Eating My Words (One of My Favorite Meals, It Seems)

“I’m not a big fan of karaoke, even at midnight, when everyone’s drunk and it seems appropriate…but in the middle of the afternoon, when no one’s drunk, and you’re at a party with your colleagues?” This is an exact quote from an email I sent to a friend of mine who used to work at my former company with me. We’ve both moved onto greener pastures, and I was debriefing her on that company’s Christmas party this year, for which I inexplicably received an invitation. I’d decided to go, because I still have quite a few friends who work there whom I don’t get to see nearly as frequently as I’d like (or used to). If I’d known karaoke was going to be on the agenda, however, I might not have been so quick to accept.

In fairness, I’ve never actually been to a karaoke bar, nor stuck around long enough at a regular bar that does karaoke on Tuesday nights after 10:00, or whatever. But I’m very aware of what they are and what they’re like, which is why I don’t hang out in them. I’m someone, as you know, who can’t stand the notion of getting up and speaking in front of a bunch of people, let alone singing. And when I drink, depression of my hypothalamus exaggerating this tendency in me, I’m even less likely to want to do such things.

I’m also someone who is extremely uncomfortable watching others make fools of themselves, and I’m sorry, unless you really are Aretha Franklin, Debbie Harry, or Tina Turner, chances are, you really can’t dance and sing like them, no matter what you might think. Thus, you’re going to look like a fool when you get up on that stage and drown out the music (which always seems to fade into the background like the ending of an old 45 record the minute someone grabs a microphone) with your off-key warbling. Yes, I’m sure your mother did say you were going to be a star one day. What I want to know is: how many martinis had she had when she told you that? I want to know, because I want to replicate her experience right here and now, so I can see if I can hear what she heard, since, Sister, it certainly hasn’t come through yet.

So, you may wonder what I was doing at another party less than a month later singing karaoke. Eating my words; that’s what. I think they were, “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.” When our friends told us they’d gotten a free karaoke machine and were having a party, I didn’t believe we’d really be singing. After all, I’ve been to a few other parties with these machines, and they’ve always sat in the corner, quietly, where such things belong.

However, I’d forgotten that this party was being hosted by our friend Rob. Rob is rivaled only by Bob (does “Robert” mean “determined?”) when it comes to determination. He and his wife had somehow missed the opportunity to use this thing at their last party, and he was bound and determined that we were going to use it this go around. Before I knew it, I was sitting on the couch, mesmerized as all the words to all these old songs flashed on the television screen, and I found myself saying, “Wow, I never knew that’s what that line was.” And then he said to me, “Here, hold this for a second,” and I looked down to find he’d put a microphone in my hand.

Well, the next step was to start belting out some of these songs. I mean, how can you hear such things as “December 1963’ and not want to sing? I was cursing the evil manufacturers of this horrid machine. But then, as we all sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” I realized this wasn’t really karaoke. No one was up on stage alone, American Idol fantasies running through their heads. We were a chorus of horrible voices. It was like an old-fashioned hootenanny.

A hootenanny. I’m about as familiar with one of those as I am with a karaoke bar. Somehow, though, like a kid forever stuck in middle school, this is the generation into which I was born. Not the one that sits around at hootenannies protesting wars, making up songs, and pretending to be Joan Baez, nor the one that hops up onto stage all alone, pretending to be Britney Spears, but no, the one in which the campfire is a large-screen television; the songs are as familiar as a bowl of Frosted Flakes; and everyone shares the stage together, laughing at how bad they are.

Perhaps it’s not quite such a bad generation after all: we’re all looking forward to being eighth-graders next year and ruling the school.

The True Biblical Scholar is Discovered

You know the Bible 93%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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I had no idea until today that I'm a true Biblical scholar. I used to be the person with a sieve of a brain, the one who ran around saying things like, "you know, what's-his-name from the Bible, the one who did that great thing we always hear about. Come on! He's the one from the Old Testament in that book that comes somewhere after Genesis, I think. No, it's not God, someone else..." I never would have predicted I'd do so well, having only read the Bible all the way through once and having hated Sunday School when I was a kid (as a matter of fact, I was a little afraid to take this quiz, sure it would be full of questions such as "Who was Beruchna's fourth daughter-in-law?").

Maybe the fact I'm married to someone who was the first at his seminary to make a 100% on his Presbyterian Bible Content ordination exam (don't tell him I told you that. He's embarrassed whenever I talk about it. Besides, we true Biblical scholars know it's a sin to brag about our husbands) is somehow rubbing off on me? I'll say, though, that the questions are heavily slanted in favor of those of us who are/were raised Christians. A fair test would not have had so many questions concerning The New Testament (19 out of 42, and it's really 19 out of 40, since the first two questions are about age and gender -- very important Biblical questions, I know) when one considers its length compared to that of the Old Testament. But who am I to quibble over such things? Oh, wait a minute. I'm a true Biblical scholar, that's who I am.

Actually, I'm thrilled to have discovered this fact. I mean, any day now, I could suddenly find myself being known not as "Emily," but merely as "the minister's wife," a fact that is, at times, leaving me a little nervous. I wouldn't be so nervous about this if people didn't keep asking me, "So, do you think you can handle being a minister's wife?" That question in and of itself is one to which I'd answer "Of course. What could possibly be so hard about it?" with blessed assurance, if I hadn't been so self-assured in my positive response when asked four years ago, "So, do you think you can handle being the wife of a seminarian?" and had then gone on to discover I'd make a miserable widow at this point in my life.

At least, from now on, when asked this question, I can say, "Well, I do happen to be a true Biblical scholar, you know," thus maybe intimidating my inquisitors so much they won't notice I swear just a little too much for a minister's wife and that "Irreverent" is my middle name. I mean, does it matter if my house isn't spotlessly clean and I'm no good at hosting ladies' teas on a moment's notice if I happen to know which book of the Bible is a book of poetry or who was eaten by a big fish? Obviously, people will be flocking to me to set them straight when they can't remember whether or not Dr. Seuss wrote the Book of Acts.

On second thought, from now on, I think I'll just start saying, "Of course I can handle being a minister's wife. After all, I'm 'awesome!' I'm 'fantastic!' What are you?"

Things Fall Apart in a nutshell: What on earth took me so long to read this brilliant book? I can't fathom how Achebe managed to cover so much in so few pages and, likewise, to do such a fabulous job of taking me into a culture about which I basically knew nothing, getting me to care so much about it. Not since I last saw the movie Black Robe have I been made to think so hard about the clashes and misunderstandings between different cultures, which are in many ways more alike than diferent, when well-meaning missionaries take up residence.

The "Bossy One"

When Ian posted his first account over on our joint blog (by the way, he posted an ancient passport photo of us the other day, which is funny, for those of you who are interested), he began his post by saying the blog had been my idea and that I'd been the one to come up with the rules. Boy, I sound bossy, don't I? If I'm honest, I have to admit I probably was (and maybe still am) a very bossy older sister. Anyone with a lesser strength of character than Ian probably would have killed me before we reached puberty.

As a matter of fact, my family happily labeled me the "bossy one," when I was still quite young, a label I find very ironic. After all, I haven't met too many older siblings who aren't bossy (Bob, the oldest of two boys is extremely bossy -- although he calls it "taking charge"), and I'm the one who had two experts to show me how it's done. By the tender age of three or four I'd learned that I couldn't just come knocking at the doors of my sisters' "houses," a motley crew of raggedy stuffed animals and dejected old doll "children"by my side, announcing I'd come for tea. Nor was I allowed to wear bellbottoms once everyone knew straight legs were the "in" thing. Even if I loved them, Abba and Leo Sayer were off limits as far as my musical tastes were concerned. And God forbid I should prefer to read The Hardy Boys over Nancy Drew (I compromised and found the wonderful, little-known Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series when they weren't paying attention). I have to hand it to them, my sisters kept me on the straight and narrow. Thank God, really. I mean, who would want to have to admit she once had Leo Sayer in her record collection?

What I find most ironic about being the "bossy one," though is that now that I've spent a number of years as an adult with the label "boss," I've discovered I don't really seem to possess whatever it is that others have that makes it easy for them to tell people what to do. There are many things I love about being a boss, but delegation is not one of them. I'm absolutely horrible when it comes to delegating tasks, somehow thinking the whole world is going to come to an end if I don't personally dot every "i" and cross every "t."

At the beginning of every year, I find myself making the same workplace resolution: "learn to delegate." But, you know, in January, we've all just come back from the holidays, and many have been away, and everyone's so busy trying to catch up. And, well, it's just easier to do these few little things myself. Then January turns to February, and February turns to March, and oh my God, two people have quit. Well, how can I possibly ask anyone to do anymore than he/she is already doing? Until we have some replacements, everyone is going to have to pick up the slack.

By summertime I'm maybe realizing my problem is that I can't tell the difference between asking and telling. After all, I've never questioned a boss of mine when he or she has asked me to do something. I've just gone and done it (as quickly as possible). And there's a difference between "work-place asking" and "non-work-place asking." Asking a colleague to write a letter for me that doesn't need my signature is very different from asking someone to help me solve all my psychological problems. Somehow, though, I'm not very good at distinguishing between different types of help, always assuming that if I'm asking for help it either means A. I'm no good at doing things myself or B. I'm extraordinarily needy. Finally, I seem to assume that no matter what I'm asking, it's going to be a huge imposition on the other person (God forbid I shouldn't just carry all burdens myself instead of sharing the load a little with others who are supposed to be sharing the load).

