Tag Archives: writing

May 21 2011

Give Me Back My Compass!

It has occurred to me again and again over the past few months that this blog has started to drift away from its moorings.  There was really not any defining purpose to what was here, but it seemed that posts would orbit around the general themes of families and their aftermath.

By that, I meant always to write about coming from a big family, how it has affected me, and how it makes my life now different from how it might have been otherwise.

For that reason, some of my posts about adoptive parenting, bad haircuts, my parents, my siblings, a love of reading, cooking and frugality…some of those posts have been solid and well-received.  And I think it’s because those have been posts that were of use to people.

Someone on the radio today was saying “I read ‘WE’ blogs, not ‘ME’ blogs.”  It made sense.  Blogs about things WE have in common, or blogs that can impact how people think about things, give them a new outlook, change routines – those are the ones with broader appeal and that’s what I want to get back to.

My core readers have been so very patient with me over the past year, as our family experienced my father’s death and the subsequent upheaval in our lives and the grieving process unfolding. Nobody came out and said “Hey….uh….we used to come here to find out about soup or laugh about haircuts or hear about how you accidentally walked into the Walmart men’s room.  What happened?”

What happened was that I allowed this to turn into a “me” blog, insofar as I began writing about things that didn’t really apply to anyone but me.  And that’s not what I want for this space.

Starting this summer, I’m going to begin archiving the old posts from 2006 through 2008.  I’m going to post more pictures, more helpful things, more positive things, or at least things that can make a difference.

When I gave myself permission to not post every single day, it relieved some pressure I’d put on myself, but I think not having that as part of my daily routine has hurt me more than it’s helped.  I’ll give myself through the end of June to ramp that back up and by July 1st, I hope to be posting daily again, and in a way that’s more productive and helpful.

I can’t promise I won’t occasionally just post what we had for dinner, and I will never abandon my occasional rants.  I just want to get back to thoughtful, funny or helpful topics.

Apr 27 2011

Easter Eggs, Reading and Weather Update

Yes, I’m still alive.  I just haven’t been blogging.

I just read today something attributed to Ben Franklin:  “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

I kind of feel like I’m in a holding pattern between those two things.  I’ve been reading a lot, and we spent time with my niece and her family over Easter.

We colored Easter eggs together on Saturday night — my niece and her husband and their five-year-old son, along with PC, Rabbit and me.  We spread paper over the table and dyed 36 eggs.  Rabbit and her little cousin kept looking for the cracked eggs so they could peel and eat them; my niece’s son probably ate ten boiled eggs during the course of their visit, but without the untoward side effects because he only ate the whites.

Sunday morning we went to my sister’s house for brunch and then the kids hunted for the eggs after my niece’s husband hid them in the back yard.  After all the eggs had been found (we thought), my sister’s dachshund, Toby, found the last one between two landscaping blocks.  He scampered up to Joan with the egg and put it at her feet.  Later, he was chewing on it and spitting out the shell.

We’d been inside for a while when Toby came running up to Joan and she thought he had a ball in his mouth.  After he coughed out his prize, we all laughed hysterically at the hard-boiled egg yolk he’d spit out on the carpet.

While we were outside with the kids, my sister and I were swapping stories with my niece about childbirth, cramps, feminine hygiene….we all talk so often by phone we really have no filter any more.  PC and my niece’s husband were nearby and suddenly one said to the other “Uh…you wanna go inside and talk about Kung Fu movies?”   So they did.

In other news, I finally went through all my papers, books, stacks of miscellaneous crap and cleaned my home office.  It was a mammoth task, but my little sanctuary is finally organized again.

It has been miserably cold and drizzly here for over ten days, making it difficult to get motivated about much of anything.  I’ve spent much of my off-work time reading on the Kindle, trying to get through the over 40 books I’ve received for my Kindle from publishers so I can write reviews. Most of them are really very good, but there have been a few that are so loathsome I couldn’t even finish them.

And I found out last week that later this year, over 11,000 U.S. libraries would be making their electronic book content available for Kindles, which is a major bit of good news to me!  Previously, Amazon wouldn’t participate, which I believe was so people would buy books instead of checking them out. However, I think the surge in sales of competing e-Readers was a big part of Amazon reversing their position in order to stay ahead of the competition.

That’s about all I have for today – I’m going to go outside now, because the sun just came out and I figure I’ll only have about ten minutes before it goes into hiding again!

Nov 1 2010

NaNoWriMo Mojo? Whoa!

I must be crazy.

Because on top of everything else I have going on this month (youth retreat, three listings under contract that close at or near the end of November, imminent family visits and hosting Thanksgiving for family)….I have decided to dive in and try NaNoWriMo.

