...the fuck?

I'm incredibly disturbed by that listing, and I'm not entirely sure why, since I'm pretty comfortable with people hunting and stuffing whatever animals they want to. But wouldn't it be more cost-effective, and the artistry just as impressive, if those were made out of loose feathers and wire and paper mache, or something, rather than actual birds' wings? Maybe it's the phrase "real bird parts."

Gross.

I've been thinking a lot about writers as presented in film, and I think I need a different style of glasses to be taken seriously as a writer, you guys.

( I only need three examples to prove this to you guys. )

...so clearly this means I need dumpier, outdated brown plastic frames, y/y?

Hey, I surprised myself by hitting 25,850 words last night before calling it quits.

This was after I lingered at 24,950 for a few hours, laughing at myself for having the type of work ethic where, rather than just writing those last 50 words, I almost stubbornly stayed where I was until the "deadline" had passed, grumbling, "You're not the boss of me, internet challenge that I chose to sign up for!" Why do I do this? From what my mother tells me, this is how I've responded to externally enforced goals since I could talk, by shouting, "NO!" and then running off to complete said goal anyway. Over two decades later, I still don't understand why this is my natural response. Weird.

Someone posted funny (and fake) writing tips for NaNo, as though famous writers were Twittering their advice. The funniest, I think, was Anne Frank: @AnneFrank #NaNoWriMo tip: Avoid distractions! When I wrote my book, I locked myself in the attic & refused to let any1 in.

Of course there are the requisite two or four people posting about how tasteless a joke that is, because "the Holocaust is never funny," but c'mon. I snorted when I read that.

Productive day, housework-wise.

I put in two hours at work this morning for a "brief" tutorial on helping customers with holiday wines, which ended up just being one of the owners talking about why he'd picked each wine, some brief history of a few of the vineyards (which I love, actually, but it's useless information - he mentioned one French vineyard that's been in the same family for generations, but the current owner is selling it because he doesn't think his trampy socialite daughter is worthy of ownership), and other general trivia. Mostly I feel it was helpful in the sense that every other wine lesson at work is helpful... the more we know, the easier it is to talk to people about wine. I'll have to make up some sort of system for remembering general characteristics for different varieties of grape, I guess. Otherwise I'll only be able to point to the handful I've tried and can remember well enough to describe, and another handful of labels that I see other people buying all the time.

Then I went grocery shopping. Then emptied the dishwasher and hand-washed everything that's been sitting in the sink all week. Then took out the trash. Then cleaned the counter where everything gets dumped - keys, junk mail, coupons we're never going to use, receipts we don't need, empty prescription bottles. It's still a mess but better. If I can vacuum and run a load of laundry through, then I'll consider today a success.

Still hovering around 16k on the NaNovel. I'm supposed to hit 25k by Sunday night, which I can come close to if I really put my nose to the grindstone. More likely: I'll pass 20k and say it's good enough, considering that'll require writing almost 10k in two days. Which is a lot, you know. Six days' worth.

There's a college student posting to the Madison forums who hit 50,000 on the 11th. Actually I'm not sure if she identified as a college student, but anyone who can devote that much of their time must be, unless she was very well-prepared going into the month, writing outlines and character sketches and a list of every scene in the book. Sometimes I think that would be a better system of quotas; rather than a daily goal, set up X chapters wherein each chapter must equal Y words... and have a really firm understanding of the plot you're about to write. Next year, next year.

A recent addition to the NaNo experience are these weekly (and sometimes a little more often than just once a week) pep talks from authors. I think last year might have been the first year they collected authors to write the talks, rather than Chris Baty just sending out one a week. Often they veer toward the corny side of encouraging, but occasionally the author in question really hits on something that changes the way I orient my brain during November.

