Six Guilty Pleasures Meme

Thank you, Becky, for tagging me for this one.

A. Six guilty pleasures no one would suspect you of having:
1. I’ll never forget the day my former boss said to me, “When have you ever been to a baseball game?” and I left him speechless by responding, “I go to Yankee Stadium at least once a year.” I guess no one would suspect me of enjoying the fun of an afternoon eating hot dogs, drinking beer, and keeping score. And I’m happy now to be living basically equidistant from two ball parks: Philly and Baltimore.

2. Listening to (really, really loud) music and singing along (really, really badly) while driving (really, really fast) on empty country roads. I can’t indulge this one too much around here, though, because despite having tons of country roads, I have to worry too much about the Amish horses and buggies.

3. Speaking of music: country music. I hated it growing up, but now I like to listen to it, because of its story-telling quality. I prefer old-timers like Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings, but Garth Brooks is fun, too, and I adore The Dixie Chicks for many, many reasons. I’m mad at those who have adopted country music the way the American flag has been adopted to represent a false, meaningless patriotism.

4. Doritos with French onion dip. You wouldn’t think I, Ms. Organic, would love something so false and junky, would you? So, so bad for so, so many reasons, but just so, so good.

5. Obscenely expensive soaps and bubble baths. I know there are people in this world who could probably feed themselves for two months on what I’ve been known to spend on these items. Sometimes, I feel (ever-so-slightly) guilty about that when I’m settling down in a tub full of organic, lavender bubbles poured from a fancy glass bottle and later washing them away with organic lavender and oatmeal soap, but not for very long.

6. Obscenely expensive and silky lingerie. I guess I love contrasts, but I don’t think there’s anything that can make a woman feel more sexy than to wear something really, really nice under a pair of comfortable old blue jeans and a soft, faded t-shirt (especially at a baseball game, after showering with obscenely expensive soap). I loved that part in Eat, Pray, Love when she’s in Italy and buys all that lingerie.

B. Six guilty pleasures you wish you had the courage to indulge:
1. Quitting my job to backpack around some exotic country for a year. I’ll never do it, though, because I’m perfectly aware that it sounds wonderfully romantic and adventuresome, but that I’d be whining like a baby with the first blister, and I’d be suicidal over something like dysentery. And I’d ruin it after six months by spending every day of the next six worrying about whether or not I’d ever get another good job once I returned home.

2. Quitting my job to travel around the world on freighter ships for a year. Wouldn’t have to worry about the blisters, then, nor the dysentery (most likely, if I kept to eating the food on the ship), but that worry over getting a job when I got back would still be a problem.

3. More than two cups of coffee per day and drinking it after 2:00 p.m. My fear of insomnia (being way too familiar with long, sleepless nights) is just too strong, despite the fact I absolutely love coffee.

4. Hot chocolate or hot Ovaltine topped with real whipped cream to accompany my Eggs Benedict or pancakes every morning for breakfast. First, I’d need to hire a full-time cook, because I’m not about to do so much as even whip cream every single morning, and, second, I don’t particularly want to become the Goodyear blimp within a year’s time.

5. Homemade dessert every night. Same problems (need to hire a cook and weight gain) as having my ideal breakfast every morning.

6. Taking a nap in the middle of a work day. I wrote about this once; I still can’t bring myself to do it (although I have once or twice when I was sick).

C. Six pleasures you once considered guilty but have now made peace with:
1. Taking a taxi instead of the subway in New York (although the subway is often more interesting to the voyeur writer in me)

2. Staying in a hotel that is quite a few steps above a Microtel

3. Custom-made bookshelves (Bob is still incredibly guilty as we wait six weeks for the Amish man we hired to do this to complete them. I’m not the least bit so and can't wait to get them into our library)

4. Buying whatever food I want with no regard to price

5. An occasional night of Doritos with French onion dip for dinner and ice cream for dessert

6. Spending an evening all alone with a good book while slowly sipping a glass or two of good sherry

If you haven't done this one yet, I'm tagging you (you know who you are).