And then there's "telling." Truth be told, I don't think I've ever had one of those types of bosses you see on TV or in movies who just orders people about. I think I can only count a handful of times when I was actually told to do something. Yet, even then, I didn't freak out or immediately start looking for another job. I just accepted whatever it was as part of the job. When it comes to telling those I supervise what to do, though, I tend to find myself thinking, "Well, who am I to tell them what to do?" I seem to have had some sort of complete memory lapse that keeps me from responding, "You're the boss, that's who." I've forgotten that in this society, it's perfectly acceptable for the boss to, well, boss others around. In fairness to me, before you start to think I'm a complete wuss who shouldn't have this job, I currently work for a wonderfully nonhierarchical company where we don't just give lip service to the idea of "teamwork," we live it, and where the notion of "bosses," although we use the terminology, is pretty foreign. Of course, players on teams typically help each other out, though, don't they? And they're not afraid to ask for that help (or even to yell to others on the field to do what needs to be done), are they?

So, this year, as I sit here worrying about the mounds of work I've got accumulating, is going to be different. I'm going to learn, once and for all, the true art of delegation. I'm going to imitate those who do it with finesse, finding themselves surrounded by adoring colleagues who love working for them. February's on the horizon. Everyone just might be starting to come out from under all that post-holiday pileup soon...

Commuting Telecommuter

A while ago Mandarine, who was reading some of my early posts (and flattering me by comparing me to chocolate) came across the post in which I was complaining about working from home, a place where I had easy access to my kitchen full of food. I know. I know. To complain about such a thing when people are starving all over the world seems quite petty, but what I was really doing was worrying that I was going to get fat, which is a concern when one lives in a country that suffers from such high rates of obesity and, thus, unnecessary health problems. We middle class Americans, it seems, have evolved into such spoiled creatures and have been fed such unhealthy food, laden with things like trans fats, all our lives that our natural mechanisms for keeping us from overeating seem to have gone the way of the appendix -- they're useless. Although I've never been fat, I'm not immune to this problem, especially when I know good food is available.

Not too long after I wrote that post about food, I discovered The Shangri La diet, which has managed to dull even my cravings for chocolate a bit (a miracle worthy of the Second Coming), and I quit worrying. Nevertheless, we all know that exercise is as important (if not more important, if recent articles in The New York Times are to be believed) for a healthy body than the food we eat, and advice as to what we need to do has remained far more consistent over the years than all the nutrition fads. I mean, with the exception of telling people that aerobics isn't enough and that some form of strength training and stretching are also important, exercise requirements don't change that much.

Does anyone else hate those nutritionists at the FDA as much as I do? They'll tell you for years and years and years that the most important things to eat are pasta and bread, and then, when everyone has gained two hundred pounds, come back with "Oops, we meant whole grains!" Or you'll read a headline that peanuts are the best thing for you, and just as you're getting ready to race out and buy three cans of Planters dry-roasted, you'll read on to find out they have to be raw and unsalted (blech), and that, oh yeah, because they're high in fat, you should really only eat five a day. But those five a day are really going to change your life! Exercise, on the other hand, remains stable. I can pretty much guarantee that as long as I'm moving and sweating for at least 30 minutes a day, I'm doing what I need to do.

The problem is, as I noted in another one of those early posts: I despise exercise for the sake of exercise. I like to hike. I like to ride a bike (although my bike needs major repairs these days, having been abandoned for years, when I worked in an office and didn't have much time to ride due to my long commute, and had thus joined a gym near the office. I keep saying I must get it fixed -- not being someone who has the patience or ability to do such things as taking apart and putting together bikes the way Hobs can, even with all ten of my fingers uninjured. I've ridden Bob's bike a few times, but it's way too big). I like to swim. Sometimes I like to run, if the terrain is relatively flat, and it's the right temperature. And that's about it. I don't like to play any competitive sports. As a matter of fact, I basically don't like to exercise with other people. And thirty minutes a day is an awful lot of time -- time that can be better spent doing just about anything else.

Then along came Mandarine with his brilliant suggestion. Why not continue to commute to work? Get outside and walk, run, or bike "to and from work" every day. I could map out my own route, and make the commute as long or as short as I wanted. So, because I have plantar fasciitis (a runner's foot injury that takes forever to heal) and can't run, and as noted above, my bike isn't in good working order (although now winter has suddenly hit the Northeast, I'm not sure I'd enjoy biking much right now anyway), I'm walking. I have a twenty-five-minute, one-way commute, which is still less time than I was commuting by car in the old days, and my afternoon commute is wonderful, because Bob and Lady usually join me for that one. This frees up my lunch hour, which I used to spend exercising, for other things, and I'm getting fifty minutes of exercise everyday instead of only thirty. I still do yoga twice a week, so there's my strengthening and stretching settled. And I can listen to books on tape again, something I'd pretty much abandoned since I moved home to work.

I've discovered an added benefit, as well. Since it's winter, and dark practically 24 hours a day, I can't commute to work until 7:00, which gets me there at 7:30. I wake up at 6:00, so this gives me a full hour to write every morning. At the other end, I have to quit working by a certain time in order to get that afternoon commute in while it's light. This means I have a period in which I truly separate my work day from my evenings. Of course, this will change come spring, but I'm hoping in the summer, when the pool's open, I can start "swimming home from work." Since we don't have central air, I can imagine I'm going to be dying to get in the pool by the time 5:00 rolls around.

So, all-and-all, a practice I'd highly recommend for all telecommuters, and one that my dim brain never would've come up with on its own. Who says we bloggers don't benefit in untold ways from each other?


Hans Brinker in a nutshell: (I've decided that as I finish reading the children's and adult's classics I've chosen for 2007, I'll try to summarize them in a few sentences at the end of posts): a gem of a story that was really like two stories in one (Hans's story and a story about a group of boys' adventures in different cities in Holland) and was chock-full of interesting details about Dutch life in the 19th-century, amazing since Mary Mapes Dodge had never been there at the time she wrote it. Also, a little-known fact (or at least I didn't know it, which may not actually make it "little-known"): the "legend" of the Little Dutch Boy who sticks his finger in the dike was completely created by Dodge for this book and has no basis in any Dutch legends.

A New Blog

My brother Ian and I have decided that this year we’re going to join forces out in the blogosphere. This is somewhat of a huge and scary step for me. You see, Ian happens to be the funniest human being I know. That’s saying a lot, because I tend to surround myself with very funny people (many of whom, if they’re reading this, I’ve probably just insulted by choosing Ian over them).

I know. You’ve read one paragraph, and you’re thinking, “Oh God. Emily’s finally proven once and for all that she’s a madwoman, fixated on her brother, having no idea she’s biased, and he’s a no-talent loser.” But ask Bob. Everyone knows how in-laws are supposed to feel about each other. He’ll tell you that Ian is the funniest human being he knows.

As a matter of fact, I’m very happy he’s my brother. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to claim him as a human being I know. It may be that I would have been lucky enough to have crossed paths with him at some point, possibly even have been introduced to him. However, I would have been far too intimidated by his brilliance, story-telling ability, and ironic wit (not to mention his championship ability to pun, rivaled only by my sister Lindsay. Don’t get the two of them together), to have done more than blush, maybe say “hi,” and then do something like trip over a dog who would’ve bitten me, thus providing fodder for a hilarious rendition of that crazy woman who tripped over Sam, the world’s most docile Basset Hound, and had to be taken to the emergency room, a story that would walk into rooms of bored-looking party guests and leave them in stitches, begging for more, for years to come.

My mother, being not at all a typical mother in her overenthusiastic convictions concerning the genius quotient of her children, used to engage in fantasies that equated her three daughters and one son with the Brontës. This was a fantasy that flattered and enthused me until I began to read all the research surrounding the Brontë children and discovered, they may have been extraordinarily talented storytellers and writers, but oh man, were they weird. Happily, I can note that although both my sisters have published books, not one of us has written a gothic romance.

My mother, however, was focusing on that storytelling quality of the Brontës, having herself been raised in the pre-tell-all-and-make-everyone-pathetic-victims-of-extreme-dysfunction-not-the-least-bit-worthy-of-admiration era. And, yes, I have to agree that all four of her children are capable of telling good stories. This isn’t the least bit remarkable, though, considering the fact we’re English, Scottish, and Southern.

Everyone knows the Anglo-Saxons were spinning marvelous yarns back in the days when America was nothing more than a many-legged monster ready to swallow up anyone stupid enough to go sailing off the edge of the world. And if you’ve ever been a child visiting relatives in Virginia, sitting on the porch of a house nestled between Poe’s Ragged Mountains and The Blue Ridge, cicadas, Bob Whites, and Whippoorwills singing in the background, while the adults sat around trying to outdo each other with one story after another, well, you’d know it’s pretty hard not to develop a knack for creating your own.

Those porches and gatherings of relatives are few and far between these days, but we do have the blogosphere. Ian was the first one in our family to venture into it, tempting me, but I wasn’t ready yet. He then walked out of it for a while, and that’s when I began my own exploration. At this point, he’s made a reappearance.

Now we’d like to do a little homesteading, building at least the porch, if nothing else, where we can tell a few stories. We both realize we have plenty of shared experiences, but that they don’t always sound the same when we begin to relate them. Like a game we used to play with friends as children in which we’d all sit in different parts of a room, a piece of paper and magic markets for each of us, choosing a theme, like “a farm” and then taking turns announcing something associated with a farm that would go in that picture, no one allowed to see what the others were drawing until we’d announced we were “done,” our stories surprise us with how completely different they are. And I love hearing his versions.

So here’s our plan: each month, we’ll choose one shared topic. He’ll blog about it. I’ll blog about it. Our only rule is that we can’t read what the other has written until we’ve written our own. My guess is they’ll be so different, you may be hard-pressed to recognize them as having the same foundation. We’ll see. You can visit us (we’ve got lemonade and homemade cookies and lots of wooden lounge chairs) over here, and I’ve written my first post. Now it’s his turn.