This week Linda Barry wrote (by hand) about the merits of handwritten drafts. Largely I'm not interested in spending as much time trying to decipher my own handwriting later in the week as I spent writing the draft in the first place, so handwritten drafts are not for me if I can help it. Especially since I left school - no more writing notes during class means my penmanship has taken a nosedive. But she did say one thing that fits into the lessons I'm learning from NaNoWriMo this year (and, actually, learning from my life as a whole this year): You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing. I read this pep talk just after finishing The Red Tent, a book that revealed itself as striking only in the last few chapters, and just after reading a list of writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk, wherein he said that he hadn't known how to end Fight Club until he reread the first few chapters of the draft he'd written, and there he found a throwaway line that ended up shaping a really memorable ending. (I know, everybody's seen Fight Club, I don't have to keep it a secret - but I'm not going to post specifics, anyway.) And when I first read that, I thought: What the hell. If there's one thing I'm completely envious of when it comes to other people's writing, it's how perfectly the plot circles back around on itself, where everything in the beginning is used in the end. This year I've been convinced that the way to effectively include everything I need at the beginning is to write the climax first, then fill in everything else to match up. It's been working pretty well, actually, though I've only written a few full drafts of anything this year.

But I'm totally having this marvelous revelation right now that maybe, with the help of several thorough rounds of editing, I could actually write a rough draft in its proper order, filling in as much detail as I can along the way, and then finding the ending where I started. I just need to... trust myself, to give myself the tools I need along the way. Somehow that seems much more satisfying than reverse engineering a plot.

I know that I could read a hundred successful authors' "Thirteen Failsafe Tips To Writing A Bestseller" without finding a shred of truth (where "truth" = my own subjective truth, what works for me) in any of it, so I shouldn't put too much stock in Palahniuk's luck with Fight Club. Still. Fodder for thought.

John has been playing a game today where he'll throw his hands in the air and yell, "In [x] hours, we'll have been married a year!" This pleases me, because he is right, and I am happy.


Earlier I finished reading a book I've been looking forward to reading for several years now, but too lazy to track down a copy of at the library until a few weeks ago: ( The Red Tent by Anita Diamant ) I don't know if anyone would be interested in that sort of book, but I spent only an easy weekend reading it, so it won't take up too much of your time even if you don't like it as much as I did.

I just hit 10k on my NaNovel, which puts me about 3,500 words behind, according to the website's fancy graph. I'd like to see a graph that pits my current wordcount against my wordcount at this time last year. I think that's a better measure of how I'm doing, or improving, than just measuring me against a daily goal.

Still, I'm feeling both better and worse about this year's project, because while I've got a rough map of plot in my head, I'm already seeing places where I'm regurgitating phrases from previous sections of the book. I'm all for repetition in my prose, but it's starting to feel like I'm not putting enough thought into the character's voice, which makes me worry that I'm also losing pieces of his motivation and experience as he trudges forward. When the conflict of your protagonist is largely internal, getting his reactions down properly makes the difference between the whole thing being coherent or not.

Or maybe, probably, this is just my worries rising to keep me from being as productive as I should be.

In real-world news, I've had a pretty low-key couple of weeks. We went out with a few friends the other night, and it's so, so bizarre to me that people my age own houses and are having kids. This is what being an adult feels like? This is it?

Oh, Halloween. Not my favorite holiday, but I do love candy and the parade of amazing costumes. Especially when they involve wiener dogs wearing buns and ketchup, or babies dressed as pea pods.

Mostly I hope to spend the day prepping for NaNoWriMo, even though I will not be staying up until midnight to kick the month off, something I've done every year since I started. Unfortunately I work very early in the morning tomorrow, so unless I manage to slip a nap in this afternoon, that's not going to happen this year. I did accidentally stumble upon a decent idea this morning, though, so I'm going to try to lay out a general outline for that, and see if I think I can stretch an entire novel out of it, or whether it would be better suited for a short story. Otherwise I'm either going to pursue one of my superhero universes in earnest, or another romance novel; but I'm not particularly invested in either of those ideas at the moment, therefore making for a long, draggy month of writing. So I don't know.

Also at work this morning, my manager asked whether I'd be coming back to the shop later in the day for the "Halloween festivities," i.e., a blind wine tasting hosted by my least favorite coworker. I joked that she'd probably assume I was there to kill her, so I'd be taking a rain check on the wine tasting, but he said, "You know, she said the other day that you've 'had a much better attitude lately,'" and rolled his eyes. I said, "I know she probably sees this differently, but after she's called me lazy, manipulative, and childish, I'm not inclined to be particularly friendly toward her." He said, "I don't blame you, since, for the record, you're none of those things." Which is always nice to hear, until I begin to wonder what reassuring things he tells her when she brings up the subject.

