But You Don’t Have to Take My Word For It

Re-reading has always felt indulgent to me in the best of ways. When I was studying literature it was practically breaking the rules unless I was doing so for comprehension of some unnecessarily overwrought text, when reading for pleasure was worthy of a laugh unless you were arguing that you actually enjoyed imagining the Panopticon into every nineteenth century English parlor (which happened in a class, once, but the tally of incidents in which I felt like a dirty fiction writer daring to enjoy artistry without critical theory are too many for any one blog to recount, and certainly not this one).

But I’ve always done it, and I do it now, too, flying in the face of all of what’s great and new and should be read; some books are just old friends.

Revisiting Anne Shirley of late has made me marvel at how little I needed to go on as a ten-year-old reader, how dearly dreaming talks of mischief and the paper-heady scent of apple blossoms could render me. I’ll tell you, almost nothing happens on the page. What does is almost always relayed to Marilla over plum cake hours after, unless it’s a certain titian-headed someone falling off of a roof, or nearly drowning playing at The Lady of Shalott. I’ve got a kindred spirit of my own in K, and the wild ramblings of Anne and Diana are just as I remember them, as I remember ours as sweetly.

What isn’t the same the second time around is Tolkien. I remember struggling and abandoning the first book after Bilbo’s party before I’d seen the films, and only after managing to get through the trilogy on the merits of the cast. I swore Aragorn had no personality and the hobbits little more than appetites, but there’s something to be said for re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring with ten years to season the pages and my temperament. The prose at times feels positively lush. If I’ve told my husband once I’ve expressed to him a dozen times my shock over how much I am actually enjoying this re-reading, which is a testament, perhaps, to what an unworthy jerk I was at nineteen. But really, who isn’t?

Besides, I can’t trust anyone who fantasized they were an edgy Elizabeth Wakefield. No matter how cute Conner McDermott was written.

Saturday’s Child: Imaginary Lovers

I prefer sexual tension to sex.

There’s a reason the characters in my novel don’t kiss for more than two-hundred and fifty pages, and it isn’t because they aren’t hot and bothered for each other after a scattering of charged dialogue. One, because it is so much more fun as a writer not to give them the things they want straightaway, and two, as a reader, the payoff is so much sweeter if I’ve been sucking my own lip for fifteen chapters in hopes they’ll get the hell over themselves and shag or snog with the wanton abandon of the young and stupid. Because I’ve never been (young). I’ve over thought just about every single thing when it comes to the opposite sex since I was old enough to develop a crush on a playmate in kindergarten over a rousing game of Hi Ho! Cherry-O.

The standard fare just isn’t enough to get me hot. It’s all bodies; no heart, no brain. Give me Juliet Marillier’s Daughter of the Forest or Son of the Shadows, especially, Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen, or of late M.K. Hobson’s Native Star. If I’ve read Dreadnaught Stanton purging himself in blood and desperate clinging to Emily once I’ve read it twelve times. I don’t need or want a love triangle unless it’s a reasonable complication (and not something conceived of by editors to drive teenage girls wild; I’m looking at you). And while I want love and my fair share of understated lust, there’s got to be more driving the story than the human hyperdrive to procreate.

Some of the best science fiction television programs, especially, do better than throw me a literal bone when it comes to romantic subplot. Farscape had more than Muppets with John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, and Star Trek: Enterprise’s third season boasts some of their best writing and more of Trip and T’pol than I thought I’d ever see. Don’t get me started on Ten and Rose (and don’t watch if you haven’t seen the whole of their story).

Suffice to say, I’m a sucker. But you’ve got to work for it.

Temper Tantrum

I have a temper that’s mostly irrational and entirely inherited from my father. Which isn’t to say my mom hasn’t got a mouth on her, but I’m all short fuses and long strings of curse words directed at ovens/computers/motor vehicles, marketing campaigns, and my husband running the goddamned vacuum at ten to midnight.