The Calvino Meme

I wish I could be like my friend Danny and resist a meme, but I just don’t seem to have that kind of willpower, or maybe it’s that I don’t have his kind of originality and have to depend on others to tell me what to write about on a regular basis (although Mandarine has been busy giving me tons of non-meme topics that I'll have to start addressing soon, so I can't really use that as an excuse). This meme was absolutely impossible for me to resist. Just before I came across it over at Litlove's place, I'd written about how The Thirteen Tales plays with readers in a way I hadn’t enjoyed since my last reading of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, one of my long-time favorite books. Lo and behold, around the time I was composing that statement, clever Kate was devising this meme based on the scene in the bookstore in Calvino’s book. So, here you have it: the meme I couldn't resist (as if there has ever been one I could). It also happens to be my first of 2007:

Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages
I once mentioned for some other meme I think that Le Miserables falls into this category (I've been meaning to read it ever since I first saw the Broadway play about fifteen years ago). The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is another one (obviously not nearly as long in this category, but getting there, since we own the advance reader's page proofs picked up at some book conference just before it was published). I often worry I might suffer some huge feeling of disappointment that has nothing to do with the books themselves, though, were one of these two actually to be moved from this category, their being so used to being neglected and my being so used to neglecting them. Maybe they should be moved to a new category like “books I’ve been planning to read for ages, but let's be real, and acknowledge there’s probably no bloody way in hell I’ll ever get around to doing so.” Then I could just admire them from afar, no feelings of guilt whatsover when I stop by to pet them occasionally, knowing they're no longer looking hopefully up at me trying to convince me they're well worth my spending time on them.

Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success
The Melendy Family by Elizabeth Enright, which is a bound volume of the first three books that involve Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver and all their adventures. I once found it on some used bookstore web site for $100, which I wasn’t desperate enough to pay at the time, although now it’s beginning to become something about which I think, “what’s a $100 for such a worthy cause?” since it’s just completely disappeared, as far as I can tell. Anyone have a copy they want to sell me?

Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment
Do sample maunscript pages for books about math that haven’t yet been published but will be in 2007 and 2008 count? If not, I've got a few books on multiple personality disorder I've checked out of the library and am referring to for a fiction piece I'm writing.

Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case
All the really basic cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking, as well as comfort books for bad days like I Capture the Castle and Three Men in a Boat.

Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Summer time is for re-reading Ross MacDonald, preferably out in a hammock up in Maine with a gin and tonic.

Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
Any book published by Persephone Books. They look so nice all lined up together, and they are guaranteed, thus far, to be fabulous reads. I wish I owned the shop (actually, at this point, I wish I could just visit the shop, or that they'd open an American branch in New York).

Books That Fill You With A Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
Anything to do with the brain. Bob and I have been fighting over the double issue of The Economist, because it’s got many interesting articles on this topic.

Books Read Long Ago That It’s Now Time To Reread
I’d love to re-read The World According to Garp, which I read for the first and last time when I was fifteen, and for years, claimed it was my favorite book (it was the book that brought me firmly into the world of reading contemporary adult literature). I can’t imagine what my reaction to it might be today.

Books That If You Had More Than One Life You’d Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
Native Son, which would be a re-read. It had such a huge impact on me, and yet it was such an incredibly difficult read, I’m not sure I could handle it again, like watching A Clockwork Orange (one of my all-time favorite movies, but one I decided after the third viewing there was no need to ever subject myself to the pain of watching again).

Anyone who wants to keep this meme going on your own blog, I hope you will. Meanwhile, I've realized after having lunch with Dorr today and laughing about how I'm not a lit blogger (during the period when I wasn't busy spilling my cranberry juice and seltzer all over myself), I've gone and yet again, written about books. I also have an unprecedented, for me (I think), five links in this post. Slowly, but surely, I must be getting over my technophobia.

We're Off to See the Wizard...

Last month, one of Bob’s and my dearest friends, who also happens to be brilliant and beautiful (sorry, Fem, I can’t remember the third adjective LC used to describe you. Let’s pretend for alliteration’s sake it was “bold,” which fits), was on her way back from a three-month stint in Vancouver and stopped by for an all-too-brief visit with us before heading on to her home country of Northern Ireland. Fem was in seminary with Bob during his first year there, and the conversation when the three of us get together always centers around the theological and the psychological, two subjects that have been near and dear to my heart since I was a teenager. This is great fun for all three of us, but sometimes we need a break from all the intensity.

A break is exactly what we were taking the second night she was here when Bob had prepared some of his infamous margaritas (neither Fem nor I hold our liquor very well, so one of these was really enough, but we all decided to have more than one). While we two women were amusingly trying to figure out if we could still touch our noses with our arms stretched straight out to our sides (I’ll let you guess as to whether or not we could), Bob decided to browse the T.V. listings in The New York Times to see if there were any movies we might like to watch that wouldn’t be too taxing for our pickled brains. This was when Bob and I were astonished and thrilled to discover that Fem, who grew up in rather unusual circumstances (at least, by our narrow American standards), had never seen The Wizard of Oz, which happened to be featured that evening.

Can you imagine getting to see that movie with an adult who’s seeing it for the first time? We immediately announced, “Oh, you have to see it!” Of course, the thought bubbles above our heads were announcing what we really meant, “Oh, we have to have the experience of seeing this with you!”

We hadn’t seen the movie probably in over ten years, but it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s as familiar as your bedroom exactly the way it was when you were eleven years old would be if you could walk back into it today. Bob and I were at our most obnoxious, proving how well we knew the whole thing and not wanting her to miss a thing with all our “Now, pay close attention to this part"-s when, for instance, Dorothy is talking to all the farmhands who will eventually become the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Fem was, as always (and in a way only those I’ve known from the U.K. can be), graciously patient with us, especially when we kept asking such stupid questions as “Do you know this song [Somewhere Over the Rainbow]?” and “What about this one [Follow the Yellow Brick Road]?” I didn’t realize it would happen, but I found myself feeling envious of someone who’d never seen the movie. Imagine not knowing you’re inevitably going to reach the “I’m melting” and “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” lines.

Probably 95% of the movies I last saw over ten years ago would be like first-time viewing experiences for me if I were to watch them now, but not this one. Watching The Wizard of Oz every year when I was growing up was a family ritual as steadfast as celebrating each family member’s birthday. I can pretty much mark my changing bedtimes by marking the points at which I had to go to bed (even on such special occasions as W.O.Z. Night, I only got to stay up half an hour past my strictly-enforced bedtime). I can still remember the thrill of the first time I got to stay up past the meeting of the Scarecrow. Needless to say, the first parts of the movie are more vivid to me these days than the latter parts.

So, Fem was doing her best to keep from telling us to shut up when Bob suddenly started telling us all kinds of things about the movie I never knew (and am still not sure are really true. They sound suspiciously like theories imposed on the movie in hindsight, sometime during the sixties), like how following the yellow brick road had been a metaphor for capitalism's directive to follow the money (yellow gold) or that the Wizard represents a de-bunking of religion and God. And why had I never paid attention to the fact that the witch’s guards resembled Russian soldiers (could be because I hadn’t seen that part of the movie as much as the first part)? And, then Dorothy tells us “there’s no place like home,” home, of course, being good old America, where capitalism reigns.

This was our break from intense conversation? Capitalism, religion, politics and war, childhood memories…It doesn’t sound like much of a break to me. I guess that’s why we had to take a real break the next evening and go see Little Miss Sunshine, that light little comedy that didn’t inspire any thoughts of anything of a psychological or political nature whatsoever, especially for two feminine feminists and their masculine feminist companion.

The Joys of Oral Presentations

I deeply admire those of you who make a living basically by getting up and giving oral presentations every day. I can’t think of much I despise more than having to get up in front of a group of people and talk. Maybe getting up in front of a group of people and singing and dancing, but no job I’ve ever had as ever required me to do such a thing.

I just got back from a trip that involved giving a presentation to four different groups of people, and I’m feeling like I need about a week to recover. I will admit I’ve come a long way since my first semester of college when I got up in my Spanish 101 class to give a presentation and literally froze, thus inspiring the sort of pity no one wants to inspire in their classmates the first semester of college. I even have to admit that I often get praised for my presentations these days (as I did after these four), thus making me one of those people I hate, who complain about how bad they are at something and then demonstrate how splendidly they can do that thing. But I think I can explain why people praise me. It’s because I’m so deathly afraid of looking out at the audience and finding most of them sleeping that I’ve learned to weave the art of personal storytelling into my presentations, a talent I learned from Bob, who does a splendid job of this, much better than I could ever do. People don’t expect it, so it doesn’t matter if your delivery is terrible, as mine so often is; if it’s unexpected, it will keep them from being too bored, and then they’ll tell you your presentation was good.

The thing is, though, if you pay attention to me, you can tell how nervous I actually am. There are those who will tell you they hate giving oral presentations, that they’re always so nervous, and then they get up and do it as if they were doing something as natural as strolling through a park on a sunny day. Where’s the nervous fidgeting? The tucking of nonexistent stray hairs behind the ears? The obviously shaking hands as they hold up something to demonstrate? Where’s the tripping up over such extremely difficult words as “the?” I see it nowhere in evidence. And sure, they might tell you they have butterflies in their stomachs, but what’s the big deal about nice little butterflies gently fluttering their wings? I’d find that far preferable to the baby pterosaur who’s so obviously trying to hatch itself out of my stomach.