This conversation comes on the heels of an incident yesterday, where I was walking past her just as she stepped back and sort of tripped-kicked her, which happens fairly regularly at the store, considering our work areas are about three and a half feet wide. But she just had this surgery on her legs, so it wasn't as minor an incident as it should have been. I tripped, I apologized, she turned and glared at me like I'd done it on purpose. She spent the rest of the morning limping around the store. I was planning to apologize again as I left, and use it to broach the subject of her recent catty comments, but she was in the office when I left talking to both managers. So when I apologized, my manager said, "What did you do to her?!" Which was funny but not exactly helpful. After I explained what had happened, my coworker said, "Oh, it's fine. I know you wouldn't do anything like that on purpose," and genuinely seemed to mean it - which would have been the perfect place to say, "Then please stop making comments about me slamming doors on you or spitting in your coffee." But I didn't want to have a huge conversation about it with both managers there (although maybe that's a mistake on my part), like some sort of mediation session, so I let it slide. Again.

I'm sure this will all be very funny once it's been resolved on some level, and I can even see the humor in it most of the time, but right now it's wearing on my patience. I should not have to play nice with her after some of the things she's said to me and about me. For a while now I've suspected that part of the reason this became such a big deal in the first place is that I've never really spent time making smalltalk with her, or made a point of greeting her or saying goodbye. That almost bothers me as much as the insults themselves.

Blerg.

I had this crazy detailed dream last night about a team of teenage superheroes. They were called the New Teen Avengers, but they were not any classic superheroes, just a handful of suburban teenagers realizing that they had powers, that a few of the adults they knew were the old Avengers (still not the classic superheroes), and that they already had classmates developing their powers under the tutelage of the enemy.

( A lot of superhero rambling and dream nonsense )

At first I was thinking that this was just a pretty cool dream, but then I realized that it might make an interesting NaNoWriMo project. Otherwise I'm not entirely sure what I'll write this year.

Some kid came into the shop today and complimented me on my "New Orleans accent." I told him I don't really think I have any accent, considering I've always lived in the northern midwest, but my mom did grow up in Southern Illinois and does have a sort of twang sometimes. But he insisted.

Do I have a Southern accent? Maybe I put one on when I'm supposed to be polite, because it makes it easier to repeat over and over again if I feel like it's some sort of game. I know my mom's seems to come out when she's on the phone, so maybe she does the same thing.

Bitchy coworker strikes again. She's been gone for two weeks having some sort of minor surgery, an elective cosmetic procedure. Yesterday was her second shift back. The cook had his hands full with dinner orders, so he asked if I would hold the cooler door for bitchy coworker while she carried pans of chicken from the oven to the cooler.

As she brought the first pan in, she said, "Just don't slam it on me, or something."

And, okay. Very funny. You got me. I don't like you. Guilty as charged. She didn't laugh, though, like she did with her joke about my spitting in her coffee. Do we really need to start the catty comments on her second shift back? She'd been in the store all of eight hours and it had already begun. Especially when I was doing dishes all afternoon in plain sight, loudly, while she was standing two feet away, which means that this isn't her trying to get me to do my job "better," it's just her being a jerk.

If I'd said something yesterday, there would have been swearing and insults involved, and possibly physical violence. Last time I tried addressing it calmly and rationally she looked horrified and began to lecture me about how manipulative and lazy she thinks I am, and obviously ignoring her hasn't been working, because she's been relentless in putting herself directly in my path throughout the day.

So what do I say?

It did help when the kitchen manager tried to send her home half an hour early because it was a slow afternoon for them. She lingered until her shift would actually have ended anyway, drying silverware while wearing her coat, but after she left, the kitchen manager came over and said, "I really appreciate having you in the store. Have I ever told you that? You bring a level of professionalism and a worth ethic that spreads to other people when you're here. And it's every day. So thank you." If this had been my manager, I would probably have thought he was making fun of me, but I buy the kitchen manager's sincerity.

I have no idea if it was related, either, or just a coincidence, but it does make me want to respond to the harassment without seeming like a brat or a victim. I just want to be able to say, "Cut the crap, lady. You're being a jerk."