My dirty mouth is not attractive, and is the kind that’s only entertaining in novels. But it’s important. I can’t take my ire seriously without it. And I didn’t swear, not one word willfully, until I read Inherit the Wind.

DRUMMOND. I’m sorry if I offend you. But I don’t swear just for the hell of it. You see, I figure that language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we ought to use all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damned few words that everybody understands.

I remember citing this play as evidence to my friends in high school, who’d presumably read the same book in the same English class or at least enough to get by, but who likely didn’t need the rationale I did to revel in bad words. Perhaps they hadn’t let something slip at nine years old without meaning to during a particularly intense game of Super Mario Bros., or perhaps they had but hadn’t spend the next hour hiding in the laundry room for fear their little brother would tattle on them to mom and dad. Maybe they didn’t grin when late for class one morning and elbow deep in discarded homework at the bottom of their locker, they repeated ‘shit’ over and over again, rolling the word between tongue and cheek and lips like a dirty pinball.

I toyed with words, all words, because I could. I liked telling people that ‘fuck’ was one of the few true English infixes, and demonstrating just how versatile an utterance it could be. As a girl, cursing gave me an edge I mostly imagined, but whose novelty provided the very best of outlets for my rage against maddeningly dull teenage boys and government teachers (and let’s be honest, machines). (My teenage love affair with RATM and Zack de la Rocha is another blog entirely). As a woman, I’m a little more sensitive, a little more secret, but there are few things that feel better than swearing when I’m hoppin’ mad.

But I still won’t curse in front of my parents.

Computer Monitors are not Crystal Balls

I was thinking that the good ol’ days of my fortune telling was my infantile exploration of the internet at fourteen and fifteen years old: the widgets – did we even call them widgets then? – on personal Angelfire pages that would provide Tarot readings or random sentiments for luck; Ask Jeeves’ maternal aunt Madame Jekaterina beseeched in a chat box regarding whether this boy or that one was worthier of my ardent affections or if foregoing AP Biology would really cripple my chances at a scholarship; the notion that the disorderly primeval ooze out of which true randomness slunk could somehow offer me direction and heart, that these things gave me what conversation and real world experience could not. Some other energy that could be heralded or blamed for when things went terribly awry. Or just plain terrible.

But it didn’t start then. I’ve liked looking for signs my whole life, though not in any of the usual places. It wasn’t only that I enjoyed imagining patterns where there weren’t any, or reading into things that probably weren’t meant to be read in the first place, it was a comfort that of all the meaningless possibilities, this one was mine. That there were answers I could not find in a book, even if it meant I had to fathom them into existence. When K and I dared to ask Zandar or I rolled a pair of mismatched dice or looked up a dream interpretation in my secondhand almanac, what I think I always wanted was confirmation for the things I already knew anyway. Worst case scenario, the things I hoped were true or real or immediate.

Now I Google the truth. Over and over again until I’ve got enough right answers to shut up the part of my brain that wants shutting up, that’s forever fourteen and in need of daily affirmations. Usually accompanied by the appropriate Yahoo horoscope and a Lisa Frank sticker.

On Magic Lamps: You’re Doing It Wrong

There are a few things I take very seriously that are very silly. One of them is wishes.

When I was a child I used to become visibly irritated by that joke that people always make when genies or other divine and magnificent dream-makers are mentioned, that if given only three wishes their first wish would be for more wishes. Didn’t they understand a single thing about the way these mythical figures operated? Didn’t they know that they were defeating the entire purpose of being granted only three wishes, and not being in the least little bit clever? It was the principle of the thing that bothered me, that one person felt they should have unlimited access to whatever they could possibly want, forever. In my opinion they just didn’t know what it was to want something so bodily that you wouldn’t be able to keep yourself from making a desperate request at the first chance.

And also that in fairy tales your ass was just going to get burned for being greedy, and you really ought to know better.