Beowulf and Cholera

Every so often, I marvel at the (I don't even know what to call it: audacity? stupidity? madness?) of Hollywood. I mean, sometimes I really wish I could have been there when some group of people happened to be sitting around, shooting the breeze, and someone suddenly said, "I've got it! Let's make ____________ into a movie!" Actually, it's a good thing I've never been a member of one of these discussions (well, at least, during the over thirteen years since I last took a hit off a joint. Before then, who knows? Maybe I, too, would have been leaping at the chance to make Sally, Dick, and Jane or something into a movie). My response would be, "Are you out of your friggin' mind?!" (Thus, maybe "madness" is the appropriate word).


I can't believe that this Christmas season, we've got not one, but two movies that fit this bill, neither of which you'll catch me racing to the theaters to see. The first of these is Beowulf, with none other than Angelina Jolie starring as Grendel's mother. Yes, I am sure it's uncanny how many people read the epic poem for the first time to be haunted by Jolie-like images of Grendel's mother. Tell me the truth now. She's exactly what your imagination conjured up, isn't she? Nothing more ferocious to a bunch of Medieval heroes than the woman who's toting around hundreds of adopted children while keeping pretty boy Brad Pitt on a short leash these days. As my sister Lindsay so aptly put it the other day, "I'm so glad Beowulf is finally out" (thus proving that my sarcastic nature runs in the family).


Beowulf is one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. Granted, I haven't read it since I was twenty-one, and it's high time for a re-read, but between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, I read it three times (twice for school and once for fun). I don't know about you, but I found my high school English classes to be extraordinarily boring, full of Shakespeare I was too young and inexperienced to understand and appreciate (come on. Why teach Romeo and Juliet to someone who has yet to experience the madness of her first requited love?); the worst, rather than the best, of the likes of Mark Twain and Edgar Alan Poe; and unimaginative textbooks and teachers who had no idea how to make these works relevant to sixteen-year-olds. To this day, I can tell you that only four other things that I had to read in my American high school (my English high school was a different story. I loved my English class there) were things that I truly enjoyed reading at the time: Spoon River Anthology; The Good Earth, Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and A Clockwork Orange. (By the way, I once had a friend of mine say to me when I narrated this list to him, "Were you schizophrenic in high school?")


Beowulf definitely stood out among the crowd here. We read it senior year, and up until that point, I'd never been exposed to anything like it. Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I must have been a knight in one of my previous lives, my fascination with castles and dragons being what it is. Although I couldn't read it, the Old English language grabbed my attention, as well. Till then, I'd never thought much about the evolution of language. I was intrigued from the moment our teacher began to introduce it to us. Then I started to read it. To say the twentieth century disappeared like a mere mortal in Grendel's mother's lair would be an understatement.


The magic of Beowulf, though, is that it's just that: magic. We are left up to our own devices, our own subconscious interpretations to bring it to life. Grendel is my very own monster, and I know what he looks like, but I'm sure he isn't yours. His mother is worse than the worst mama bear protecting her cubs. My dragon is bleak with a sad fury, not the type you see baring teeth and dancing in a Chinese New Year parade, as he might be for someone else. How dare anyone ruin my pictures of them by committing them to film? It's sacrilege, pure and simple.

Speaking of magic, anyone ever heard of magical realism? Any others of you stupid enough to have watched that pathetic excuse for a film version of a book The House of the Spirits, like I was? I hope, like I, after that experience, you saw the light and weren't the least bit tempted to see the film version of the oh-so-wonderful Corelli's Mandolin. After all, you'd realized that, despite the fact film seems like the perfect medium for magical realism, some things, once again, are best left up to the imagination. So, why on earth would anyone take Love in the Time of Cholera and make it into a movie? Granted, it's not One Hundred Years of Solitude, the grandfather of magical realism, but still.


I don't need to go see the movie to have a pretty good idea of what those in the film industry will have done to my favorite Garcia Marquez novel (another one, coincidentally, I've read three times) in order to try to make millions off it. I can just picture all the sex and the seductive whores and a complete missing of the boat when it comes to capturing the complexity of the novel and its exploration of all the many types of love we humans experience. Even People has trashed this one.


I have a confession to make now, though. I'm being very hypocritical. I'm the person who has always said, "Don't tell me how awful an author is unless you've read him or her." I obviously haven't seen either one of these movies. Maybe I should. Maybe Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother will add a whole new dimension to the text. Maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez should have started with films rather than with novels. Then again, if this is what the merging of film and literature has led to, maybe I shouldn't have given up smoking pot all those years ago.

