Handy Husband
if you try this at home, be sure to turn the light off first
He amazes me, my husband. You ask him to replace the hall light that has, for over a decade, shed little light and made your hallway look like a weirdly tiny version of a castle in Transyvlania — and he gets out a screwdriver, and does it.
No one was injured in the making of this small house improvement. If it had been me doing it, someone would have been.
A Picture and a Couple of Paragraphs
the photo part
This isn’t actually going to be about Archie, but it’s never bad to put a dog in your post, right? (There’s a Billy Collins poem where he advises poets who are stuck to put a dog in the poem.) It’s just to say that I like my blog more when I don’t feel compelled to write really long posts. A photo and two or three paragraphs. Sometimes I want to read more from other people, but honestly? I don’t want to write more than that.
This happened to me today: While riding through Berkeley to get to my train into San Francisco, I thought deeply about helmet wearing. I myself was not wearing a helmet. These thoughts, more or less, passed through my head: it’s a beautiful day, helmets are so sweaty and I have to go in and talk to the judges when I arrive, I’m going, like, 2.5 miles an hour, the biggest danger I’m going to encounter this morning on the bike boulevard through Berkeley is from a bug flying into my mouth, so I’ll keep my mouth closed, European bike commuters don’t wear helmets, sheesh, I’m not Lance Armstrong, biking like this isn’t dangerous, what kind of weird conspiracy is going on that tries to make people feel like they HAVE to wear a helmet or they’ll die? And then I saw him, a guy in a helmet riding no hands down the street. He took his helmet off, still no hands, adjusted it and then put it back on.
Something about that made me laugh and I decided to lighten up.
Re-Cycle
the re-cycle
In addition to home beautification projects, I also gave some attention during my time off to the sorry state of the world and my contribution to that sorrow. That’s why I have a new bike. I’ve decided that the whole oil spill thing in the Gulf is at least 50% my fault (and the fault of people like me) — because, really, would they be drilling for oil in the gulf if I was riding my bike to work? Right. It’s more like 75% my fault. The rest was so inevitable, greed and politics being what they are, that it’s actually pretty much 100% my — our — fault.
It seemed wrong to buy a new bike, though, particularly when there are so many bikes out there looking for good homes via the miracle that is craigslist. And I really lucked out — I found this great bike on craigslist and I bought it from a very nice young woman with no real desire to ride it. I stuck a basket on it (after taking votes on the important question of wire vs. wicker on facebook) and now I’m trying to ride it everywhere.
How’s that going? Well, the first time I took it into the city to work (I had to watch four youtube videos of how you load your bike on the bus before I had sufficient courage to do this), it rained. Still, I rode it from the bus terminal to my office, down Market Street in the pretty great bike lane the City of San Francisco has created for people like me. Several guys on bikes stopped and chatted me up at red lights. One handed me his business card and asked me to call him if I ever wanted to meet and have a drink. What that was about I have no idea. People don’t generally chat me up. Maybe it was the cute bike.
What’s Been Going on Around Here?
in the morning, this is archie's spot. also, check out the curtains. they do not have birds on them. they are simple, pretty, washable and cost a total of $50 at IKEA. Plus, no birds.
Children have grown, as they do. I wrote a screenplay. More on that later.
A few weeks ago, some guys came over and painted our living room, dining room and hallway. It took them five hours. I was stunned by their industry. For thirteen years every wall in our house has been realtor white. In other words, we have never painted the interior of our house. It always seemed too complicated. In fact, it is not complicated at all to other people. Like the woman who came over and told me the name of the sort of color I like. And the guys who painted. For them, the walls of houses are made to be painted. For me, apparently, they were made to sigh over, cringe at, and complain about. Maybe there is a metaphor here.
What I do know is that the walls of our living room, dining room and hallway are now actual colors. Pewter, and pewter’s even mellower cousin. It’s calming. Oh, and those curtains that were here for thirteen years? The ones with the birds on them? They’re gone too.
Parrot and Olivier
I'm pretty sure that must be Olivier
Books with two narrators are hard to pull off. I almost always prefer one narrator to the other, which means I almost always have the following poor reading experience with two-narrative books, to wit (as they say in books written a while ago and in legal documents still):
So there I am, reading along, and then the great story I’ve been loving slams to a stop and some other story starts up, and it turns out to be one I don’t care about at all. It’s sort of like what happens at parties when some guy steps in between you and the person who’s telling a great story about, say, the time their mother tricked them into going to the United States so you wouldn’t get your aristocratic behind in trouble, and the boring guy starts to relate to you the tale of how he bought his Prius. Bad. I always wonder how the writer failed to see that the narrator I like is so much better than that other narrator to whom the writer handed over big swathes of the book. It is not a question you can ever get answered.
