Oh, goody! I will have at least one person I actually know personally to turn to for sympathy and procrastination about National Novel Writing Month!
Subject: Novel in a month
Now I went and done it!! I signed up for the writing thingie!!OMG What have I done? (laughing)
Chad
I can’t honestly say I wish this joyous creative horror on anyone else, but I’m not going to complain.
The Light of My Existence is threatening to leave me, because he thinks I have no ambition, and all I do is sit around playing on the computer. Right.
I sit around “playing” on the computer, all right. I don’t make much money at the moment, and spend a lot of time sifting through job listings, looking for legitimate local jobs amongst all the spam ads, making phone calls, and sending out resumes. I also spend some time each day working on increasing my typing speed. No ambition.
I freely admit that I read online newspapers and email my friends on a semi-regular basis. I also occasionally watch The Daily Show and/or cartoons on Adult Swim to cheer myself up after I read the news, which is mostly depressing. Sometimes I even write in this blog. However, most of the time I’m doing other things.
I’m frying my brain learning Linux and PHP… stuff that I can learn for FREE, and then take a few tests for under $500 to earn certification qualifying me for a $70k job that I would actually enjoy. But Himself thinks it’s all bullshit, of course, because I have an immediate goal of using my new PHP skills to redesign my personal website. No ambition.
I’m working on an outline for a novel that I have pledged to write in the space of one month. No ambition.
I’ve started transcribing (with much cringing) a drawer full of fading love letters my parents saved, which my mother wanted published after their deaths, because they were a biracial couple in the Deep South in the early Sixties, and she thought it was important to someday have their story told.
No ambition.
I normally avoid talking politics here, but this big fuss about gay marriage annoys the daylights out of me. I don’t care who marries who. If both parties are over 18 and it’s consensual, it’s none of my damn business. Therefore, I am ideally suited to offer the following detached assessment of the current political brouhaha for the benefit of the undecided.
Who benefits from a ban on gay marriage?
Paid lobbyists on both sides of the issue. And maybe a few embarrassed parents.
Who get screwed?
Short term: Committed couples who are unable to legally marry, and the wedding planners, caterers, florists, formalwear shops, travel agents, and so forth who lose a potential expanded source of income.
Long term: All of the above, plus divorce lawyers, who also lose a potential expanded source of income.
How much does it cost?
However much it costs taxpayers for elected officials to bicker over a pointless, polarizing piece of legislation that keeps being introduced as a smokescreen to draw people’s attention away from issues that are WAAAY more important than a couple of guys getting hitched. To each other.
Who pays for it?
Everybody but the #@%&*^$ lobbyists!
I heart Dooce. She’s eloquent, funny, and uh, let’s say brain chemistry-challenged. She’s not the exact same flavor of crazy as I am, but it’s close enough for me to identify with, sometimes to the point of tears. I’m not much of a kid fan, but I enjoy reading her blog. It mildly irritates me that she’s been summarily classified as a “mommy blogger.” Her daughter Leta is obviously the center of her universe, and the source of a lot of her funny anecdotes, but it’s equally obvious that’s not the only thing the site or its creator is about.
(Must… resist… urge to go off on a tirade about women being stereotyped by one important aspect of their lives… argh…)
Urge resisted. ANYway.
I just read her post from Tuesday. She and her husband were having a difference of opinion about how to mentor Leta on proper English usage, because said child was repeatedly using bad grammar (”Did you sawl it?”) to demand Daddy’s assistance in locating a Polly Pocket shoe smaller than a BB. The following paragraph inexplicably cracked me up.
“Leta,” he says with a calm, assertive tone that The Dog Whisperer recommends you use with disobedient dogs. Except Jon has never used this tone with Coco and instead prefers the DIE! DIE! DIE! approach to conversation. It involves a lot of tearing at his hair. And using inappropriate words in front of our impressionable four-year-old daughter who just yesterday used SHIT in proper context. I should probably add an OOPS to the end of that revelation, but I’m less embarrassed by her cussing than I am proud that she is figuring out the subtleties of language.
It wasn’t sure WHY THAT WAS SO HILARIOUS, then I remembered something that happened when I was in first grade. I was only five years old, but I still recall this semi-clearly, because my parents were acting very strange. Or so I thought, at the time.
I had seen a word that I didn’t know written on the bathroom wall. Upon getting home from school, I got the dictionary down and tried to look it up, as I had been trained to do as soon as I learned how to read. If I didn’t know what something meant, there was no point in asking my parents. “Don’t ask me,” my mother and/or father would say, “look it up yourself, unless you can’t figure out how to spell it.”
The word wasn’t IN the dictionary. And it was a little short word. F-U-C-K. So I went and asked for help. “Mommy, what does ‘fuck’ mean?”
All hell broke loose.
“WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT WORD?!?”
“I didn’t hear it. It was on the bathroom wall. What does it mean?”
“DON’T EVER SAY THAT WORD AGAIN!!”
“Okay. But what does it mean?”