Even now when it comes to things like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake or breaking the wishbone or plucking a rogue eyelash from a cheek and blowing a breath of hope across a finger or thumb, I feel that the language I use to articulate my heart’s desire is very important. I can’t leave anything to chance. As a student when I took every opportunity to ask to just graduate already, I had to be sure to specify that I graduate on time, with good grades I’d earned, and without having to jump through the hoops of fire I was sure my African American Studies professor kept in his desk. Of late when I wish for things like babies and book deals, I hope explicitly for a healthy body that can produce both, all seven pounds and one-hundred-seventy thousand words.

It’s a manic sort of thing, I know. But I’m just covering all my bases.

Saturday’s Child: Raising Arizona, Hope, and Me

First of all, let me tell you that my love of Raising Hope has only a very little to do with the fact that it stars the not-whiny gal from The Goonies all grown up.

When I was a kid my parents loved Raising Arizona, and I remember just finding it awkward and embarrassing in its near depiction of my own awkward, embarrassing family. Which isn’t to say my mom and dad wanted for kids enough to go around thieving them, but still. These folks were poor and inarticulate and taken advantage of. They weren’t so much real people as caricatures, and when paired with their socioeconomic equals on Married With Children, I was made more than a little bit uncomfortable.

Hope’s family is poor and rowdy and none too bright but they love the shit out of each other, and for me that is the strongest narrative thread in the series. My love of queering the traditional family delights, too, in the role reversal of Jimmy’s parents. His father is the one who needs to be hugged, who cries, who shelters him, and his mother plays at sympathies she sometimes simply doesn’t have. For all of the outlandishness somehow tidily resolved by the end of an episode, these crazy folks are real and I love them.

Just like my folks are real and crazy and I love them.

Super Sad True Love Story

Let me tell you about the look on his face.

Seated at his computer desk with his back to me, I contemplated the slope of his shoulders and the weight of the news I carried, literally. More than wand-thin plastic and the slimmest of fruit seeds, this was big news, belly-big, big as our little life increased by some mathematical factor he wouldn’t have time to explain anymore to me.

So I said what I didn’t think I’d be saying so soon after I kicked the habit, and let me tell you, the look on his face. Let me tell you about it.

“Really?“

My husband is a man of secret giddiness, but this expression had no secrets. Full and open as a book, no, a drawing of a book so fat-full of pages you could never close it again. He took me on his lap, he repeated himself. I repeated myself. Our grins fell together like lovers in bed when we kissed.

For less than a week we were having a baby. And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t.

There wasn’t any pain, only the heart-choking sobs that hiccuped out of me when I thought too hard about it, which I tried not to do. I reasoned crying and writing about it in private, and have resisted for months even talking about it with the few who knew by necessity of when I got the news, and how. All of my adult life I haven’t wanted to talk about being a girl. The paranoia that accompanied any mention of my wedding when we were getting married carried over quite naturally into any mention of wanting to start a family, for fear of seeming like someone I wasn’t, or worse, wanting to be someone who mightn’t be respected. It doesn’t make sense. Most things I think don’t.

But this happened, and my heart is a telling heart, a showing heart, a sharing one. I wanted you to know.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I have lots of Halloween stories I like to tell. Here’s one.

Though my mother attests that I went as Punky Brewster for three Halloweens in a row as a very young girl, the first costume I remember was the Queen of Hearts. Maybe I liked her demanding aesthetic, maybe Alice was just too much of a wimp, maybe I just wanted a crown and a big ass dress and a scepter heavy on the hearts. At six years old, I suspect it was entirely the last.

My parents, being the clever and thrifty folks that they were, put a lot of time and effort into my costume and it was a secret to me until the day before the Halloween parade at school. While the other girls would be wearing flimsy plastic masks and store bought tunics that tied like hospital gowns over their school clothes, I would have an ensemble. I’d seen the crown my parents had made for me, adapting a New Year’s Eve party hat, hearts bobbing and glittered gold letters in my mother’s hand announcing my title. What I hadn’t seen was the sandwich board to be affixed above my shoulders, the Queen of Hearts painstakingly rendered by my dad, a damn fine likeness of your standard Bicycle playing card. I was mortified, but it was too, too late to do anything about it. My rebellion against the costume extended only so far as refusing to take off my jean skirt at the school parade, for leotard and tights or no, my modesty would not permit me to go about with nothing but cardboard and a layer of red nylon between me and my classmates.