A Photo Entry

Fall finally came to Lancaster, and I managed to get a few shots before the huge winds and drastic drop in temperature took it away. This is the tree in our front yard. Before we moved here, we were told it was beautiful in the fall. Until about ten days ago, I was beginning to have my doubts, but I see I need to work on having a little more faith in what others tell me.



This is the same tree and the front of the manse. That window in the peak just begs to have a mysterious figure standing in it and then disappearing, doesn't it? I'll have to see what I can do about that.

This is the side and back of the manse. We're so popular, we have a parking lot in our back yard.

This is the church. Bob's in there somewhere.
These are our neighbors. No one's invited me out to play yet, but they don't mind when I go wandering around on their property.

So, here I am, proud of myself for getting pictures on my blog, and then I discover Ian's been busy making his own YouTube videos. Nothing like being put to shame by your little brother.

More Rattling Chains or Are They Jingle Bells? As Well as a Meme

Well, since we're being forced to move into the Christmas season, whether we're ready or not, I've finished my ghost story over at Things that Go Bump in the Night. (Stef, this is the one I promised to send you.) I posted it from beginning to end to make it easier to read, and I'd love some feedback (have even conveniently included questions for readers to answer to help with this). And don't worry. I won't be hurt if the only feedback you want to give me is, "Forget ghost stories." Meanwhile, until I get that feedback, I think I'll write a few Christmas ghost stories, but don't worry, yet again: I won't subject you-all to those. Now that I'm done revising this story and have completed Cam's roundtable discussion (wasn't it great?), it's back to a regular blog-posting schedule right here for now.

What the Eye Doesn't See Meme

Becky created this meme, for which I am an ideal candidate. Unfortunately, she created it so long ago, many of you may have forgotten all about it. You can refresh your memory over here. In the meantime, here is my list of five advantages to being extremely near-sighted.

1. A great excuse -- being a contact-lens wearer and going places without solution, lens cases, and glasses is the perfect excuse never to have to spend the night anywhere I don’t want to (in my single days: that “iffy,” hinting-he’d-like-me-to-spend-the-night date’s apartment. A few years ago: my father in-law’s place when it was snowing up a storm Christmas day, and he was wondering whether or not it was safe for us to drive all the way home. Now: clingy friends of Bob’s and mine who we know will keep us up all night with all their woes. You get the picture, I’m sure).

2. Christmas tree lights -- there’s nothing cooler than looking at a multi-color-lighted tree sans glasses or contact lenses. The lights turn into blurring, soft, wheels, and they monopolize the tree, so that tacky ornaments are invisible.

3. Handing over the car keys -- my night vision is particularly bad, and I’m not a big fan of driving at night (especially now that I live in an area where horses and buggies go roaming around after dark). I happily hand over car keys to anyone willing to chauffeur me with the excuse that I’m likely to get us into an accident with my poor vision. This also means I can drink alcoholic beverages without having to worry, since I’m rarely ever assigned “designated driver” status.

4. Instant intelligence – people really do seem to think that those of us who wear glasses are smarter. I don’t wear my glasses all that often, because they bother me (never seem to sit comfortably on my nose, fog up when it’s hot and muggy outside, attract dirt, slide off if I work up a sweat, etc.), but when I’m feeling the need to counter-balance my blond hair, I’ll put them on.

5. Payback – I have one of those husbands who doesn’t seem to be able to find anything on his own, always needing my help to find anything he’s lost and often expecting me to drop what I’m doing to help him. Every so often, I’ll take my glasses off to pull on a sweater, wash my face, look at a Christmas tree, or something, forgetting which table or counter I put them on, and I literally can’t find them (yes, I’m that blind without them). He has to drop whatever he’s doing and come find them for me. Hmmm…maybe I should do this more than every-so-often.

If you’re blind as a bat and have spent most of your life lamenting how horrible you look in glasses, I’m tagging you to give this meme a whirl.

The Roundtable

It's up! Cam has posted the first installment of our blogger roundtable discussion. Check it out, comment please, and praise Cam to the hilt. It was lots of fun to be a participant, but lots of work for her, as you will be able to imagine once you start reading. You'll note that I blather on more than anyone else; thus, I was the one who made her job twice as hard.