And then there’s the dry mouth. If I’m not tripping over the pronunciation of “the,” my tongue is sticking to the roof of my mouth so firmly, I’m sure all that’s going to come out is a few grunts. That would be even worse than a reenactment of the frozen Spanish 101 student. I could hear it going down in the history of the company, “Remember that time when that woman, what was her name? Emily or something? She stood up in front of us, sounding like a pig?” I’m drinking all the water in the pitcher that’s been provided and wondering how others also manage to make that seem so effortless. I mean, people stand up at podiums and casually incorporate sips of water into what they’re saying, as if their notes say, “pause for sip of water,” and it flows beautifully, not looking the least bit out of place. I’m busy looking down at my notes and wondering, “Can I possibly make it through these next ten pages of notes without anymore water, and if not, where can I fit in a quick sip?” all the while praying my shaking hands don’t end up spilling the water all over those notes. Finally, I quickly reach for the glass in desperation, unable to keep from noting everyone’s expectant faces during this unwanted interruption.

I suppose, as some would ask, yes, it does get easier with time and with practice, but I'm not sure it's actually getting easier. I think what’s really going on is an experience similar to the way I’ve heard women with children describe childbirth. After each one of these painful events, as time goes on, I completely forget the pain. I’m lulled by the joy my job provides me about 85% of the time. And just like the mother who decides she really wants to have another baby, seeming to have a complete memory block when it comes to the fact she screamed throughout her last labor that she was never going to do this again, once I’ve forgotten, I will find myself doing things like volunteering to run entire summits on my area of expertise. Then again, maybe it has nothing to do with a memory lapse similar to a mother’s and more to do with drinking a very potent margarita in Fort Worth, TX. Oh well, whatever it is, for the time being, I can collapse and enjoy my job until the labor pains come again.

One Last Look Back at 2006 or Ripping Off Someone Else's Brilliant Idea

Others are much better at coming up with interesting ideas than I am, but I figure as long as I give them credit, it isn’t stealing when I take their terrific ideas and run with them . Thus, I’m giving Dorr (better known as Dorothy W. to those who don’t insist on coming up with nicknames for everyone) credit for analyzing the books she read in 2006, providing us with some great statistics. What a wonderful thing she did. I couldn’t get it out of my mind until I’d analyzed my 2006 list, changing it a tiny bit to make it my own. So here are the results:

Total number of titles read: 63
Total number aborted after reading at least 30 pages: 2
Total number of pages read: 17146 (You may wonder how I manage to have this number. Well, it’s a definite sign that I’m weird and/or that I work in publishing. When I record the books I read, I give a full bibliographic record, including copyright date(s), publisher, and number of pages. You can assume this number is a bit misleading, because some of the books I read had indices, and I promise you, even I’m not enough of a geek to read through all those. But it’s a close approximation. I thought about doing a “number of publishers” category as well, but I didn’t want to have to bother to look up all the various imprints, and I figure that since most trade books are published by imprints of one of the big three publishers, the number would probably just be 3. We’ll ignore the fact that I read quite a few books that are old and were published by houses that no longer even exist.)
Number of books written by women: 33
Number of books written by men: 29
Number of books that were written in the 19th century: 3
Number of books that were written in the first half of the 20th century: 10
Number of books that were written in the second half of the 20th century: 22
Number of books that were written in the 21st century: 27
Number of books of poetry: 6
Number of children’s books: 15
Number of books written by American authors: 34
Number of books written by non-American authors: 27
Number of collected works that included both male and female authors, as well as works from various centuries: 1
Number that were listened to as opposed to being read: 4 (we have big debates in our house as to whether or not this counts as reading a book. I claim it does. After all, the art of storytelling has been around far longer than the accessible written word has been, and the accessible written word is just a form of storytelling for the masses. The question should really be: does reading a book count as listening to a story?)
Number that were re-reads: 4

And now, I’ve realized, based on these numbers, there’s a lot of b.s. I may need to rethink next time I start spouting it off, such as:

“I read books all the time.” The better statement is, “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing with all my free time.” I mean, 7146 pages? I know I’m a slow reader, but even at my rate, that’s at most about 45 minutes of book reading a day. That’s not all the time. That’s about how long it takes to cook and eat dinner, and I don’t go around saying, “I cook and eat dinner all the time.” I’m scrapping all my other New Year’s resolutions in exchange for one: increase this number to at least an hour a day.

“I don’t read much written past 1950, and forget anything written since 2000.” Well, that’s certainly a bold-faced lie, isn’t it? In fairness, when I make that statement, I’m usually referring to fiction, but I’m afraid to go back and categorize how many of those post-1950 titles were fiction, because getting caught in yet another lie would just be too depressing.

“I have no problem starting a book and deciding not to finish it, and I do it all the time.” Yeah, just like I read books all the time.

“I used to read mostly books written by men, but that’s changed, and now I much prefer to read books written by women.” So, have there been a lot of sex change operations going on in the world of writers lately or something?

“I don’t read poetry much.” Well, six out of 63 still isn’t all that much, but when I say that, I’m usually thinking, “maybe one collection a year, if that.” Then again, I’ve lately been saying “I’m going to make a concerted effort to read more poetry,” and it looks like I did so in 2006, so maybe there’s one lie I haven’t been telling.

“I need to expand my horizons, because almost everything I read is written by American authors.” That would be a completely true statement, if I’d add “…by American and British authors.”

“I read children’s books, but usually only ones I enjoyed as a child.” Well, this statement was skewed this year, because I discovered Alan Garner, and have a friend who happens to own almost everything he ever wrote, an author I would have loved as a child, if I’d known he existed, as well as Neil Gaiman, who wasn’t writing when I was a child, and I read the third Harry Potter book (yes, I’m very behind in reading Harry Potter, but mainly because every time I read one, I’m driven to go back and read things like the E. Nesbits I loved so much as a child, and which I find to be superior to Harry Potter. I mean, I dare you to find any character in children’s literature more wonderful than The Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet. He's the Platonic kiddie lit character, much more enoyable as an adult than I remember him being as a child). But, I’ve now learned that it’s fun to discover children’s authors I’ve never read, and I’m hoping to read more in the future.

“I re-read books all the time.” Another flat-out lie, if this year’s statistics are any indication. Good thing I don’t, though. What a waste of my measly 45-minutes a day, when there’s so much out there yet to be discovered.

All right, and now we can finally put 2006 to rest, I think.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm off to Texas for a sales meeting and probably won't have much blogging time, so talkatcha when I get back.

Books III (at least I think it's "III")

I made an annotated (God, do I sound like an editor or what? I was just about to delete that word, but decided to comment on it instead) list of my six favorites books of the year about midway through the year, and now it’s time to complete that list with my six favorite from the second half of the year. It’s been a particularly good year book-wise for me, thanks to recommendations from new friends online, new and old colleagues, and the old stand-bys: my husband and family members, as well as the creation of two book discussion groups. I’m expecting 2007 to be even better.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. I’m cheating with this one, because I actually read it during the first half of the year, but had already made the decision, since it was on the cusp, that I’d include it on my list for the second half. Brilliantly executed book. Charlotte’s done a better job than I ever could of doing it justice over here.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. Probably the most perfect example of why Pym is such an exemplary writer, and why I’m green with envy over that fact every time I read her.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang. I’ve discussed this one ad nauseam with anyone who will listen, and have even mentioned it in a couple of posts. Such a fascinating book that opened up a whole new world to me, as well as an understanding of Mao’s China I’d never gotten from sitting in a classroom and reading textbooks. I loved the way history was traced through female voices and wish I could find more like this. Anyone have any suggestions?

Coraline by Neil Gaiman. A near-perfect children’s book: spooky, mysterious, dreamlike, and an independent and resilient child heroine. There are horrible adults and no thinly-disguised moralization in sight. I’ll be reading more Gaiman in the future. Who knows? Maybe even in the form of graphic novels.

Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff. Funny. Don’t-read-it-in-public-places funny. Don’t-read-it-in-bed-while-spouse-is-trying-to-sleep-funny. Want-to-read-it-out-loud-to-everyone-who-walks-by-funny. Now, if I still haven’t convinced you, go read what I had to say about it here.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Both The NYT and TLS raved about this one, which usually means I’m destined to hate whatever it is. But Bob thought it sounded just like me and got it for me for our anniversary, and surprise, surprise! It's a WONDERFULLY old-fashioned read, one that kept me guessing until the end, which is so unusual, I’m beginning to wonder if I wasn’t sleep-deprived from staying up late reading it and missed some obvious clues and that maybe I ought to re-read it very soon. (Anyone else read it and feel this way?) I haven’t read a book in which the author was having so much fun with what she knows a certain sort of reader is like since the last time I read Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. If this isn’t already on your TBR list, put it there. If it is, move it to the top.

I shouldn’t have limited myself to twelve for the whole year, but I did (one per month and none to grow on), so I’m afraid that’s it. But ask me about some other great things I read in 2006, if you want. I’m sure I won’t be at a loss for an answer.

