Monthly Archives: July 2009

Good god people, are you trying to kill me?

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Today alone:

Former client ran into me on the playground of all  places and asked me to do some copywriting. ASAP. Because clients often run ideas by you  several months before they need them.

Agent emailed and said that he wants to see more of my novel but already sees the same major issue that other readers have pointed out. Must reorganize whole book and get it to him by, say, tomorrow.

Peanut does not like the olallieberry crisp we made before lunch and has requested a cookie baking session after nap. I’m not entirely opposed to his demands. But how can I blog the already baked recipe if it’s loathed by 50% of the family who have thus far tasted it? 75%, really, if you consider the cats who won’t touch it. To be fair, they thought it was blackbery crisp. Also, did you notice the two other projects that seem a bit more pressing than cookies, given the ready availability of decent cookies in every case of every local bakery in this country? Hell, FatApples is two blocks away. Run over to the bakery, little boy, and bring back two cookies. Mommy has a book to submit.

Someone with no authority whatsoever has said my novel will be a huge success as a book and also as a major motion picture, floor wax, and cheese spread. I hope it’s non-aerosol. And that she gets some authority over something soon so I can start pushing for an action figure.

IJ quote of the day 15

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I think this quote is a day behind. But seriously, who’s counting?

The section that most pleases me in the book, thus far, is the selected transcripts from drop-in hours of Pat Montesian. Laughed out loud. Laughed so hard I shook the bed and Spouse awoke, grumbled something about “that f—ing book” and went back to sleep. Then I read the next line and laughed again.

“So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I kind of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though” (177).

“So I’m sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there’s a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here’s Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl’s body is literally parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea” (177-8).

Ow! Not in the eye!

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Sweetie? Pumpkin butter? Love? Mommy doesn’t want to talk about this right now.

Why?

Well, first of all, Mommy is driving. We are hurling at 70 miles an hour toward home after a long day of doing everything you want, and the only thing keeping us from smashing this steel cage into a cement barricade or another car full of humans is Mommy’s ability to keep her brain in control of her hands and feet. And honestly, the neurons are firing quite a bit slowly since you were born.

Mommy is trying to concentrate. Also confounding us just a bit, honey, just a tad in our quest to keep Mommy’s thoughts and actions on the same basic page, is the fact that, while rolling my eyes at your question, the same question you’ve been asking all day, and the same freaking question I’ve answered, I swear to Aphrodite, twelve times already, during that process I managed to lodge a contact lens somewhere deep in my barely functioning brain. Okay, honey? So not only am I operating a motor vehicle hurling down the highway, limbs dead with “when-do-I-get-ten-seconds-of-time-to-myself?” fatigue, and a brain hobbled by your awesome attempts to understand the world, I am also gouging my eye out trying to get to the lens, to relieve the pain and fix the fauceting from my eye and potentially restore the level of vision usually required for the tasks in which I am engaged.

So, sweetheart, it all comes down to this: there is a thin piece of precisely machined plastic wedged into the Why Is Harold with the Purple Crayon Happy When He Gets in the Boat part of my brain. It’s unfortunately inaccessible at present, lovekin. I also can’t freaking see anything, doodlebug. Mommy is blind, Mommy is tired, Mommy is flying home HOPING TO MAUD that Daddy is there so she can drop your adorable little body into his arms for the five minute break that is bathtime.

I know it’s been a long day, pumpkin, but that’s not my fault. Traffic is not my fault. The sun in your eyes is not my fault. My not being willing to answer the same emotive question thirteen times in one day is, I swear to all that is holy, not my fault. You see, I was only given enough patience to give twelve remarkably similar answers to the same question. Blame your grandparents. I can guarantee you they only answered eleven times, because they roll their eyes at your Mom now every time she answers you twelve times in a row.

So please. I’ll say this again, politely. Please put a sock in the exploring-the-emotions-of-cartoon-characters part of your darling, kissable little mouth while I try to get us home safely. There are, like, fourteen freeway interchanges between us and home, buddy, and I think we’re gonna wind up in the wrong county if I don’t pay attention right now.

Ah, dammit, now we’re on the bridge.

Did you just ask why is there water? Because we’re on a bridge.

Why is it a bridge? Because I made a mistake.

Why did I make a mistake? Honey, mistakes are…

Tell you what. You take your purple crayon and think fast and soon we can be climbing aboard a trim little boat, too, and you can tell me why that makes you happy.
Because I’m all out of answers today, bug. I really am.

Like a cool drink of water

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Aaaah. Today was nice. Niyiyice. Compliant, happy, silly, observant child. Good weather. Great conversation with a genius writer with credentials out the wazoo who gave much more concrete, actionable, and loving feedback than the agent who, nevertheless, went to the trouble, if you know what I mean.