My appointment this morning was both anticlimatic and reassuring. I'm doing everything right, but I should be doing more of it; and basically every time I start doing more, it's going to suck, and I'm going to hurt, and I need to tone it down again, and I need to really be serious about limiting my lifting.

I resent the duality of this recovery, though, that I have to be both satisfied with the progress I've made (considering how easily I could be dead or paralyzed, etc.) and utterly bereaved by the things I have lost in this. I never fully realized how physical a person I was before, if I've never said that aloud in this venue before. I never fully realized how proud of my physical self I was. And now it's like, the doctor asks me to try to touch my toes, and when I touch the floor she says, "Wow, that's very impressive!" and I have to remember that even people who have never been seriously injured or ill can't touch their toes. But, hey, I can touch my toes, you guys. And that's pretty fucking fantastic, all things considered.

Plus, when the nurse ran through the preliminary set of questions, and she saw I'd come in to talk about my back, she said, "Oh, so you were in a car accident? You were rear-ended or something?" And when I said, "No, actually, I was t-boned in the driver's side door, and I was knocked out, and had a pretty serious concussion and fractured my spine - " she looked suitably horrified. Wide eyes, jaw dropping, the whole bit. It was refreshing to get that sort of reaction, because so often this year I've told the story to receptionists and doctors and nurses and they sort of just nod and say, "Okay, sure," which makes me feel like it's not a big deal, and since I'm walking and talking and telling the story coherently, clearly I'm in good shape. And I didn't even tell her the girl drove off without really stopping.

For Halloween this year, I could totally phone it in and go as Liz Lemon. Plaid shirt, sweater, jeans, Chucks? Check. Done. Maybe a nametag with the NBC logo. Somehow I'm sure that costume would be better if I could have Alec Baldwin following me around, but this is the low-budget version of the costume, unfortunately.

Meanwhile I got out of working the last few hours of my shift this afternoon, which is good, but I did so by accidentally breaking down in manager's office, which isn't as good. I'm worried that I've become That Girl Who Cries In The Manager's Office, Rather Than Doing Her Job, but fuck those capital letters: I broke my back, and I'm tired. Which means I end up crying in awkward places at awkward times around my emotionally deficient male managers, whose advice mostly boils down to, "Hang in there, tell us if you need help...?" from one and really bewildered, awkward silence from the other, who would rather be playing video games. Bah.

Approximately three weeks into this new 20 hr/wk schedule at work, and I'm totally wiped. I spent Monday through Wednesday in some fairly significant pain through my back and hips, which I am assuming is mostly caused by the stress of working more hours, but probably also complicated by things like: suddenly cold weather, deciding to wear my Chucks (rather than my cushy padded work sneakers) for a mile-long walk down Monroe, general stress and recent casual colds. Also a possibility, I could have just forgotten what pushing myself a little feels like, since my last request for more hours was back in May, or earlier.

I did schedule a doctor's appointment, but the soonest they could see me was two weeks from today, the 16th. So we'll see. I tried to avoid using the word "pain" in scheduling the appointment (mostly to look macho and capable, because I am not the type of person to have back problems, obviously - I am strapping, like a horse, or a fiddle) but apparently when it comes to back problems, it's always pain. A surprisingly easy concession to make, I guess, even this "late" in the game. It hurts, okay, world? I broke my back and it still fucking hurts sometimes.

Anyway, I'm reading Bridget Jones's Diary and am absolutely dying to know how tall she's supposed to be. I think it makes an enormous difference in how I read her character. I'm having a hard time sympathizing with someone who, at her heaviest in the book, weighs 135. If for example she is 5'6" and whining about being 135, clearly she is neurotic to the point of having an eating disorder and has a totally warped sense of thinness, because that would easily put her at an American size four. I wonder if Helen Fielding has ever addressed this issue in an interview.

(...I totally realize this is a common question re: Bridget Jones. Is she fat? Is she normal? Is she actually on the thin side of normal? But I think as an author, Fielding should have handled it more clearly, because GUESS WHAT. A lot of women are obsessed with weights, as the popularity of the book illustrates, and this just feeds our obsession. Can we find ourselves in Bridget? Well, only if she's actually our size or fatter.)