That’s National Novel Writing Month. I would provide a link, but apparently their site has crashed because it is day one of the thirty-day writing frenzy wherein participants attempt to write, from scratch, a minimum 50,000-word novel.

I hope to be able to keep a running tally of the number of words I’ve written somewhere on my sidebar.  In the meantime, be patient with me.  I won’t be posting anything from my project, and I may be occasionally (or frequently) re-running some of my “best of” posts so I can concentrate on the big project.

The weird thing is that I had an amazingly vivid dream last night that kind of formulated a scene or a theme for what I’m going to be writing in November.

And now, I’m going to start.  Wish me luck!

Sep 21 2010

Finding a Way Back to Funny

Remember back in 2008 when I used to be funny?  Yeah, me neither.  Until this evening when I glanced back through some old posts and laughed out loud.

Truth is, life just hasn’t been very funny lately.  God bless the patient and loyal readers who have continued to click over to this blog, often hopeful of some lighter fare.  I’ve been trying to keep things light, but some evenings I sit down at the computer and stare at the keyboard and my hands and there’s just nothing.

About eleven months ago, my dad’s illness began to consume the family.  And then it just spiraled into worse and worse and the nightmare quieted to a harsh reality that he would be leaving us.

In the middle of all of that, a sibling who had struggled all of his life began to unravel, and our family clashed in grief and anger about how and whether at all to help him.  We finally got our butts in gear and figured out a plan for him and he is getting some help.

THEN, we’ve been dealing with my dad’s estate, including rental houses that need to be sold in a tiny town in a depressed economy. One of the rental houses was occupied by a family of meth-cooking squatters with a box full of goopy-eyed kittens, junk cars in back and extended family of all ages sleeping on filthy mattresses throughout the house.  After they were finally evicted, we discovered a poster on the wall of the house in which one of the former occupants referred to my sister (whose husband gifted her with a new sporty car after she underwent cancer treatment last year) as “that bitch in the red Camaro.”

On top of it all, here at home we’re battling a bleak economy and PC has been desperately searching for work.  He had found a job doing some painting for a person who promised all the hours he wanted, and then within four days, the work dried up.  We discovered that the employer had some disturbing marks on his criminal record for assault against employees, so it was back to the drawing board.

PC did get a job offer last Friday, though!  Full time with benefits, to start in two weeks.  The pay is not much, but we have not had medical insurance in almost three years, so it is a Godsend.  We hope for the real estate market to pick up, but in the meantime have worked out an agreement to not incur a late penalty on our October mortgage payment and just need to tough it out through October.

So this is why 2010 hasn’t had its “Hair Retrospective” post, its more clever or witty essays.  Sometimes life just isn’t hilarious, and when it is, sometimes I’m just so consumed by everything else I forget to write it down. For those of you hanging in there with me, I appreciate it.  For those of you just finding your way here…stick around.  Things are getting better.

May 18 2010

ONE THOUSAND

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking to myself:  what’s it all about, Mary?  What’s the point of this blog, because now that I am at the computer and tapping out the contents of post number ONE THOUSAND (yes, really!) I should have an idea of what it is I’m trying to accomplish besides getting something out of my system.

Having a platform for expression is fine.  But it’s also an opportunity. Am I a mommy blogger?  A women’s blogger?  A family blogger?  Recipes, food, families, life in general, struggling to balance career and creativity?  What is the point of this? Because if a blogger can’t figure out the point of her life, she can’t figure out the purpose of her writing, and if that’s the case, then what the hell business does she have writing every day?

I’m not on the map in the blog world.  I don’t have a goal of exposing corruption, or getting people to eat better food or raise the minimum wage or create some new policy and affect public opinion.  I’m intelligent but not wired that way.

My goal in life has always been to help people.  To live a decent life that brings illumination to people and makes the way a little straighter, the load a little lighter, the going a little easier.  It’s not much.  I just want life to be better for people for having met me.  I just want to love people and provide a piece of the universe, a little space that makes them forget for a time that things out there are so hard. 

When I was a teen, there were times of chaos and fear and loathing that felt so impossible to overcome that life was untenable.  I’ve been trapped in those times occasionally throughout the years, and I always managed to find my way out through a combination of pulling myself up and being pulled by others.  What I’m trying to say is that none of us can get through this stuff alone.  If someone reads me every day and something I say can help them find their way through something untenable, then I am happy to continue this. 

If I write something entertaining and it illuminates the way for a while, that’s great.  If I share a struggle and someone says “Hey, that’s what I’m dealing with,” then that’s great.