These problems are not present in Peter Carey’s new book, Parrot and Olivier (they go to America, and that’s part of the title too). It took me 24 hours to read it. Both Parrot and Olivier are equally wonderful. You might want to pick it up.
Hiatus
I suppose it’s already obvious that I’ve been taking a break from blogging — but I thought I’d say that I’ll be back in June. Until then, happy spring, and see you all soon. xo, Lily
What Were They Thinking
Today, in one of the century’s most stunning what-were-they-thinking moments, Apple decided to name its new e-reader the iPad, despite the fact that they probably want women to buy it. Bad move. I’ll spare you the many possible jokes about feminine hygiene product- related names Apple could have given this thing (just google “ipad” and “stupid name”).
Instead, I would like to discuss the obvious, but endlessly interesting question: what were they thinking? I don’t know what they were thinking, because I can’t read the minds of people who don’t appear to have them, but I’m pretty sure I know what they were saying: ”Great name, Steve.” ”Yeah, great name.” ”Fabulous name, Steve-oh.” I guess it’s obvious that the naming people were all men. And like men everywhere, none of them wanted to talk about .. . well, you know, the time when women (a) often don’t want to have sex and (b) become people men think are crazy. The thing is, I am certain these Apple people are familiar with the maxi-pad, the mini-pad, the scented maxi pad, the unscented maxi pad, and the maxi pad with wings, because they often have to go to the drug store for their wives/girlfriends/daughters to get those PADS. Nevertheless, they let this name be attached to a product that pretty much nobody can ask for without feeling at least slightly contemptuous of the people who named it. I also feel sorry for the people who have to sell it.
It turns out that they don’t conduct market research at Apple, like we always thought they did. They do things because they’re too embarrassed to tell Steve Jobs that he’s a numbskull. Maybe Steve will suggest they lower the price to $4.99 and they’ll all be too embarrassed to tell him he’s being a moron. The only upside I can think of to this is that everyone in America will find it ridiculous — republican, democrat, independent. It will unite us, although it will probably not get a health care bill passed.
Still, really, who among us has not had a “what was I thinking?” moment? And because I know Steve Jobs is obsessively googling “why are they mocking the name of my new tablet computer, the one I could have called iTab if I wasn’t such an idiot”, I’d like to now describe one of mine. It might make him feel better. But probably not, because his mistake is in the New York Times, and other news outlets people actually read, and it will soon be something Jon Stewart talks about and my mistake is one that is buried in a grainy photograph in the Washington High School yearbook from 1976, which isn’t being broadcast or delivered to people I don’t know. I’ve been considering this all day, and have decided that each decade (okay, each year, but who’s counting) of my life has, within it, at least one of these moments. But I’ll start with the 1970s:
During my first year in high school I was that girl who, like Reese Witherspoon in Election, ran for everything, raised her hand even when all the teacher did was yawn, and had recently discovered irony and sarcasm but had not yet discovered that many other people had too. I was also skinny, wore glasses, had a weird sense of humor, and my fashion sense was as undeveloped as I was. The only reason I was the president of our class that first year was because nobody ran against me. And why did they not run against me? No, dear reader, it was not because they were scared I’d win. After all, the year before, I had managed to lose the slam dunk Class Treasurer contest even though I ran on a slate with my friend Debi, who was a goddess and, therefore, likely to get me swept into her new administration just because I appeared to be breathing the same air she was. Also my opponent was someone who, though a nice guy, was often teased for being so very smart. Even more than I ever was. Anyway, I thought I had a lock on it. Plus, we had good signs, because my friend Debi’s sister, Faith, painted them and Faith was a legend in the cheerleading community in part because of her ability to knock out spirit signs (you know, the ones that read GO PATRIOTS!) in enormous quantities. So, I think my point was that if I lost THAT election, there was no election I wasn’t capable of losing. Nobody was afraid of me.