Sleep: not enough. Food: too much. Reading: not enough. Writing: way too little. Meltdown tally: two averted. Full meals cooked: two completed and edible. (Granted, one was semi-cheating, a homemade basil-heavy marinara and store-bought ravioli. But the other was all from scratch bok choy, portabello, tofu, and whole wheat soba stirfry with a homemade soy-vinegar-plum-perppercorn kind of thing.)

This was a pretty darned good day. And I owe it all to Spouse having 6 consecutive days off, getting some R&R at various family functions, a brilliant friend whose creative writing MA from Columbia is finally worth its weight in my appreciation, and a child who somehow, some way, has decided to settle down today.

Phew.

IJ quote of the day 15

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Holy Mary, mother of my cousins: the grandaddy speech to young JOI is aboslutely excruciating. In a Chris Ware, father to son,”here are the defining moments of my life’s failures and why my father was ten times the asshole I am now” kind of way. Guacamole.

So today I leave you with the same thing grandpappy left us:

“A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation conteplative prayer, sliding forward” (168).

No wonder himself was afraid of black widows. And palm frond pus.

You simply must read Infinite Jest.

Chillin’

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No quote of the day today. I’m way behinnd in my reading, and I got to coo at new neices and play with family and friends today. So I am not up for assignments and expectations and such. I’ve been a bit too self driven all my life and I’m not in the mood today.

Got some solid feedback from an agent late last night, and I’m trying to decide what parts of it I’ll incorporate. I know I’m not fond of the “no thank you” part, but much of the rest was thoughtful.

So I cuddled babies and saw people I love and sucked on a big bag of sour grapes for a while. And I’ll tell you: having three small people smile at me today was worth not typing up a quote for you, the few readers who seem to be online this week. Where did everybody go?

Infinite Jest quote of the day 14

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Appropos of Hal as narrator, by Hal as younger academic:

“We await, I predict the hero of non-action, that catatonic hero, the one beyond the calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines” (142).

Though Wallace disdained postmodern irony, and especially ironic distance that created a lack of humanity, he sure gets the self-referencing joke of postmodern lit pretty well…

And but so, this day of reading gave us the lethal purse snatching, the bricklayer’s accident clarification letter, and the page  long question that ends, “And but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning?” after a huge surge toward video-TP conferencing.

Aces reading assignment, today. Stitches, from the on-the-inside laughing.

Go read Infinite Jest.

Awful truth—Uighur uprising uninteresting to Christian right

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So depressing that our media covers entertainment and Alaskan stories without putting proper perspective on the violent uprising in China.

Where now are the Republicans who wanted us to shout our disapproval of Iran from the highest, most offensive, and least appropriate mountains?

Check out this post by Glenn Greenwald on the double standard.

Don’t make me use the H word.  But when you pick and choose using your far-right-colored glasses (that color, I believe, is the really distorting maroon of upholstered hotel lobbies),  hyprocrisy is the only word to use.

Let them figure it out

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I have no problem letting Republicans figure out their own leaders, politics, and goals. They know much better than I what they want and how on earth they can believe the things they believe.

So I’m just saying this…of all the theories, and I’ve heard maybe eight this weekend, on why Palin quit a job she promised to do, I don’t care which reason is real and which is spin. What I care is that Canada embraces now the knowledge that I will undoubtedly leave this country if the Republicans choose her as their representative, and that by some stretch of faith, ignorance, or fraud, she gets elected President of these United States.

I’m not opposed to thoughtful, intelligent, inspiring Republicans getting their shot at running things. But I am opposed to that woman, who stands, talks, and walks for everything I find abhorrent in the way our democracy is going, putting her stamp on this nation.

Just saying. In advance. Appropos  of probably nothing.

IJ quote of the day 13

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the whole scene, really with Poor Tony and C and yrstruly, but here’s a snippet, all sic

“I yrstruly get a cold feeling of super station once more, you get wicked super station in this fucked up kindof shit life because its’ a never ending chase and you get too tired to go by much more than never ending habit and super station and everything like that so but I dont’ say any thing but yrstruly I have a cold super station about Poor Tony not wining while he makes like he has to cusually piss and takes a piss and the piss steams up around the lower ares of the bush with his back turned away and isnt’ looking around with interst or anything like that you never turn your back on the skeet when its’ partly your skeet” (134)

Thank dog for small favors

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Dear Universe,

Thank you, thank you for making fruit that does not need to be peeled or cut.  Washed, sure, mostly. Thank you for berries and grapes; they make my life so much easier I might actually cry. (All you chocking-hazard types can just get bent because I’m having a freaking moment here, and I sit with him when he eats, and I haven’t cut grapes since he was a year, and I’m bending over backwards here not letting him cry and respecting him so if I want to endanger his life a little it’s my business since I’m the one whose given up almost everything I know as happy and good in the world to give him things that are happy and good so just back the hell up and choose another blog to safetyvangelize.)