ME: I think my back's been hurting more because I've been wearing my Chucks instead of shoes with real support...
JOHN: Hmm. I'm guessing it's more to do with the catastrophic car accident.

Facepalm.

Ha, so totally by coincidence, I started watching Project Runway Canada last night, because the current American season isn't on YouTube (which I'm very annoyed with, but totally understand... I guess). Anyway, the coincidence lies in the fact that PRC is hosted by Iman.

She just stepped onto the runway to let them choose their models wearing a David Bowie t-shirt. How freaking adorable is that? I love them.

Dear So Many Stupid Women:

Being shorter than your boyfriend/fiance/husband does not make you seem innately more feminine. It does not necessarily make you look prettier, thinner, more graceful, or sexier. The man standing next to you does not look any more masculine or appealing simply because he seems tall by comparison.

( Even with her ridiculously tall hair, does Iman dwarf Bowie? Do you find her any less feminine, beautiful, or thin when she stands beside him? )

If you are really that self-conscious about wearing heels that put up an inch or two taller than your man (or if your man really has that big an issue with his own height), then you shouldn't be dating him in the first place. It's not dating like a smoker or a guy with a beard; your husband will always (always) be that short. He's only going to shrink as he gets older. And you chose to be standing beside him for the next sixty years.

At the very least, please stop bitching about how you "can't wear heels." And if the real problem is that you just don't like to wear high heels, then stop. Don't use your stupid short boyfriend as an excuse. Just stop wearing heels. It's really that easy. And then we don't have to hear your stupid whining.

No love,
me

Meeting with local lawyers: scheduled. As a lawyer's daughter, I can't say I've ever really bought into the whole "lawyers are evil/manipulative/bloodthirsty/money-hungry" stereotype (although I can see why that stereotype exists, and I find the jokes very funny), but after this whole ordeal I can from this point onward honestly tell people that lawyers might have the capacity to be all of those things, but insurance companies are far, far worse. To all of the above.


Meanwhile, last night I wrote a huge post about Why I'm Losing Interest In Weddingbee.com, starting and ending with one of their newer bloggers, who is very conservative, both religiously and politically. Mostly it ended up being a rant about a recent post wherein this woman heavily implied that divorce is "dishonorable" while congratulating her parents on thirty successful years of marriage. At first I was just annoyed because, hey, if you believe that marriage is life-long, then why on earth should anyone celebrate a long marriage? It should be expected.

But then I realized that I was really angry because (like most elements of any relationship, even strictly platonic friendships, if you believe those exist) marriage and divorce are very complicated, and no two are exactly alike - and while my parents have been married for over 25 years now, my life would not exist the way it does had my mother not divorced her first husband, and nothing I've heard about the experience (though both the marriage and divorce were not positive experiences, for many reasons) has made me feel that it was a dishonorable decision. Regardless of what my grandmother may think. (Har, har.) So my offense to this blogger was both a kneejerk "Don't you talk about my mama!" response, and my past experiences with her sort of ultra-conservative minds, and my very strong belief that there are always at least two sides to every story, and unless you have access to all sides, you shouldn't be judging. (The fact that the act of judgment itself is a very unChristian attitude is just gravy.) Plus there's this implied notion that divorce occurs because two married people wake up one morning and say with a sigh, "Marriage is tricky. I give up," or, "I'm bored. Let's do something else now." Not only is that a naive belief, it's also dangerous, and I'm quite certain that, even when a couple takes the time to go through pre-marital counseling, or other programs that serve the same purpose, there are many, many reasons for divorce that probably could not be foreseen at the time of the couple's marriage.

Ultimately I started reading Weddingbee.com for the DIY crafts and design ideas (and the pretty dresses!), and I was game for reading the next wave of bloggers, some of whom were preparing for their second marriage or had children, and their posts about the more "real world" elements of the wedding. I liked reading about the stress and pressure, and about conflicts with the in-laws, and about women who did not consider their wedding day "the most perfect and beautiful day of their life," but as a day they were going to throw a massive, stressful party... and have a lot of fun, and gain a husband, in the process. So I think that with the introduction of this type of judgmental, "waiting for marriage" blogger, I will have to stop reading the site.

Trust me, this is the short version of this rant. You're welcome.