing.  Screw the consequences.  So the intro doesn’t have firecrackers or start off with a death or the baking of a lemon pie. I’ll just get rejected anyway.  Why does it matter so much?

It’s not always romantic, this writing thing.  I just have to keep listening to the voice, the one who tells me to keep on writing.  To keep remembering the stories, and the dreams, and the visions.  I have to tell myself that there’s a reason this chose me.  That God put this burden on my heart.  Someday, an agent will say yes.  Hell yes! Absolutely yes!

Then, and only then, I’ll fall down in tears of joy and realize the voice is not a crazy hallucination, but a blessing.  Until then, bear with me.  I’m the one in the corner typing. Without shoes.  With two pairs of glasses and shaking, medication-seeking hands.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

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