Gender Meme

Gender Meme

Mandarine tagged me for the gender meme over here, which I forgot I wanted to do back when I first read it (too distracted by all this holiday stuff). Actually, Mandarine’s been giving me quite a lot of fodder for my blog these days. During what must have been a period of desperate boredom, he went back to the early days of my blog and started commenting on some of the posts I’d practically forgotten I’d written, which has made me want to revisit some of those topics, now that a whole, long seven months has gone by. Those things will have to wait, though. For now, it’s the meme:

Three things you do that women usually do

1. Wear makeup (but only what takes less than five minutes to apply)
2. Shave my legs (an activity that helps keep me from envying those tall women whose shapely legs start right around their eyebrows)
3. Consider chocolate to be one of my dearest friends

Three things you do that men usually do

1. Drive all over creation, hopelessly lost, but refusing to ask for directions, despite the fact that I know damn well I’ve got a terrible sense of direction
2. Hang out with the boys
3. Consider the floor to be a perfectly reasonable place to store clothes until I’m ready to put them away

Three things you do that women usually don’t do

1. Love to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon at the ball park, filling in the score card and eating hotdogs and Cracker Jacks (HUGE disppointment at Camden Yards: no Cracker Jacks. How could such a cool baseball stadium not sell Cracker Jacks?)
2. Avoid talking on the phone as if the latest research has shown it causes severe brain damage (noting from the way people act with their cell phones, I’m pretty sure it does, even without the research to back up my theory)
3. Talk incessantly about math and how cool it is (but I don’t know many men who do this, either. Maybe this should go under a different category “something you do that non-geeks usually don’t do”)

Three things you do that men usually don’t do

1. Obsessively try to make sure Bob and I are eating healthily
2. Drink all those “girlie” cocktails like apple martinis, amaretto sours, and lemon drops. I’m always deeply impressed by men who will drink them with me (like Bob), but they seem to be impressed that I will also kick back a bourbon on the rocks.
3. Get drunk after only two of those aforementioned cocktails, so that any man who might have been impressed that I was kicking back a bourbon on the rocks immediately becomes unimpressed by the fact that I can’t hold my liquor

Three things you don’t do that women usually do

1. Prefer driving an automatic to driving a stick shift
2. Freak out when a spider/insect/lizard, etc. runs across my path
3. Go ga-ga over babies (puppies and kittens, on the other hand…)

Three things you don’t do that men usually do

1. Tell people they’re being irrational just because they don’t agree with me
2. Eat enough food for three people in one sitting
3. Spend so much time talking, reading, and thinking about sports that the important things for which they’re still mainly responsible (like doing something about global warming, putting a stop to war, irradicating AIDS) don’t get done

Three things you don’t do that women usually don’t do

1. Mow the lawn (I don’t think I’ve ever even turned on a lawn mower in my life)
2. Run my own company (although maybe, one day…)
3. Consider every other driver on the road to be my enemy, personally out to get me

Three things you don’t do that men usually don’t do

1. Jump on the newest fad diet craze
2. Spend hours on end shopping at the mall
3. Get manicures

Marshmallow Christmas Candy Part IV

I was beginning to get frantic and turned on the stereo, ready to pop in one of the CDs I’d brought along for the trip. However, I caught the fact, before the CD slid in, that one of my favorite radio stations was playing glorious choral Christmas music. I decided to keep this on, and Candy immediately climbed back into the backseat, lay down, and went to sleep.

I’d love to be able to turn this story into one my marshmallow would love: a sad, neglected, and abused dog who responded only to Christmas music, a magical Christmas gift for the generous soul who adopted her. She’d become “Christmas Candy.” They’d visit shut-in children during the holidays and the dog, whom everyone noted was certainly an angel, would “sing along” to favorite carols, and the children would miraculously recover from whatever ailed them.

Unfortunately, the thing I finally realized was wrong with Candy when she woke up, began pacing in earnest, and it became clear that she really did need to make a pit stop now, was that she was deaf. It wasn’t just “no” and “Candy” that resulted in no response from her. She didn’t respond to snapping, whistling, or clapping either. Quite obviously, the Christmas music had done nothing to soothe and calm her; she had just been worn out by wrestling with me for the coveted driver’s seat. I saw a sign for a commuter parking lot and decided this would be the ideal place to let her out.

Normally, in this state, commuter lots are located just off highway entrances and exits, and are very easily accessible, the notion being that commuters can meet each other for carpooling without having to use half a tank of gas to do so. Not so, this lot, which had me snaking all over an unfamiliar town, wondering if I’d ever find my way back to the interstate. Meanwhile, Candy was growing ever more anxious in the back seat. Just as I was beginning to believe I was in some episode of The Twilight Zone and some creature bigger than I had plopped down that “commuter lot” sign for his amusement, rearranging streets to keep me from ever finding it, I came upon the huge parking lot.

I let Candy out of the car, and she proceeded, once again, to lug me around as if she were the ox and I the cart. She did her business, though, and didn’t run away with me. She even happily trotted back to the car to get inside, and this time I knew to move the blanket out of the way and to give her hind legs a little boost. Another week or so of this, and maybe we’d finally have a system.

Meanwhile, I was getting phone calls from everybody. Lisa called to let me know she’d be unavailable to receive my “she’s been picked up” call, which she had instructed us all to make, once we’d reached our destinations and handed Candy off to the next driver. The mother-daughter team who were meeting me, called to say they’d had car trouble and had to go back to get the daughter’s car. The woman on the leg after the mother-daughter team called to find out where I was and what my ETA in my drop-off city was, so she could plan accordingly. I had no idea exactly where I was, since I don’t travel this stretch of interstate often. I gave her my best estimate and then pictured myself being dragged all over the parking lot where I was supposed to meet the mother-daughter team, who never showed up, because the daughter’s car turned out to be as unreliable as the mother’s, while this other poor woman waited for hours at her destination, because I’d completely screwed up my time estimate and hadn’t accounted for cars breaking down.

I’ll never know how long that one woman had to wait, but the two meeting me pulled up into the lot only about five minutes after I arrived. They’d brought a stuffed toy for Candy and seemed excited to have her. Was that jealously I felt when Candy eagerly followed them, barely looking back at me as she hopped up into their car, no weak hind legs in evidence whatsoever, and they all went on their merry way, barely listening to my instructions to keep the food bag out of her reach? Could I possibly be regretting the fact that the journey had seemed so short, that Candy had only just begun to nuzzle me and to “kiss” my neck? Was I hoping with all my might that Candy would find a good home with other dogs who would play with her and serve as her ears for her? Was I kicking myself for not having thought of bringing her a stuffed toy? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I told my marshmallow that next time the dog’s name would be Killer, and she wouldn’t be so enamored, but she wasn’t listening. She was too busy fantasizing about buying a huge plot of land – better yet, an island like the one for the misfit toys – so we could provide homes for all the Candys of the world.

(And that's it for the Christmas stories. I will resume with all the other stuff that's been running around in my head this month after the holidays. Those of you celebrating Christmas tomorrow: have a merry one!)

Marshmallow Christmas Candy Part III

I pulled into the Shell station, our designated meeting place, to find Candy had had an exciting ride on the leg before mine. She was happily palling around with the two big dogs of the woman who'd been driving. The three of them were acting as though they'd all grown up together, and I felt a little guilty about taking her away, but she didn't seem too upset.

I took hold of her leash, and she began pulling me along, something for which I wasn't prepared. Candy was small for a Dalmatian and definitely needed to put a little meat on her bones, but she was still much bigger than my Sheltie. When a Sheltie tugs at a leash, it's pretty easy for one to tug back with results. With Candy, I might as well have been tugging at a linebacker. I struggled to get her headed in the direction of my car. Fortunately, once I got the car door open, she readily made the leap up onto the seat. Unfortunately, her hind legs seemed to be a bit weak. She only made it about halfway up, her front paws slipping all over the back seat, as the blanket I'd so carefully laid out slid to the floor, her hind legs, still back on the pavement, sprawled awkwardly.

Worried that the woman with her two dogs and ASPCA baseball cap was watching and concluding I was a hopeless volunteer who had no idea how to care for a dog, I tentatively reached down and helped Candy onto the seat, her front paws sliding out from under her. I expected she might turn around and snap at me, but she didn't. Once she seemed settled, I climbed into the driver's seat, carefully arranging the bag containing dog food and her papers that Ms. ASPCA had handed over to me on the floor of the passenger's side.

As I started the car, Candy seemed very restless. She was pacing around in the back, more like a polar bear in a cage than a Dalmatian on a road trip, and when I actually started moving the car, she was all over the place, slipping and sliding as she tried to get her balance. I'd expected her to immediately lie down and go to sleep, but no, she obviously had multiple personalities and the sweet, docile one had gone into hiding when it met me. The hyper and impatient one had come to join me and was wishing it could say to me, "You know, I'm not used to riding in cars. Why don't you just let me out, and I'll run along beside?"

Not only was she hyper, but she also was ravenously hungry. As I pulled onto the interstate on-ramp, she decided to join me in the front seat where she discovered her goodies on the floor, and there was no stopping her. I uselessly said, "No, no, Candy," as she began purposefully pawing at the plastic. We'd been told not to feed her, and I had one (ineffective) hand reaching out to stop her while the other hand tried to maneuver the on-ramp. Before I'd made it onto the interstate, she'd managed to dig out a baggie containing dog treats.

Knowing there was no good place to stop for the next five miles or so, I made the somewhat unwise decsion to pull over onto the shoulder. Turning on the emergency flashers, I hoped she wouldn't leap out into the cars, all racing by at record speeds, which they tend to do in this state, as I took the bag and biscuits, carrying them around and depositing them in the cargo compartment of the station wagon. Thank goodness our car has a cover that can be pulled over the cargo compartment. Otherwise, she might have crawled back there, gobbled everything down, including her papers, and then spent the rest of the ride puking all over the car's interior.

I was beginning to discover Candy was a pretty amenable dog. I expected her to be upset that I'd taken away her food, to maybe even try to find out where I'd put it, but she wasn't. She just, once again, took up her pacing routine, slipping and sliding off the seat every time I accelerated or hit the brakes. According to what I'd read in the emails, this was her signal that she needed to pee. I couldn't believe she needed to do that only twenty minutes after I'd picked her up, but maybe she had an extremely small bladder or something.

When she got tired of being thrown all over the back seat, she once again decided to come join me in the front. This time, no bags of food to distract her, she shunned the passenger seat, which wasn't good enough. She wanted to be in the driver's seat, on my lap. This was when I, a very slow learner, suddenly realized that bringing along another person might have been a good idea. A one-handed attempt to push a Dalmatian off your lap while steering a car might be a piece of cake for, oh, a Le Cirque performer or a dog whisperer, but not for a Three Stooges contender or a dog screamer, such as I. I was discovering it was even more difficult than a one-handed attempt at keeping a Dalmatian from eating biscuits while steering a car. We'd been told that the safety of the dog should always come first. Well, first I'd risked her escape onto a busy interstate, and now I was risking a jump over the median and into an oncoming tractor trailer. If I'd been given a job evaluation for my performance as a dog driver, I would have been fired on the spot.