Mommy promptly called Daddy at work to have a fit about what HIS daughter just said. Looking back, Daddy must have had a fit too, and sworn he’d never said THAT in front of his precious baby girl. (Not after he wound up in the doghouse for I have no idea how long, for accidentally teaching me to scream “OHHHHH, SHIT!” at the top of my lungs any time I hurt myself. That’s what he did if he cut himself shaving, so I thought that was what you were SUPPOSED to do if you were bleeding and/or extremely angry. I was rather tomboyish, and was constantly getting cut, scratched, scraping my knees or elbows, or just pissed off while playing and/or roughhousing, so for a few days I yelled “OH SHIT!” a lot until it stopped being amusing, and it was sternly explained to me that only grown-ups were allowed to say that.)
After the hysterical phone call, Daddy apparently started racing home from work. Mommy, who was president of the PTA at the time, apparently called the principal of the school and started screeching at him or her. About the janitor. Or something. I had been told to sit down, shut up, and not move … on the GOOD sofa, in the living room, which I was not normally allowed to touch with my grubby little kid hands, or even breathe on, unless I was freshly bathed, coiffed, and wearing a foo-foo party dress for a holiday photograph, much less SIT on it after school, with playground dust staining the drooping lace ruffles on my socks.
After Daddy got home, the drama seemed to last for hours… my parents having a collective fit, while I sat fidgeting on the sofa… the same crap OVER and OVER…
Both: “THAT’S A VERY BAD WORD! NEVER SAY IT AGAIN!”
Me: “OKAY. I only said it ONCE, to ask what it means. I won’t say it, again, I promise. But WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”
Mommy: “Where did you hear that? Aiee!!! What is this world coming to? What’s wrong with that school?”
Daddy: “Dammit, Cory, YOU’RE the president of the PTA!”
Mommy: “Don’t curse in front of her!”
Me, wailing with frustration: “But WHAT does it MEEEEEEEAN?” (start from beginning)
I imagine the reason they were having such a spaz attack is because even though I calmly accepted the fact that it was a “grown-up only” word that I wasn’t allowed to say, I simply wouldn’t stop asking what it meant, and they didn’t want to tell me right then. I found out what THAT WORD meant around age 12, and never mentioned it to my parents.
After I moved out at 20, I recalled the incident, asked my mother about it, and she started laughing. She had hoped I would forget about it, but wasn’t surprised I remembered. She told me that she and my father had put a lot of effort into training me to want to learn new things, and to think for myself, but they had no idea it would bite them on the ass before I made it through my first year of elementary school.
This post is not about the Snowflake Method, to which I (ahem) faintly alluded in my last ridiculous post. It’s about what I was doing ten years ago. So I lied. And I’m stealing an idea.
This will be mercifully short. I got the idea from Punchline Walking, who got it from WhiskeyMarie, who got it from FriedaBee, and that is as far as I got before I fell victim to blog fatigue, went to the kitchen for a beer and got lost in a maze of browser tabs on my return.
Ten years ago, I was working for one of the following: an attorney, a small newspaper, or a large crappy internet service provider. 1998 was a rather scrambled up year for me. I was probably in New Mexico. I could check my income tax returns, or old copies of my resume, just to be sure, but I’m lazy.
The whole point of this is that I don’t really remember.
I know the entire history of Middle Earth. I can quote long passages of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Henry Miller, the Bible, and Scarface at length, from memory. I remember my sixth birthday party. I remember my 10th birthday party (that was the year nobody showed up, and I vowed to never have another birthday party ever again). I still remember most of the abbreviations in the periodic table of elements, and the silly cartoons my high school chemistry teacher drew (featuring Elmer the Electron) to illustrate how atoms combine to form molecules.
But I’m not sure what I was doing ten years ago, except that I was underpaid, whatever it was.
Today, I officially started working on the outline of the novel I have pledged to write in November. Because of multiple distractions, I haven’t made much progress, beyond a “mind-mapping” exercise that gave me a headache and sent me fleeing to the corner store for beer.Now fortified with mild, fizzy alcohol, I am just now realizing the true extent of my folly in signing up for this ridiculous event. In fact, I had an argument with myself about it.
Left Brain: You are psychotic, and possibly an idiot. You cannot do this. Do not even try. Your ambition is commendable, but you are highly unstable, and unlikely to fulfill your goal. Therefore, I see no reason to subject us to this potential humiliation.
Right Brain: SCREW YOU! Idiot? Idiot savant, maybe! I’m brillant, and besides, I just WANT to do this. Why are you always trying to spoil my fun? Furthermore, I don’t care what anybody thinks. That’s YOUR job, tight-ass.
LB: You are not being sensible.
RB: That’s why YOU get to do all the planning and organizing. And I’ll get all the credit! Neener neener neener!
LB: You are also childish. If I were not a Vulcan, I would hate you.
This exchange continued for quite some time, contributing to my headache, but you get the idea. As usual, the creative side beat down my few remaining shreds of common sense (with an empty beer bottle, metaphorically speaking), and I am still determined to do this.
Coming next: the Snowflake Method.