I'm Still Addicted to These Things

Thanks to Charlotte for this one. Apparently, she and I could pose for a double portrait. Those of you who have ever seen me at a party, sitting quietly, just observing what's going on around me, obviously have no idea what a show-stopper I really am. Must be that I'm also just such a kind person that I simply choose not to compete. I mean, when you know you could so easily overshadow everyone else, why bother?

Who Should Paint You: Roy Lichtenstein

Larger than life, your personality overshadows everyone in the room A painter would tend to portray you with a bit of added flair!

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

Not Exactly Pastoral

I am so, so glad no one has yet invented whatever needs to be invented in order to be able to read others’ minds. I remember once, somewhere (either on the radio, TV, or some magazine), encountering a discussion about mind-reading. Some woman was talking about how she so wished her husband could read her mind. My immediate reaction was: are you nuts?

I’d love to see how quickly my marriage might dissolve if my husband could actually read my mind when, for instance, I’m trying to relate the fascinating conversation about the relationship between algebra and geometry I had with one of my authors today, and he doesn’t even bother to put down the newspaper to pretend, at least, he’s listening. Or how about when he wants high praise because he cleaned a bathroom, emptied the litter box, and went to the post office to buy stamps on the same day I paid all the bills, went grocery shopping, took the car in for an oil change, and spent an hour online looking for a story that might help him make a point in his sermon next Sunday? Oh, and did I mention the fact I also worked eight hours that day? I don’t think you need to be a mind-reader to take a stab at figuring out what might be going on in mine at such times. They’re the sorts of thoughts that have “one-way-to-divorce-court” stamped all over them.

I’ve had occasion as of late to think of something that might be worse than a mind-reading husband: mind-reading parishioners. I can’t quite decide what, exactly, would most cause them to want to drive their pastor and his horrible wife out of town. Would it be the fact she can’t possibly be worthy of the position, because no “Christian” woman would have such thoughts? Perhaps it would be the fact that no good man could possibly be married to someone so mean. I like to fantasize that it would be fear, fear that this woman can’t possibly have their numbers like that, can she?

Actually, I’m sure they would be afraid. However, they wouldn’t be afraid of my ability to peg them. No, they’d be afraid of my multiple personalities. Even in this quiet, innocent little part of the world, people have heard of Sybil. Let’s take a look at some of the recent examples that exemplify two very distinct personalities inside the head of one pastor’s wife. Just for the heck of it, we’ll call them Mary and Jezebel, shall we?

SCENARIO #1:
Woman with little girl in tow rings the manse’s doorbell at 9:00 p.m. on a very chilly night. She’s having car trouble. She has no money. She needs a place to stay.

Mary: Oh, how horrible! That poor woman! Imagine being stranded in the middle of nowhere with no money and nowhere to go. Invite them in. See if they’re hungry. Let’s get out the “emergency funds” and give them $100.

Jezebel: Oh, give me a break! Even I, one of the most movie-ignorant people in this country, have seen Paper Moon. Can’t you come up with something more original than car trouble and a little girl you have to feed? Who’s that other person sitting out there in the car? Hit the road. We haven’t got a cent for the likes of you.

SCENARIO #2:
The pastor and his wife are at a hayride and bonfire party sponsored by one of the members of the church. Some of the kids are crowding around the pastor, teasing him and telling him he’s a bonfire. A few of the women of the church look at him knowingly and say, “That’s because you’re so hot.”

Mary: Oh, how sweet. We haven’t even been here two months, and people are already comfortable enough to tease him like this.

Jezebel: Yeah, and if any of you tries to sink your nasty little claws into him, there’ll be hell to pay. This is one pastor, if I can help it, who won’t be running off with any organists.

SCENARIO #3:
Parishioner informs pastor and his wife that next Saturday is the day that all of the oldest members of the church get together to have a little party and auction. She’d like the pastor and his wife to come, especially since this little group has begun to dwindle due to illness and death.

Mary: Oh, how sweet! And how sad so many of them are ill. What should I bring?

Jezebel: Well, there goes yet another Saturday. Are we ever going to get to have a Saturday to ourselves? I can’t think of anything I’d rather NOT be doing next Saturday. Will these invitations to mind-numbing events never cease?