Speaking of screaming, Candy had no concept of the word "no." She also had no concept of the words "good dog," or even "Candy." I kept thinking I was just spoiled by my own dog, who seemed to be born knowing the meanings of "no" (well, unless there's another dog anywhere within a 100-yard radius, and then all human commands are to be ignored in an effort to protect that human, who doesn't know what's good for her, from the killer beast disguised as a cute little schnauzer) and "good dog," as well as "Lady." This dog hadn't been socialized, nor had she been trained at all, so I shouldn't expect her to behave the way Lady would. But we all know comparisons are odious. If I hadn't been so busy making them, I might have woken up to the fact sooner that something else was wrong.

Marshmallow Christmas Candy Part II

My marshmallow wasn't exactly overjoyed, but it returned to focusing on the Dalmatian, to whom it was becoming extremely attached. I suspected this attachment might have something to do with the fact the dog's name was Candy. My marshmallow and Candy could drown together in their sweetness. We quit looking at the other websites and focused on the two snapshots we had of Candy from the rescue shelter. She looked into the camera so gently and hopefully.

Unlike my brain, my marshmallow has no concept of the meaning of the word “stress.” It manages to make me completely forget the fact that I become stressed at the slightest provocation. It never once considered the fact that this little trip it had volunteered to take might wake up a few anxious feelings that had been lying around snoozing with one eye open, just waiting for such an opportunity to add a little excitement to their lives. Marshmallow thought we were just going to be peacefully driving along interstates with this docile creature lying quietly and gratefully in the back seat.

My first panic attack set in before I’d even picked up Candy. Lisa, the woman from the shelter in Maine who supervised Candy’s big adventure, kept a wonderful, detailed account via email of who was picking up our precious cargo when and where. I was supposed to drive Candy on Sunday from 2:00 to 3:30. By Thursday, all slots had been filled except two legs: the one immediately preceding mine and the one immediately following it. Suddenly, I had visions of driving across four states, turning my little Sunday afternoon jaunt into an all-day and all-night event.

Then, it turned out Candy didn’t have a collar, and Lisa asked if anyone had a spare collar for her. I prayed someone would, as I envisioned pulling over for a “potty break,” watching helplessly as the dog slipped out of whatever cobbled-together, noosed leash I might make. I'd grab for her slippery rear-end, coming up with nothing but some shedding hair, as she disappeared into the night somewhere along a very dark stretch of highway.

Happily, volunteers were found for the legs surrounding mine, and by Saturday evening and Sunday morning, I was tracking Candy’s progress. She’d made it with no problem to her overnight volunteer’s house. Someone had bought her a brand new red collar as a Christmas present. She was a perfect riding companion, apparently doing nothing other than sleeping in the back seat of the car. When she needed to relieve herself, she’d let the driver know by pacing from window to window in the backseat. She was described as living up to her name, being “very sweet.” I was looking forward to meeting her.

Marshmallow Christmas Candy Part I

I have a huge marshmallow where my heart should be. I've been on the waiting list for years for a stone transplant (even a couple of small rocks would do), but those with stones don't tend to spend much time thinking about donating to those less fortunate than they. Thus, I'm stuck with this marshmallow that's constantly leaping at the chance to do things that those with stones, or even normal hearts, would label "insane." I'm especially vulnerable during the Christmas season, when my marshmallow seems to push the "high" button on its radar detector for something that will make the season memorable and meaningful.

That's why my marshmallow skipped a few beats last December when I read an email sent to me by my boss. An animal shelter based in Maine had chosen to rescue a rejected and heart-worm-infected dalmation who was living in North Carolina. They needed volunteers to drive her different legs of the long journey up the east coast, and no one had volunteered for the slot running through my neck of the woods. After its little imitation of a child on a school playground, my marshmallow then became the secret agent, convincing me we were co-conspirators against my brain, sneaking around it to quickly type a reply that might as well have said, "Oh boy! There's nothing we'd rather do than spend a precious Sunday afternoon driving all over God's creation for such a good cause." Then, my marshmallow spent the next few days as a fleece sweatsuit, making me feel all warm and fuzzy and good about myself for doing something so noble.

Unfortunately, this warm, fuzzy feeling was ruined by a re-visit to that email and a click on one of the links that took me to sites where all kinds of poor dogs needing homes were on display. One little dachsund described "himself" as needing a very special kind of human to care for him, one who would get joy only out of knowing a good home was being provided for him, because he suffered from encephalitis, which meant he couldn't provide the sorts of things most dogs provide for humans: he didn't want to be held or petted; he couldn't see well; and he would be hard to train.

Where the hell was my brain? I needed it to control my marshmallow, who was already looking for a nice nook for this little guy in our house. Forget outrageous vet bills. Forget the fact I travel all the time and couldn't give him the attention he needed. Forget the fact that dogs, unlike humans, are lucky enough that they can actually be "put down" when they're in this sort of condition, and wasn't it inhumane to be keeping the poor thing alive? Quite obviously, he'd been spared for the sole purpose of making me feel guilty for not leaping at the chance to bring him into a safe and loving environment, and I should be quitting my job and devoting my whole life to his care.

Finally, my brain walked in from its Mensa meeting, or something, and grabbed the mouse, shutting off the computer. It told me to stay away from all those dog sites and not even to entertain the notion of showing them to Bob, who has two marshmallows where his heart should be. It reminded me that to adopt any dog, let alone an encephalitic one, would be enough to cause it to have a stroke. Having one dog that was shuttled back and forth between NYC and our house was bad enough (Bob was still in school at the time, and we had a student apartment), let alone two. I didn't argue. I knew encephalitis was probably a sensitive subject.

The Page 123 Meme

(Yet another break in my Christmas storytelling to respond to the meme Litlove tagged me to do. I’ve realized that, by some obvious Christmas miracle, the passage is very seasonally appropriate, so if you came here looking for holiday stories, just pretend this one was intended to be included all along).

These were the instructions:
1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, scroll down to the 5th sentence
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
4. Name of the book and the author
5. Tag 3 People

Stalks of that selfsame wheat from the hallway are being soaked, folded, twisted, braided, and tied into an endless variety of shapes by half a dozen of Martha’s elves. Despite the humility of the materials, there is nothing simple about the ornaments as they are dusted with differing shades of brilliant metallic mica powder, an incredibly toxic substance that has the young man using it -- the only man working here in fact, albeit curiously named Meghan – wearing a double-filtered gas mask. The crafters are all hunched over their small wheaten garlands and wreaths.

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), p. 123.

Thank God for laptops, which allowed me to be sitting in my comfy chair, this book by my side, when I discovered I’d been tagged for this meme. If I’d been tied to a desktop, I’d have been stuck up in the study. I checked, and that would have meant subjecting you to page 123 of The Chicago Manual of Style. This one is much more fun.

Of course, having just read that passage, you may be asking, "Huh? Fun? I can’t figure out what the hell it’s about." Quite obviously, it’s a passage that absolutely does not do the book justice, although if I tell you he’s describing a visit to the crafts department of the magazine Martha Stewart Living, you might begin to see the light, becoming somewhat intrigued. I’ll intrigue those of you who haven’t read it some more: if you’re someone who likes to fall out of your chair laughing, drop what you are doing right now and get over to your nearest bookstore to grab a copy of this. I haven’t laughed so hard since the last time I read a David Sedaris book.

But don’t let what I just said fool you. Comparisons between Sedaris and Rakoff are made all over the place, but the two writers are actually very different. Both wind up on NPR quite a bit, yes. Both are gay, white men, yes. Both have an extraordinarily acerbic wit, yes. But if you asked me which one I’d rather be, it would be Rakoff (even if he didn’t happen to have one of the best jobs in the world, getting paid to do things like pretending to be a cabana boy at a wealthy resort in Florida for a few days and then writing about it), because his writing is more an amused look at our entire society, rather than an amused look at his own bellybutton. Yes, he does navel gaze (all writers navel gaze), but he looks up all the time to see what’s going on around him. Sedaris, although we have to give him credit for possessing one of the funniest navels that spends its time traveling back and forth between America and France, doesn’t look up as often. I want a brain implant that gives me Rakoff's powers of observation.

So, here’s a much better (and longer) passage for you that does do justice to the book. (You may want to imagine discovering such wit when you’ve only reached page 5 of the book. Possibly you're sitting in a very public place, like a Barnes and Noble. You've happened upon the book and have taken it to a chair to have a look at it, trying to decide if you really want it. You know, the sort of place where falling out of chairs laughing is behavior not exactly welcomed. But, this is all hypothetical, of course. I'll let you conjure up your own little scene if you'd rather):

[Rakoff, a Canadian who's been living in New York for over ten years, has finally decided to become a citizen of The United States. He’s describing the application form and is noting his difficulty answering this question: "If the law required it, would you be willing to bear arms on behalf of the United States?"]...…I put the application back into the drawer and return to my bed, not picking it up again until seven days later, when I surprise myself by checking "yes."

I figure it’s grass soup. Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a recipe for food of last resort that my father apparently squirreled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe, but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else turn to shit, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup! At heart, it’s an anxious, romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner, but when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel. Young Tiny Tim’s palsied hand lifting a spoon to his rosebud mouth. "What delicious grass soup. I must be getting better after all," he will say, putting on a good show of it just as he expires, the tin utensil clattering to the rough wood table.