What were they afraid of? Well, being class president wasn’t a very demanding job, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the work load that scared them off. In fact, the only thing you really had to do was organize the student ID card sale, and even that was organized by someone more efficient than me. But what you did have to do was this: If your class lost the contest to see who sold the most of these cards, then you had to submit to being made into an ice cream sundae at an assembly full of jeering students. And that is why this election was uncontested. What was I thinking? Who knows? I remember I wore to the event a construction worker hat (god, I just remembered: I actually wore that hat to school regularly because I thought it made an ironic statement) and overalls. But what I remember most, other than the odd feeling of having strawberry ice cream, nuts, and whipped cream dumped on my head (I was in a wheelbarrow with the guy from the other class that lost while this occurred), was my dad’s reaction when I asked him to come pick me up. My parents never, ever picked me up or took me anywhere. So I never asked them to pick me up. But because I felt I could not walk home with chocolate sauce running down my neck, I called my dad up and said I’d had a little accident with my clothes. He actually agreed to come, possibly because I was a little hysterical by them, in part because the ice cream was melting throughout my overalls. When I got into his car he looked me up and down and said, “Well, that probably wasn’t such a good idea.”
I’ve experienced, on facebook, a sudden influx of people I went to high school with. I’m hoping this memory has faded.
Tune in next time for the 90s moment.
Young Men and Books
It was amazing really, the combined brainpower that went into choosing books for 14 year old boys — and very little of it was actually mine. Okay, truth: the only book I chose was Jim the Boy, and I’m quite uncertain about how that will go over. I also chose the movies. I loved Gran Tornio, although I think Clint Eastwood could have exercised a little discretion about posing himself as a crucified Christ in the last scene and I’m sorry if that spoils anything for you, but it had to be said.
We’re in San Diego tonight, and tomorrow we head across the border to Baja, where some of us will be windsurfing, and others will be writing, and all of us will be reading.
More from Paradise in a few days.
The Wisemen Cometh
The ever-watchful duo: Batman and Joseph
That’s really all I have to say today. Keep an eye out for the wiseguys. Teen bookstacks tomorrow. xo
Bookstacks 2009: H-E-L-P
In book-related news, I’d like to anounce that I’m about to make a bunch of bookstacks, something I’ve done for the last couple of years, and am doing early this year because we are celebrating Christmas on December 17 and leaving the country for sunny Baja the next day. (We did that last year too. We are becoming traditionalists, sort of, in the bloglily household.)
Anyway, the challenge this year is to find good things for a 14 year old boy to read. Biographies of insane rock musicians, stories of horrendous crimes and disasters, entertaining accounts of stuff that happened in the past (aka history), graphic novels (aka comic books), and the novel that you read when you were 14 that you really loved are all possibilities. Trouble is that I don’t know the names of ANY of these books and am hoping that you, dear readers, just might.
And if you have any movie suggestions for 14 and 10 year old boys, well, throw that in too while you’re at it, okay?
xo
Heartbreaker
A friend recently described short stories as “heartbreaking.” I thought she meant that stories themselves — at their best — can break your heart. It turned out that she was really talking about the difficulty of placing stories, even good ones. And she’s completely right — the process of placing my first story was at times so dispiriting that I was reduced to devoting an entire page of my blog to the tales of my submission efforts just to keep my spirits up. When you’re getting floods of rejection slips for what you’re pretty sure are good stories, it’s quite possible to conclude that there must be more short story writers than there are readers. And you might even be right. That’s not really a reason to stop writing stories, though, but it does make you see your stories in a different light — they’re like the beloved child who’s charming, handsome and witty, but can never seem to get a job and move out of the house.
Well, the news today is that one of my stories (it’s called The Centerfold Club, and yes indeed it’s about a couple’s visit to a strip club) actually found itself an apartment – an astonishingly fine one, in a decent neighborhood in Alabama, with some truly exemplary roommates. It’s my first such child to do that — I won’t go into how many are still lying around the house in the equivalent of their underwear playing on the x-box because that would increase the heartbreak quotient too much for such a happy day.
So here’s what I’d like you guys to do, if you are able: e-mail the really terrific Karen at Southern Humanities Review. Subscribe to the journal — you’ll get my story, but you’ll also get the stories, poems and essays of some really amazing writers, including poet/essayist/blogger Emma Bolden, who’s been known to make an appearance there And you’ll be supporting Story Independence and diminishing writing heartbreak in one fell swoop.