SCENARIO #4:
Pastor and his wife are at another church function. Wife is extraordinarily exhausted and just wants to go home. Pastor is not picking up on any of the various hints she’s been dropping to indicate thus. Finally, she bluntly says, “We have to go,” at almost the exact same moment some woman in distress asks the pastor if he might have some time to talk with her soon. He says “sure” and proceeds to suggest they talk now.

Mary: How wonderful I’m married to such a nice man who’s so willing to help all these people when they need him. I’m glad they have someone to talk to them; it’s so important, and he’s such a sympathetic listener.

Jezebel (restraining foot from kicking his shin as he suggests they find a quiet place to talk): Why can’t he ever say “no” to anyone? And how dare she come along and take him away just when I finally had him halfway out the door? I have half a mind to just go off and leave him here.

So, you see, others with mind-reading capabilities might be a bit of a problem for someone in my shoes. I can’t remember if that radio report/TV show/magazine was reporting on its becoming a reality or not. I certainly hope not, but if it was, I want the equivalent of caller i.d. blocking for my thoughts. Being sent to the nearest mental institution is not exactly how I envisioned the “Pennsylvania Phase” of my life.

So, I Lied, But I Have a Crazy Idea to Make Up for It

I know, I said I was back about a month ago, but I've really only been about half back, haven't I? Everyone else has been busy celebrating NaBloPoMo, and I seem to have been celebrating NaNoBloPoMo. Oh well, it can't be helped. I've just got too much on my plate right now: still unpacking, conferences for work, and now I'm getting ready finally to go spend some time with my sister and nieces. I promise I'm not gone for good. Every so often, I'll still be posting, I will finish the ghost story over at Things That Go Bump in the Night, and, occasionally, I will still visit each of your blogs and maybe even leave some comments. One day, maybe as a New Year's resolution, I will get back to a nice routine, and my blog posts will once again be more frequent.

Meanwhile, I'd like to throw out a crazy idea to everyone. How about an international blogger meet up in Philadelphia, PA next year (say, in August)? I'm not at all familiar with Philly yet, having had no time to explore it (hell, I haven't even had any time to explore Lancaster yet), but I figure it might be a good place to find a museum (I do happen to know that the library is fabulous, so maybe we could meet there. It might even be an "event" the library would sponsor: The Gathering of Book Bloggers. Of course, then I'd have to lie again and pretend I'm a book blogger) or something where we could all meet. If anyone is interested, I'm willing to do the exploring and to set it all up. We can meet in the morning, and if no one is getting along by noon, we can all go our separate ways, or if things are going well, we can keep hanging out with each other (kind of like a blind date for drinks rather than dinner and a movie). Then, maybe this could be an annual thing, and I'll have an excuse every year to go somewhere really exciting.

If you can't possibly come to Philly next summer, in January, Courtney is in the process of arranging a meetup in New York around AWP for a little prelude to the Philly meetup. I'll be there, probably insisting we all go to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, inconveniently located way up on the Upper West Side, and whining about how much I want to live in the city.

Raving

Excuse me for a moment while I rave about our new house, which isn’t new at all, age-wise, having been built sometime in the 1880s. Anyway, all I can say is: Bob had better keep his job, because I love this house. Despite still having plenty of unpacked boxes and not being able to find a thing (even unpacked things, because I can’t remember what I thought was such a clever place for them, when I unpacked them, utterly exhausted at 9:30 p.m. sometime two weeks ago), I already feel right at home. This was obviously the sort of house I was made to inhabit, the interior reminding me quite a bit of the house in which I was raised, except it’s bigger and older.

And I don’t just love this house because the first Sunday we lived here somebody other than Bob and I was mowing our lawn, and we didn’t have to pay for it. Or because the automatic ice maker wasn’t working, and I wasn’t the one who had to call Kenmore to get a repairman out here, or because I just chose paint colors I wanted for the downstairs rooms, and, voila! they were all painted by the time I arrived. No, I love this house because of what it is: a marvelous old house that has re-awakened the ghost-story writer in me (we have a walk-up attic that seems it was at one time the maids’ quarters – a dusty old place with a hallway that mimics the one on the second floor and two rooms off to either side. I’ve placed a big basket chair and a small table at the end of this hallway, right in front of the peaked window that looks out the front and over the huge spruce in the yard. Can you think of a better spot to take a notebook and pen to write? It’s not heated, but I’m hardy when it comes to temperature and will take a sleeping bag up there with me until it gets too cold even for me). Strange knocking noises in the dining room just have to be a ghost, right?