A grass-soup situation is a self-dramatizing one based on such a poorly imagined improbable premise as to rend it beneath consideration. Michael Jackson saying with no apparent irony, for example, that were he to wake up one day to find all the children in the world gone, he would throw himself out the window. Mr. Jackson’s statement doesn’t really take into consideration that a planet devoid of tots would likely be just one link in a chain of geopolitical events so cataclysmic, that to assume the presence of an intact building with an intact window out of which to throw himself is plain idiotic. As for grass soup itself, from what I’ve seen on the news, by the time you’re reduced to using lawn for food, any grass that isn’t already gone – either parched to death or napalmed into oblivion – is probably best eaten on the run.

All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the forty-something asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypo-active thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have happened. The streets would likely be running with blood, and such moral gray areas as might have existed at other times will seem either so beside the point that I will join the fight, or so terrifying and appallingly beyond the pale that I’d either already be dead or underground. (Rakoff, pp. 5-6).

Damn! I wish I’d written that! And don’t tell me you didn’t even crack a smile while reading it.

I’m breaking the rules and tagging everyone on my blogroll who hasn’t done this yet and feels like doing it. That way, I don’t have to single out anyone, and if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. Maybe that will result in 3 more to keep this meme going?

The New Kids on the Block

(I have to pause before I go onto my next Christmas post to write about my experience meeting Dorr and Hobs this past Saturday.)

Bob was a little concerned when I first started blogging, wondering without face-to-face contact what sorts of people I’d “meet.” I have to admit that with an imagination like mine, it wasn’t hard to conjure up some creep who lives in a basement, surrounded by computers, chowing down on someone’s liver, and egotistically surfing the web, electronically clipping and filing articles with headlines such as “Possible Link between Serial Killings and Blogs.” But that was only one small part of me. What I really envisioned was friends of mine reading my blog and telling me I needed a really good editor.

What I didn’t envision was that very few of my real-life friends would be the least bit interested in my blog. I also didn’t envision that within a very short period of time, I would come to think of people I’d never met, never even spoken to on the phone, as friends, but that’s exactly what has happened. Of course, once that’s happened, if you’re me, you can’t help fantasizing about meeting some of these people IRL (“in real life,” as Hobs has taught me), sitting around, drinking coffee or tea or wine, and discussing books, etc. for hours on end.

I first began to suspect that Hobs and Dorr (as if their blogger identities weren’t enough, I’ve given them further nicknames, but I have a tendency to do that with friends) might live somewhere near me when one of them described taking the interstate that goes right through my town up to a bike race. However, I had them placed well north of me, so I was very surprised to discover they live in the town right next door to mine. Upon discovering this too-good-to-be-true coincidence, fantasy-immediately-turning-to-reality, I invited them to join my book discussion group, because we sometimes meet in a coffee shop in their town.

Hobs gallantly told me he wouldn’t mind being the only male member of the group. The rest of my friends in this group and I view this as our “thing to do without husbands and (for those who have them) children.” I let them know we were reading Barbara Noble’s Doreen (a Persephone reprint, but they managed to find a cool used edition, printed by Doubleday, where Noble was apparently a real bigwig in her day. We publishing geeks notice such things) and when and where we’d be meeting.

All right. That was all fine and dandy and exciting, but then, as with all fantasies, reality set in. I was married before the whole online dating thing really took off, so I don’t know what it’s like to do that, but I can only describe my feelings as Saturday drew near as the way one must feel when finally deciding to meet someone with whom they’ve been carrying on lively email and/or IM-ing conversations.

What if they didn’t like me? What if they thought our book discussion group was silly and pointless (after all, they’re both academics)? What if they were totally shocked to discover my online persona is completely different, and they just couldn’t relate this deadly dull and slightly obnoxious person to the one they thought they knew? I had to keep reminding myself that my brother has commented to me, “Your blog, Emily, is so you,” and that I’ve had other friends comment that my writing sounds just like me, to convince myself that I must not be that different in person from what I am in writing.

I even found myself doing something I never do, which was worrying about what I should wear. I envisioned both of them being exactly what they were, which is the kind of people who are so cool, you don’t even notice what they’re wearing. I promise you: that’s not the kind of person I am. I tend to throw things on and only discover halfway through the day I’ve got a big rip in the side of my shirt or something.

I found them easy to spot the minute I walked into the Borders where we met. They both looked extraordinarily familiar, which is unusual. I’ve, many times, had the experience of meeting authors with whom I’ve worked for months before I meet them in person, and they never look the least bit familiar when I finally do. They both very easily became a natural addition to our little group, and I didn’t get the feeling they’d been immediately turned off by me. In fact, I felt they were enjoying all of our company and were eager to hear what we all had to say.

Then, something new began to happen. I began to feel possessive. I didn’t want to share them. Not yet anyway. That feeling passed, though, because I really love my other friends, too, and love it when friends of mine click with each other, and then I was proud, happy that I’d found these new people who were such an asset to our discussion. The meeting was too short. I had to get back, because Bob and I had plans that evening, and our friend from Northern Ireland was coming to visit us, but as I drove home, I found myself wishing I’d thought to meet them earlier, before the book discussion began. I wanted to discuss all kinds of things with them, and I found myself thinking, “Damn! I didn’t even ask them the most basic questions.”

Not bad for a first blind date, huh? Guess what. They actually want to go out with me again. And that cannibalistic, serial-killing blogger? He must have eaten that small part of me that used to worry about him.

Broken Christmases Part IV

Then there are the Christmases broken by illness. I had so looked forward to Bob's and my first Christmas together in our own home with our own tree the year we got married. Bob loves to buy gifts for me, and for once, I was with a man I knew I could lavish with gifts who wouldn't feel guilty, because all he'd bought me was a CD from the sale rack. So what happened? We both came down with severe chest colds that prevented us from doing much more than dragging ourselves from the bed to the kitchen to make cups of hot tea and back again. Forget Christmas shopping. We had a total of about three presents under the tree that year.

When everyone is the epitome of good health, the weather will do its best to interfere. One Christmas, Bob and I were looking forward to entertaining Forsyth, who had recently divorced, and our two young nieces. Having worried that the weather in our neck of the woods might suddenly dump buckets of ice and snow on us, I hadn't once thought to worry about North Carolina, where ice and snow before January are about as common as tornadoes in the Land of Oz. Blizzards can be raging everywhere else in the country, even in Key West, and the piedmont region of North Carolina will be hit with nothing but a disappointing and bitterly cold drizzly rain.

Not that year, though. While we remained perfectly sunny and precipitation free, Raleigh was hit with a paralyzing ice storm. My sister and nieces never made it.

Broken toys, broken dreams, broken relationships...No wonder Scrooge was so down on Christmas. What I do wonder, though, is why I still fall into the trap of hoping every Christmas that maybe that magic we're promised is there somewhere. As are the idealized parent, the idealized family, the idealized homes and marriages we've all come to want and expect but rarely get, Christmas is one of those myths of western culture. The question shouldn't be: do you believe in Santa Clause? The question should be: do you believe in Christmas?

Sometimes, despite all my dashed hopes, when I manage to wade through all the hideous advertising, all the holiday crowds and can convince myself to ignore all the greed and selfishness so blatantly on display, I'll see a single white candle shining in a window. Or I'll hear a clear, haunting soprano sing "Once in Royal David's City." Or, I'll watch a child joyfully unwrap a present I've carefully chosen, and even I have to answer, "Yes, I do believe in Christmas."

Broken Christmases Part III

Soon, we always had someone missing at Christmas. My oldest sister Forsyth started spending every other Christmas at her in-laws, and eventually my brother went to live in South Africa for a while, and then Lindsay went to South Africa, as well, for a while. One year, I was the only one who came home, but that was long after Christmases had started to break for me in other ways.

The year I went off to college and joined the growing number of family members who "came home" for Christmas, my big gift was a broken heart. I found out my boyfriend had been spending an inordinate amount of time with the young woman I'd thought was his ex-girlfriend. I overheard a conversation he had with his older brother, in which older brother (wonderful fellow that he was) counseled him thus,

"There's nothing wrong with having two girlfriends. You just need to make sure they both know about it."

When I confronted him, he swore to me he really was going to break it off with her, that I was the only one, and he even asked me to marry him. I naively believed him and hung in with him until two Christmases later, when even I, someone who had become the queen of denial, finally had to admit that he'd left off a few words when he'd said I was "the only one." What he'd really meant to say was "you're the only one who's enough of a sucker to believe I'm not bedding down every female I possibly can when you and I aren't together."

I got my revenge on the broken heart with a broken relationship that Christmas. Still, the revenge wasn't sweet. I'd never broken up with a boy until then, especially not a boy whose friends and family members I'd become close to. And the boyfriend who had never been the epitome of devotion, except when some prettier, smarter, and wittier alternative hadn't presented herself, suddenly seemed to want me more than he wanted anything else in his life. Did I mention holding firm to difficult decisions is not one of my strengths? Especially when romance and sex are involved?

Some years later, I had to witness yet another Christmas breakup when Ian's girlfriend at the time decided not even to pretend to be discreet, as my old boyfriend had. None of us had any doubts as to what she'd done (it was actually New Year's, but still the Christmas season) and with someone who couldn't even begin to hold a candle to my brother. Just like his broken Christmas toy, no one was going to fix that relationship. No tidings of great joy were felt while visions of murder danced in this big sister's head.

Broken Christmases Part II

I’m glad children are children, so they’re not typically aware of how extraordinarily disappointing Christmas actually is. Talk about a holiday that is set up to do absolutely nothing but dash one’s hopes. Even the best parents, with the best of intentions, can’t help but disappoint. I saw an ad for The Gap yesterday with a hip hop theme for “Christmas in the 'hood.” Yeah. Right. Like everyone in the ‘hood can afford to waste their money on $30 t-shirts at The Gap. Most parents, in or out of the ‘hood, are barely managing to scrape by and can’t possibly afford to buy all the computer equipment and electronic games their kids tell Santa they want. Tiny Tim may have been able to understand a deeper meaning to Christmas, but he wasn’t living in a day and age in which commercial television-viewing has become a classic study in how to appeal to the human id.