Thank you, Universe, for screwcap wine being okay now instead of all box winey.

Thank you Universe for my son’s perspective. On our hike I saw a deer and three wild turkey (not the former because of the latter, though that might be a good story, too) and he showed me a hawk, about 20 feet across a gorge, in a tree. I see stuff that’s moving and blow past things that are still. He sees everything. I’ve never before seen a hawk sitting still, watching.

Thank you, capitalism, for making pipe cleaners so cheap. Seriously. That’s like an hour of free thinking time while we quietly make fake flowers together for the house’s many vases. (Cat bastards make sure no real plant goes unmolested. For those keeping score, cats are more trouble than a fetus; newborns and infants and toddlers are more trouble than cats. Now cats are back on top, causing way more headaches than a three-year-old, even one without child care or preschool or any time away from me god help me don’t know how to make it through tomorrow or the next day.)

Thank you, Universe, for hummus. I would thank you more for avocado if my kid would eat it, because it’s an even more complete meal than hummus. But, we play the hand we’re dealt, and I appreciate hummus.

Thank you, youtube. Just for being you. Except all the creepy parts. I don’t appreciate having to prescreen searches to make sure some Plushy doesn’t pop up when I search for aardwark vids. But, still.

Thank you, England, for losing. We totally dig our fireworks. And the kazoo parade at the Russian River. I’m a total Yankee Doodle Dandy, macaroni and all. Seriously, how would we make it from Memorial Day to Labor Day without an excuse for outdoor cooking and excessive desserts? Thanks, British Empire. Most of the other colonies got totally scrod, but we did okay.

And thank you, Spouse, for the help yesterday. Your willingness to move the dust mop AND the whole pile of dirt about four feet out of the way when shrieks from our child interrupted my progress really helped. I was able to pick up my mopping again the next day, almost as if nothing had happened. You’re a peach.

And thank you Universe, for continuing to throw a freaking bone to the family you keep tossing about like a plaything. Thank goodness the illnesses (times thrity-two, by now, I think) and the car accident and the spitballs of bullshit you keep hurling at them just miss. There, CB. I’m grateful for you.

IJ quote of the day 10

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You’re almost to two weeks and you’ve cracked 100 pages. Congrats. Today you get a special bonus: several quotes.

IJ’s gorgeous prose quote of the day: “A curled bit of cloudy old Pledge-husk and a green thread from a  strip of GauzeTex wrap are complexly intertwined in the blue fibers of the carpet near Hal’s left ankle, which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue twinge” (104).
[Wallace’s grammatical tic of using “which” as an adjective is at once infuriating and endearing. Or infuriating but less with incessant exposure.]

IJ’s philosophical quote of the day: “Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend not to know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fantacism with care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen” (107.)

IJ’s perfectly tuned pitch on tween-y voices quote of the day:
“‘Purchase a clue Kent Blott!’ Arslanian says.
‘The large and economy-size clue, Blott,’ Ingersoll chimes.
Beak sits up and says ‘God no not with pliers!’ and collapses back again, again with the spit-bubble. (113).

And IJ’s ETA quote of the day:
“‘You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’
‘If you lose?’
‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’
A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods” (119).

Bonus word of the day from Infinite Summer: Infsumalians. Lovely,  Kevin.

Found around the Web today

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I think Wednesday might become “shamelessly linking” day because it’s also Movie Day, during which my kid gets an hour of crap from a DVD and I rearrange furniture or finally put away winter clothes or whatever (whatever meaning both of those things, at least today).

Here’s a lame attempt at mocking the literati, offering a list of how to pretend to read like a hipster. (It’s funny if you aren’t above conflating “nerdy” and “ironic.” Or if you’ve never read any of the titles on the list.) I say, find the egregious error and win a prize, in which you can say you may be pretentious, but at least you’re not a poseur.

Here’s an article on the legal decision that nobody other than J.D. Salinger can write a sequel to Catcher. Swedish author calls it book banning. His lawyers said the derivative text was parody. Judge says no. And hopefully, is being misquoted with “naivety.”

Here’s a bit about Mayor Bloomberg’s literary reference to Roth’s newest novel and how, as always, it’s all about context.

Finally, here’s a small item to file in my gigantic folder of why Florida should be annexed to anyone who will take them. Place in subfolders “parents should be licensed” and “do not go to Florida.”