Not only is it a marvelous old house, but it’s also the sort of house I always wanted with its big front porch and nine-foot ceilings. And I’m living right, smack-dab in the center of “town” (such as it is. The real town is Lancaster proper, and I suppose this used to be a village of sorts, surrounded by nothing but farmland). We have hardwood floors that aren’t ruined with wall-to-wall carpeting. We have a space at the end of the upstairs hall with a window just perfect for a reading couch. The dining room is the biggest room in the house. How can someone who thinks food is one of life’s greatest pleasures not be thrilled about that?

I don’t want to sound too unappreciative of our former home, which was a very nice place as well. The problem with it, though, is that it was a very nice place for someone like all our neighbors – the sorts of people who seem to like nothing better, after a long, hard week at work, to spend their weekends cleaning, painting, decorating, gardening, renovating, and worrying about every scratch and knick on the exterior and interior of their homes. That would not be Bob and me. We like to spend our weekends reading books and the Sunday New York Times (which to our horror, we’ve discovered we can’t get delivered here).

I fell in love with that house, too, but I fell in love with it on a very superficial level. It had this beautiful window in the living room, and the living room led into a huge glassed-in sunroom (which we decorated with artifacts Bob had collected while in grad school in Santa Fe and came to call the “Santa Fe room”). Off the Santa Fe room was a swimming pool. It all sounds very glamorous and appealing, and it is if you’re just visiting it for a few days, but not if you’re trying to live there. You see, if you don’t live with one and have to take care of it, you don’t realize that things like swimming pools have to be vacuumed and that they’re sullen teenagers who, when they feel you’ve been ignoring them too long, enjoy doing things like suddenly turning green with algae the week of your pool party. Huge glassed-in rooms have windows that seem to want to show off their dirt if they’re not washed on a regular basis. It was as if the house had a pair of sparkling green eyes that had attracted my attention the minute we first saw it, drawing me away from the rest of its body and making me forget that I really like deep, dark, soulful, brown eyes – the sort of eyes that have a pipeline to the heart. The house I’m in now has deep, dark, soulful, brown eyes.

When we first moved into our former house, we were newlyweds who’d never lived with each other. So what’s really nice about that house is that we grew up and together in it. What’s also nice about that house is that it helped me get to know Bob, whom I now know much better than I did when I was busy being charmed by a pair of green eyes. I know he can’t bear to get rid of anything. That house, despite having this absurd 4-car garage (the former owner had been a pilot and had built on extra garage stalls, so he could build and house his own plane) never had the right kind of storage space. And I was too lazy busy with my all-important work and travel schedule to weed and take care of it all.

The other problem with the old house is that we were house poor when we moved into it. I was only 31 when we got married, and although I had my doubts, still wasn’t sure that my biological clock hadn’t just been temporarily broken and that I might not find myself desperate for children by the time I was 36 or so. And we wanted a room to call a “study” where we both could write. Thus, we had to have at least three bedrooms: one for a baby, one for us, and one for a study. We were living in Stamford, CT at the time and to think we were under the delusion we could afford such a thing there is laughable. But then we discovered this little town that hadn’t yet been “discovered” (it since has, in abundance, and huge houses are popping up all over the place like pimples on a teenager’s face). If we pushed the limits of what we were planning to spend on a house, we could get this sparkling-green-eyed, 4-bedroom colonial that seemed about 100 times the size of the studio apartment I was renting at the time.

We’d sunk all our money into a down payment and mortgaged ourselves up to our necks, before I noticed its flabby beer belly (kitchen that probably still had the original appliances from 1959, the year it was built, with an oven that couldn’t easily be replaced when it broke, because wall ovens are no longer made in that size), its dirty fingernails (wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpeting that was old, dingy, stained, and, in some of the bedrooms, shoddily lain), and its nasty habit of spitting in public (bathrooms that had issues similar to the ones in the kitchen). Within a week of moving into the house, the dishwasher blew up, the pool filter stopped doing its job, and the water tank sprung little pin-hole leaks. Paying for all these things added new meaning to the term “house poor.”