In retrospect I find their efforts brilliant and wish I had the costume still, or at least a photograph of it. We made our costumes every year, later favorites including a ghost from a story I’d liked on Unsolved Mysteries, a gypsy draped in my mother’s shawls from high school homecoming dances, and, taking advantage of my wild hair in early adolescence, the Bride of Frankenstein.

My brother and I would run from house to house in neighborhoods much nicer than ours, always prepared with two pillow cases for when the first one became full. No paltry pails for us. I had no patience for cousins when we suffered trick or treating in groups, when they became whiny or tired or refused to commit to our breakneck speed. Clearly, they did not understand that we had only three hours to acquire as much free candy as we could. Each street we failed to visit was one less house with a fog machine and grave stone dotted yard that we would miss, a teenager leaping from a leaf burial to  make us shriek, a porch veiled in black garbage bags promising mystery. And candy. Did I mention the candy?

Halloween always was and still is my favorite holiday. What’s yours?

Touch of Grey

I found my first grey hair. Like a fat-toothed comb my fingers parted hairs until I could pluck it free, be sure it wasn’t paint or light or my eyes playing tricks in the sterile fluorescence of the bathroom. But the hair was silvered pale, delicate as thread, and I sealed it reverently in a plastic container to show my husband when he came home. He wasn’t as convinced as me, though my evidence of age is very little when compared with his salt and peppering beard.

“It looks white.”

“Maybe I’ll go white instead of grey.”

That could be pretty bitchin’, to have a few Rogue years between my sorry youth and sure to be sorrier middle age. That’s more of a dream, I think, than thinking that one won’t sprout in time one hundred.

Before I threw it out I twirled it once, twice, three times around my finger, less than I would have been able to after a recent hair cut. I’m nearing the end of my twenties, but for all I regret at their passing I have more to look forward to, more ahead than I have behind. A writing professor I had as an undergraduate, a man I admired greatly and for shame have yet to read, mused to me that I might have only one really good story in me as a young person, and that perhaps I had already told it. But more would come, later. He was of the opinion that most people were not worth reading until they were in their thirties, even if they’d been writing for years. I didn’t balk at the idea at the time and I don’t now, either, because I know that I always have more work to do. I can only hope to be given the time to do it.

And with NaNoWriMo but a few days away, the many kicks in the pants I need to keep from squandering my last year as a twenty-something on World of Warcraft.

The Good That Men Do

There are two men in my life who love me.

The first today hugged me hard enough to break my back. It has been a few months since we have seen each other and saw each other today only because we were together for a wake for my uncle, for him the man who had been like a second father to him, his sister’s husband, his friend. My father had a beer in one hand, eyes yellowed with unshed tears and though he talked and talked there were many things he didn’t say. His pride in me is like a brand, or maybe it is more like the tattoo he gave himself as a too-young man, the hot needle prick of ink persisting forever. For me it says remember, remember, remember where you came from.

And I always will remember, because despite the fact that I’ve taken the name of the second man for my own, I’ve chosen to publish with both, when I do.

Tonight I dropped a tea tray on my foot. The clatter and cursing were more serious than the wound warranted, but my husband was up and out of his office chair in an instant, teasing with me only when he’d established that the hurt was not severe. Still I strip my tights and he cleans my busted big toe over the sink, bandages with the light pressure of his thumbs and forefingers. Before I met him I would’ve let fingers and toes rot off before I’d waste a bandage, but I’ve grown more fond of his careful attention in moments like these than I have my own limbs.

“You might lose the nail,” he warns, brows arched in all seriousness. “It’ll take years to grow back.”

At least I’ll have good company.