You can e-mail Karen at: shrengl@auburn.edu or give her a call at (334) 844-9088 or fax: (334) 844-9027. Tell her I said hello and hope the story is behaving itself.
Make Monday a Sunday, While You’re At It
Filed under: Actual Historical Fact, Franksgiving, Thanksgiving |
Comments (7) 
My Pie Plan (which evolved: I nixed the key lime and pear tart and made apple tart instead)
For a long time, my husband wasn’t aware that Thanksgiving always fell on the fourth (I had to change this — for reasons I’ll explain below) Thursday in November by some predetermined arrangement between the pilgrims and the native people. Apparently, he was under the impression that Thanksgiving was always November 24th, and that date always magically fell on a Thursday. Really, who knows what he thought? He has a fine brain, and maybe the reason he can consistently remember the temperature at which water boils and whether a centimeter is bigger or smaller than an inch, and by how much (same goes for kilometers and miles and liters and ounces) is because it isn’t full of competing information, like this fact about Thanksgiving that I’m guessing every single person reading this knows, unless you’re European, which is fine, because you probably know a lot of stuff we Americans don’t know.
It turns out, however, that his confusion over the actual date on which Thanksgiving can be expected to fall isn’t as weird as it sounds and, in fact, has some historical basis. Thinking that this blog so seldom discusses history, I thought it was high time to demonstrate that I’m actually aware that things happened in the past, and there is some record of them AND they’re actually of some relevance and interest to those of us who live in the here and now. (This is known as history. It is a knowledge seldom put to any use here in the United States because we prefer to go on repeating our mistakes.)
So, here’s the thing: for a very long time, Thanksgiving was celebrated on the last Thursday in November. I mean, who knows when the pilgrims celebrated it, but whenever we got organized as a country and figured out that we should all celebrate the same things at the same time because it was good for us a nation (around about Grover Cleveland’s time, is my guess), well the last Thursday in November it was. Until Franklin Roosevelt, that well-known disrespecter of Tradition and Already Printed Up Calendars, and Previously Organized Football Games, got involved. And so it was that, in 1939, Roosevelt decided that Thanksgiving should be on the THIRD Thursday in November. Did he do this out of mere whim? Was it something he dreamed up because he didn’t like to have to wait for the big bird? Well, no. He did it so there would be more time to shop for Christmas. I swear, that is the absolute truth and I give you this website as my evidence of that historical fact.
What I love about that link, which you really must go check out, is that it reproduces the letters written to Roosevelt and his staff by American citizens who were totally outraged by the shifting of the holiday. There are several notable things about letters written to the president in 1939. First of all, people are super polite. They might think Roosevelt’s a total a-hole for doing this to them and screwing up, as the manufacturer of calendars pointed out, the ENTIRE YEAR’S CALENDAR PRODUCTION SCHEDULE, but they say it with restraint and dignity. Another thing I noticed is that that guy from NYU who was used to his college football team playing on Thanksgiving Day and had apparently reserved Yankee Stadium for the next five years on the last Thursday in November to do that, actually thought he could change Roosevelt’s mind because it was kind of inconvenient for NYU to have to play their football game on a day when no one would be eating turkey.
One thing that has not changed is that, in America, if you don’t like something, you accuse the person who’s doing it of being a communist, (or “communistic” as one person called Roosevelt). Even if he’s making the change so we’ll buy more stuff we don’t need, an idea that, last time I looked, was more a capitalist than communist notion, you still want to be sure to accuse him of being a commie. And, finally, I would simply like to say that the guy who wrote Roosevelt to say that he was really happy about the change, and then asked Roosevelt if maybe he could talk to god and have it be declared ungodly to work on Tuesdays, well, I love that guy.
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend and I’m so sorry that tomorrow is Monday and not Sunday. But if we all write Obama and ask if maybe he can work it out so that the Monday after Thanksgiving remains a Sunday, well, then our votes will not have been in vain.
PS: I’d just like to add that yes, I reported in an earlier version of this post that Thanksgiving falls on the third Thursday in November, which it doesn’t, despite Franklin’s (and my) best efforts. (Thanks for pointing that out, sharp eyed blog reader!) But my sad lack of specific information on this subject is nothing compared to that of my children. This morning, when I asked them what day Thanksgiving falls on, one child said, “The day before Black Friday.” Okay, it’s true that one of them said it falls on the fourth Thursday (NO, I said, it can’t!! FDR changed that.) Well, apparently they changed it back, something I didn’t even notice in my total excitement to be actually posting something in my blog.