At its heart, this blog is for me to express myself, get better as a writer and practice the discipline of consistently putting down what’s on my mind.  But I could do that in a journal, or on the computer without publishing it online.  By making it available publicly, I’m holding myself accountable.  I don’t flatter myself that anyone depends on what I write.  But now I’m part of a community of writers, readers, and people who have shared their lives online.  I’ve learned from the blogs I read and I hope to God I’ve been able to touch others with what I have shared. 

My life is not a box with perfectly filed categories.  I can’t just take one category and blog about it.  There are those who can and do compartmentalize what they believe and share only a portion.  But my life is made up of a lot of ingredients:  family, friends, my present life and my past.  Nothing is separate from anything else.  You may be an appetizer or a perfectly presented entrée with garnish and white space on the plate between foods.  You may be a palate cleanser, a sorbet in a goblet.  Me? I’m stew.  I’m a tasty mess that might not always be pretty to look at, but I feed you, I fill you up and I’m made up of a thousand ingredients that have combined to make something comforting.  If you want to get all metaphorical, you could use my argument to say I’m sausage:  a bunch of leftovers stuffed into an unappetizing shell in a process nobody likes to see, but the finished product isn’t half bad if you don’t examine it too closely.  Whatever.  I’m what I am because of who I’ve been. I’m the average of the people with whom I’ve spent my life and I write about that life because I don’t know anything else.

I used to imagine myself teaching in a university.  I used to think about knowing everything in the books I would have on a shelf, being an expert in literature or writing or poetry.  I would imagine greeting students in a classroom, an academic with the respect of her students.  I never got there, and at long last I’m okay with it.  I fell in love, fell into life, fell apart, fell into jobs, fell into parenthood….I missed the mark I had set for myself and instead of regret, I have learned to like this life I have. 

A blogger I love and admire recently wrote about the trajectory of her life and the impact of the disappointments and pain she had suffered.  She wrote that instead of learning to survive, she learned to grow wild. 

Think about that for a minute:  plan out your life and despite your best efforts, you get something different.  Is that failure? No – but it’s hard.  And instead of looking at it as “Well, I guess I just need to make do and get through it,” you can think of it as an opportunity to be where you are and grow where you weren’t expected to.  Don’t just survive.  Grow wild. 

And that…THAT is what this blog is about.  Families and their aftermath. Being who you are because of and in spite of where you’ve come from.  You can be an only child or one of twelve. You can be childless or child-free or a parent or an aunt or uncle.  You can be estranged from your parents, orphaned, adopted, abandoned, a caregiver or someone unmoored from all family obligations.  But everyone comes from someone else and we are all marked by that. 

From the sacred to the profane, the minute to the divine—what we experience can resonate with others.  That’s why I’m here.  I could watch my daughter fly a kite or see a dead tree and find something in it that reminds me of something else, and it usually comes back to family.  Whether it is a time of unmitigated bleakness or incandescent joy, I know how I got there and I want others to know about it.

Thank you for reading.  Thank you for making the world a little smaller.  Thank you for telling me about your lives, because I am better for it.  I hope you can say the same.

Oct 22 2009

In Which I Say Shit Several Times

I came dangerously close to another Omnivore’s Dilemma situation this week.  Barely escaped, in fact. 

Several months ago, I threw in the towel just a chapter away from the finish line while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  The book was so wordy, so worthy, so friggin’ important…I felt like a real scab just admitting that while it was all those things, it was also a tedious pain in the ass.

A similar scenario happened last month, when I put down my paperback copy of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier.  I was only about 80 pages in, and it was like when you politely eat something that twenty other people have raved about, how good it is, how great it smells, how brilliant the chef is….and you eat that first bite and think hrrmmm I’ve never tasted this kind of blend of flavors before, and then you think of cooking shows and how this must be how a palate is developed, kind of like a callous….then you start thinking maybe there’s something wrong with your tastebuds.  Then you realize that, no, it’s not your taste buds.  This food tastes like.  like… like shit.

So.

It was with trepidation that I set out last week to read American Pastoral by Philip Roth.  I’d been reading some lists of great books, great authors, other friends’ recommendations and was chagrined to find that I’d never read any of Roth’s work.  I figured that just as I did with reading Larry McMurtry, I would start with the book that won the author the Pulitzer, to avoid a misstep that would land me in one of his lesser works. 