My own parents did a wonderful job of trying to make Christmas as special as possible. The festivities went in stages in our family. First, there were the stockings, explored while sitting on my parents’ bed. At the breakfast table (eaten in the dining room, where we never ate breakfast unless we had guests), we all exchanged the gifts we’d gotten each other. Finally, we’d move to the living room, whose glass door had been covered with a blanket, hiding what awaited inside. Santa didn’t put presents under the tree. We each had our own chair with our own presents, and once we’d “oohed and awed” over those, presents from extended family members and friends waited under the tree. It was a morning-long affair (but morning had started around 5:00 a.m., which was about as late as any of us could manage to wait).

Even with this much care and attention paid to the day, something from my wish list was always missing. I'd figure this out once the excitement had worn off and I’d sat down to think about it. I’m sure I thought of something even the year I sat on Santa’s lap and suddenly announced, much to my mother’s surprise and horror, I’m sure, that I wanted a stuffed puppy for Christmas. I have no idea how she managed to find that stuffed puppy, which had certainly been news to her, because it had even been news to me until I'd sat in his lap at a complete loss as to what I wanted, just two days before Christmas (my mother once very wisely said to me, “Christmas is for children and men, not for mothers”), but he showed up on my chair Christmas morning.

I wonder who came up with the stupid notion that it’s actually a good idea for a child to sit on Santa’s lap, making specific requests face-to-face. How can a child who’s been so close to Santa not feel he’s rejected her when she doesn’t find what she wanted on Christmas morning? It was probably some psychologist hoping to make a fortune by the damage done to both rejected child and wretched parent who feels so because he or she can’t possibly get said child his very own yacht.

I can’t remember how old I was when I began asking for an Easy Bake oven, but it became an obsession, and year after year, Santa neglected to bring me one. My mother would explain to me it was because Santa didn’t think I needed one, since I was always helping her bake in the big oven in my very own little pans, making mini-versions of whatever she was making. It’s true, I loved making those little cakes and breads beside my mother, but being the greedy child I was, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to bake in the big oven with my very own little pans and have my very own little oven.

I was awfully suspicious of a Santa who refused to bring me my heart’s desire. I was also suspicious of a Santa who seemed to bring my brother all the best toys. He got Tonka trucks and Fisher Price castles, things I hadn’t thought to demand, because I didn’t hang out in the “boys’” section of our favorite toy store, and this was still a day-and-age in which most adults didn’t think to give toy trucks and cars to little girls. Even the best stuffed puppy in the world couldn’t hold a candle to a huge Tonka cement mixer with movable parts. Luckily, Ian was younger and could easily be manipulated into “sharing” his toys. My sisters weren’t quite so generous with things like record players and drum sets. Why didn’t Santa just give all these things to me? I may have been greedy, but I was also an extremely fair child. I would have allotted everyone his or her X number of minutes per day to play with each item.

As I grew older, Christmas began to break in other ways. First, my sister Lindsay went off to college in England and didn’t come home the year I was a junior in high school. My oldest sister had already been in college a number of years, but she always came home. This was the first year in which we had a gap at the breakfast table and an empty chair in the living room. When each of them had gone off to college, I think I’d vaguely been aware of the fact I occasionally missed them (or at least missed their clothes, which were no longer available for me to borrow), but I was way too busy with school work, my after-school job, and whomever my latest unrequited love was to pay much attention. Somehow, though, having one of our family absent on Christmas morning was nearly unbearable, especially when I unwrapped her gift to me to discover it was a box full of things like Mars Bars, Smarties, Opal Fruits, and Wine Gums, all our favorite English candy, nearly impossible to get in this country at that time.

Broken Christmases Part I

The year I was in kindergarten, my grandmother, in a rare moment of insanity, because she hated Christmas, actually came down from Virginia to spend Christmas with us in North Carolina. I can remember the excitement of having her there, which just added to my general five-year-old hysteria during the holidays. I was one of those children who felt sick whenever she was overly-excited, which means that pretty much during the whole month of December, my stomach was never very happy. From the second the Christmas specials began to appear on television, and we took out our Advent calendars, till two days after Christmas, when I sat mad at Budweiser, because they were still showing their Clydesdale holiday ads, and everyone knew Christmas was over, I ate like a bird (oh, to be young again and actually to lose weight during the holiday season!).

That Christmas, my grandmother (“Grandmic” we called her, the “Mic” being a shortened version of our sir name) had gotten my brother Ian a helicopter. It was a very, very cool toy, as far as toys went in those days. It had flashing lights and a propeller that spun around with the help of some batteries. I have no memory of the rest of this story I’m about to relate; I don't even have any memory of what Grandmic gave me that year; but I do remember that helicopter. It was definitely the highlight of that Christmas. I wished it had been given to me.

By the time Christmas dinner was over, though, I had lost interest. The helicopter was broken. Because my memory fails me, I don’t know exactly how it broke, but I imagine a Nutcracker-like scene: Ian had three bossy older sisters, all of whom were probably as enthralled by the helicopter as he was, and none of whom was over the age of nine. Most likely, we should all envision a lot of squabbling and pushing and yanking of the poor toy out of little hands. Some little scientific mind probably got it into her or his head to see what would happen if we pushed the propellers backwards. Eventually, it may have been tossed up in the air to see if it would fly. Ian, once it had been decided it wasn’t going to stay aloft, may have been doing his best three-year-old imitation of Clara saving the beloved Nutcracker when it had suffered a similar gravitational fate, to save his precious gift before it came crashing to the ground.

Grandmic used to love to tell me how Ian and I brought it to her, hoping she might be able to fix it. She was at her sympathetic best, seeing how crushed Ian was, when she had to tell him she was sorry but she couldn’t fix it. I, on the other hand, not seeming the least bit upset – after all, it wasn’t my toy that had broken – apparently looked up at her and said,

“That’s okay, Grandmic. Everything always breaks on Christmas afternoon.”

I have to admit that every time my grandmother would relate this story to me, I felt a swelling of pride. I was so young. How had I already figured out that everything breaks at Christmas?

This Being December and All...

"Wow, two posts in one day," you may very well be thinking (at least, that's what I'd be thinking if I were you), but this isn't really a post. It's a warning. I've decided during the month of December to post two seasonally-appropriate pieces I wrote before I made the magical jump into the blogosphere (editing them as I go). They're both quite long, which means I plan to spend multiple days posting them. So, if you're the "bah, humbug" sort, you may just want to postpone visits with me until January, at which point I will pick up where I've left off (you know, writing lots of interesting things about what it's like to telecommute, as the title of my blog insinuates).

Poetry Meme

As promised...

The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to is…
…maybe "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear. I say “maybe,” because I distinctly remember my father reading this one to me from a beautiful, big, illustrated copy we had and loving it, especially the way he read it. However, I also know that my mother and brother and I used to memorize poems as a pre-bedtime activity, and how I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Bed in Summer" (one of the ones I memorized). I’m not sure which came first.

I was forced to memorize long Bible passages in school (I went to a Lutheran elementary school), and…
… I’m sure some of them were very poetic, but I couldn’t begin to tell you which ones they were, and they obviously didn’t stick. I’m not even sure if they were really all that long, but to a fourth-grader, they seemed interminably so. Talk about a useless activity, one I can remember hurrying through, because I so hated it. In high school, we memorized the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and that I loved and can still recite (although I’m sure my pronunciation is all wrong).

I read poetry because…
…I’m always so amazed by how brilliant poets are, able to convey images and stories in so few words. I have to admit, though, that for a very, very long time, I didn’t read poetry. The way it was taught in high school and college completely turned me off, and also, it’s such an extremely personal and emotional form of writing that the reader really, really needs to discover poets on her own. Being forced to read and analyze Ezra Pound when you aren’t feeling any connection to him whatsoever is far worse than reading some novel you find boring.

A poem I am likely to think about when asked for a favorite poem is…
…"The Owl and the Pussycat." I still absolutely love that poem.

I don’t write poetry, but…
...I wish I could. I’m nowhere near brilliant enough to convey images and stories in so few words. When it comes to writing, I lean more in the direction of Tolstoy (who if he were writing today, people would say, as they do about Stephen King and Pat Conroy, “He needs a good editor”).

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature…
…because I’m much more picky about poetry. When it comes to other types of literature, I’ll read almost any writer and will put in time and effort if I’m not immediately impressed. When it comes to poetry, either the poet grabs me immediately with the first few poems, and I keep reading, or not, in which case I’ll readily abandon it.

I find poetry…
…to be awe-inspiring when I connect with it and tedious when I don’t.

The last time I heard poetry…
…was in the summer of 2005. Our company was having a multiple-day, off-site sales meeting (a curious invention of the publishing industry in which editors pitch their books to those who will be selling them), and one evening we had a dinner activity. I’m not much of a joiner, and when I found out we had invited an author who’d written a book for us on incorporating poetry slams into the high school classroom to lead a poetry slam, I was less than thrilled. Since you now know how I feel about poetry (that it’s very personal and not something I particularly want to share with a large group), I’m sure you can understand why.

For not the first time in my life, I was completely wrong. We had “reciters” and “judges.” I was a judge (imagine having to judge both your boss and the company president, who were reciters). The reciters were given poems to read and the judges had to vote. It turned out to be one of the most hilarious and fun dinners I’ve attended in years, whose highlight was a recitation of a teenager’s poem on pain that was brilliantly performed by another one of our author’s sons (it helped that he’s in the theater).

I think poetry is like…
…beautiful mathematical equations that succinctly bring one to life’s truths through letters rather than through numbers.

I'm tagging Dante for this one.