No, in fact, the anemia did not kill me
I’ve been back from writer’s camp in Florida for exactly 72 hours and so have been able to gauge whether the massive doses of iron I’ve been taking have actually done me any good. I had to wait to get home to do that because it’s utterly useless to try to figure out if the iron is making you peppy when you are in a setting that would make anyone feel remarkably cheery and alert, because in that setting you don’t have to (a) cook, (b) pick up dirty shorts that have been thrown so they land precisely NEXT TO the laundry basket, or (c) tell people (aka teenagers) to get off Facebook. In that setting — New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in fact, where I’ve been for the month of October, more or less — you can’t feel tired. Well, you can, but that’s only because you stayed up until really late drinking tall gin and tonics and that doesn’t count as tired. That activity falls under the heading of “Fun Things I Did at Writer’s Camp.”
Anyway, I made it home after a night of doing Fun Things At Writer’s Camp, and unpacked. And then I dealt with a number of ordinarily exhausting events, including finding out that some friend of my kids knows the password to my itunes account and has been ordering things like DOOM! version 1.0, apparently under the illusion that I’d think maybe I’D ordered that and just, well, you know, forgotten about it. Also, I made it through a Halloween weekend distinguished chiefly by how much my children would prefer it if I wasn’t around them while they roamed the streets of Berkeley. I’ve also confronted the fact that in my absence at least one child managed to go without eating a single piece of fruit for three weeks (and no, it wasn’t the child who has refused all his life to eat fruit on the theory that he could eat vegetables and leave the fruit eating to his twin and by some magical twin science thing they’d get the nutritional benefits of both, as though they were still in the womb, which they aren’t: see above, regarding not wanting me to follow them around on Halloween). Sound tiring? I know.
The take home here: I’m actually kind of energetic. The iron pills are working.
How have you been?
Bring That Woman a Steak!
Last November, I gave up all the things I don’t really like to do anyway, including eating meat. Unfortunately, my decision to replace meat with cookies turns out to have been somewhat unwise.
I could have guessed that I’d made an unwise nutritional decision, but in fact the extent of my unwisdom was brought to my attention by my doctor, who called the other night to tell me I am severely anemic. (I thought she was calling to tell me that they’d finally voted on a new health care bill and it required all doctors to actually follow up on blood test results that they’ve had since June, but in fact, she managed to stumble on my results without any kind of government mandate. Whether that gives you solace in your concerns about health care legislation I cannot say. All I know is that I’ve been about the same degree of tired for 14 years, and that hasn’t gotten worse since I stopped eating steak.)
When I heard about the severe anemia, my first thought was how I could use THAT news to my advantage. I am here to tell you that in my family it counts for nothing. My husband first checked, of course, as husbands will, to be sure that the chances are zero that the anemia is related to something that will trigger the need to cash in my life insurance policy. After that, well, you still have to do the dishes.
Soon, though, maybe I will be given something that will make me feel totally fired up. And then look out. For one thing, I will beging posting at a rate of greater than .7 blog posts a week. And I will be organizing my bureau drawers and then coming over to your house and alphabetizing your spice rack.
And this is also to say to the fourteen lovely, lovely blog readers who left comments cheering me on in the quicksand also known as revising-your-novel-yet again: I ADORE YOU. And my husband, who really just wants to be sure I am well, I adore him too. And those who read and don’t comment, like the lovely Mari (and her lovely soon to be baby?) but hope for the best in the quicksand? Yup. I ADORE YOU also!
The Neverending Story
You know the novel I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been writing this blog? The one with forty-four (44) chapters? The one I’m revising for my agent? I am just beginning chapter 11.
God.
I have a deadline: October 7. Wish me luck. And know that I am never, ever, ever going to revise this book again. Well, that’s not true. If someone buys it, you’d better believe I’ll revise it again for them.
I don’t know if this much effort goes into every book you pick up at a bookstore or if I am just a slow, sucky writer. But this is one big thing I’ve learned about writing a book: that effortless sentence, that flowing paragraph, that interesting, quick aside? If it’s in my book, you can be certain it took me a really long time to get right.
I suppose that’s one of the great pleasures of your first book, though. I mean, if you get lucky and someone wants the next one, usually they want it faster than forever. But I’m hoping with the second one I won’t need forever to get it right.