I got through the first chapter, but I was starting to have that nagging feeling again.  The going was slow with this book.  Oh, he’s a good writer.  But I was becoming impatient.  Where the hell was this story going, and why was he writing down all the stuff he was supposed to be showing me?  Seriously, it was like he was making a list of the character’s emotions instead of describing a gesture or glance that would convey it to me.  And no, I don’t have specific examples because I’m too tired and discouraged to trudge into the other room to get the damn book

And I’m cussing now. So you know it isn’t good.

So I’m reading about Seymour “Swede” Levov as described by his ersatz biographer, Roth’s ubiquitous recurring narrator Nathan Zuckerman.  Swede was Zuckerman’s boyhood hero, and after Swede dies, Zuckerman falls into a reverie about the man’s life and failures.  At some point in this reverie, which I believe may have happened during Zuckerman’s high school reunion but I’m not sure because at this point I’m skipping paragraphs and perhaps entire pages…at some point, he’s voicing a memory of Levov’s that is either speculation or some sort of messed up sudden shift in the book’s point of view, but the scene is Levov driving home from the beach with his daughter, who is about eleven. 

The daughter lets her bathing suit strap fall off her shoulder and leans into her father and asks him to kiss her the way he kisses her mother…and after a (far too) brief moral dilemma, he COMPLIES.  He kisses her on the mouth.

And that, my friends, is where I snapped the book shut last night and threw back the covers on the bed. 

I marched over to the dresser and slapped the book on top of it, and grabbed a can of Febreeze and slammed it on top of the book.  And then slapped my hands together to get the residual book ickiness off, and gave in to a full-on, complete body skeeve.

My husband looked up.  “What’s wrong?”

I glared at him.  “That f***ing BOOK!”

“What book?”

I told him.  He shrugged and went back to his Newsweek magazine.

I went into the living room and found my copy of Girl With a Pearl Earring and climbed into bed with it. 

“I thought you’d already read that one,” he said.

“Palate cleanser,” I replied. 

Now if you are going to tell me I should have given the book another chance, save your breath.  Life’s too short to spoon shit into your mouth just because ten other people tell you it tastes great.  It doesn’t taste great to me.  And don’t roll your eyes and call me provincial because I couldn’t choke my way through that book.  I saw The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover when it came out and I didn’t get up and leave.  I read Lolita and saw the brilliance of it, even though it was inherently disgusting, because the author had a sense of humor and irony. 

But if this is what reading Philip Roth is like, then I’ll just have to put down my napkin and get up from the table.  Three plates of shit is enough for one year, thank you.

Jan 9 2009

What’s the Roman Numeral For Milestone?

I don’t know, but I want to find out

because this is my 500th post!!!!!!!!

fireworks

I don’t have anything profound or special to write today about this milestone, other than that if you had told me in 2006 when I was messing around with Picasa on the computer and saw the button that said “blog this” under a picture in my file, that I would two and a half years later be posting my 500th addition to “The Eleventh” I would have –well, I probably would have believed you.

Thank you for reading, and for continuing to read. 

xoxo

Jan 3 2009

Please Don’t Shoot The Pianist

I was reading the transcript from todays “Writer’s Almanac” from NPR.  They noted that it was this day in 1892 that Oscar Wilde arrived in New York, and when the customs officials asked him if he had anything to declare, Wilde replied, “Nothing but my genius.”

He had come to the United States for a lecture tour, and many people in the U.S. considered him to be ridiculous.  However, there were some places, surprising pockets of U.S. culture, where he did very well.  He was particularly well received in the rough mining town of Leadville, Colorado.  The miners loved him, and Oscar Wilde was fascinated by the town, this isolated place that hadn’t really heard of him and thus, appreciated what he had to say without having it filtered through the opinions of others.  While there, he visited a saloon where he saw a sign tacked to the wall.  It read, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”

Wilde called it “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.”

I tend to agree.  We bloggers are (some of us) the literary equivalent of a piano player in a saloon in a rough mining town.  We may never go anywhere else, we don’t have classical training, we play because we like it, because we have a modicum of talent for it, for people who seem mostly to appreciate it, and occasionally, we are blasted for not having elevated our art to a higher plane. 

There are a million bloggers out there who, like me, like to write and have a blog which allows them to say what they want, however they want.  Some blogs have music, some have home videos, some post recipes, some detail what they wore to work, and all of us, once in a while, display flashes of real literary merit, beauty or even, as Wilde declared, “genius.”

It’s not every day, or sometimes every week or month, but the key is practice.  Keep writing.  Write every day.  Write with passion and with purpose, even if that purpose is just to get something posted that day so you can say “I’m here.  I’m still writing.” 

In the meantime, be gentle among the others who are doing the same thing.  We’re all playing, we’re all trying, so don’t shoot us. We’re doing our best.