We had no money, and we are not handy do-it-yourselfers, so we didn’t do what most people do. We didn’t remodel or redecorate. We just moved all our stuff in and placed it on top of what was already there. Then we went back to reading books. When we finally did feel we had a little money to remodel or redecorate, things like swimming pool liners needed replacing, or a tree fell on the deck (not once, but twice!) so that it needed major repair, or pipes froze and flooded the basement, or families of squirrels decided that our garage was prime real estate in squirrel land. We dealt with all those disasters and were too exhausted to do anything other than pick up our books and read.

Bob, the more romantic member of this pair, will tell you how much he loves that house, what a wonderful house it is. What I love is the fact we grew up in it together, that it was a great place to get to know and love each other better. We learned that we were the sort of couple that would come together when we woke up to discover the roof was leaking into the laundry room. I learned that Bob is a Master when it comes to researching contractors and repairmen and getting them to do wonderful work. And that house is now in terrific hands, with one of those neighbors who is not the sort who likes to spend his weekends reading books.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to taking junk lovely sentimental artifacts up to that huge walk-up attic. Oh yes, and I do have to tell you that this house does have one fault. It wears glasses over its soulful brown eyes, you see, because it’s situated right on the Lincoln Highway, a road that an adventuresome soul can take all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. People tell us we’ll get used to the roar of the traffic one of these days. I certainly hope so.

Where's the Kitty?

Got the camera, got the directions for downloading photos onto computer, got the photo before the kitten was an eighteen-year-old, toothless and drooling cat. This is a particularly good photo, because it shows not only the hidden Kitty (I must say, Francis blends in with quite a lot around here. You should see him disappear on the hardwood floors), but also the hand-made quilt we bought at the library auction the first week we were living here.

This was the same library auction where I was heard to declare before we went, "We are not buying anything. No new things come into this house until we're done unpacking and know what we need." You may have spotted us later that evening with a rug, an office chair, and this quilt. But, you know, it was all for a good cause: we were supporting the library. Besides, it was really unfair for them to have a patchwork quilt when I'm a complete sucker for patchwork, and we were the only people not likely to have one already, this seemingly being the quilting capital of the world.

Answers to your questions:

Why, yes, of course it's his bed. Bob and I have taken to squeezing into old-towel-lined boxes on the floor every night.

The bed is unmade, because we just couldn't disturb him, not, of course, because the bed quite often goes unmade in our house.

Rattling Chains

Well, the chains haven't really started rattling much yet, but they've sort of moved onto the scene over here today. And talk about the difficulties of re-working a story. I realized I had an entire paragraph in the absolute wrong place in my first installment. I hope the story makes sense by the time I'm done.

Meanwhile (she says all smiles), I'm beginning to suspect we have a ghost in the manse. More on that later (gee, I'm leaving you hanging all over the place today).

Watching Lolita in Connecticut

(Happy Halloween! I really ought to be posting over at Things that Go Bump in the Night today, but the blog-posting demon that possesses me has insisted on this post today instead, and, of course, the exorcist is way too busy with far more important matters on a day like this to be of any assistance.)

Shortly after I wrote this, Becky (who also listened to the recorded book) and I decided we were going to have a Lolita party. The idea was to rent both versions of the movie, neither of which we'd ever seen, and to watch them back-to-back. One thing moving away has taught me is to quit assuming I have all the time in the world to instigate such plans and that when I come up with such an idea, the weekend immediately following is a good one to implement it. Needless to say, Becky and I never got around to having our party, and then it was too late. Happily, I came back, and we were able to implement half our plan.

I spent last week up in New England, mostly at the office in New Hampshire, but I stayed in Connecticut at the weekends going up and coming back. Becky was my gracious hostess as I made my way back down to Pennsylvania (if you’re ever in New England in the fall, go stay with Becky. She lives on a lovely old farm, where the trees are spectacular in their golden and amber glory, especially from the porch, and she has a very cozy guest room, with beautiful old hardwood floors, where she’ll bed you down with flannel sheets and a gorgeous hand-made quilt, making it very difficult to get up and leave in the morning). We decided to watch the Jeremy Irons version of the movie this weekend, since his reading of the book had been so perfect, had so mesmerized both of us.

When I studied Lolita in college, I remember a lengthy discussion about how no one wants to read a love story that is all roses: happy and uncomplicated (having been through what seemed like nothing but very unhappy, complicated love stories of my own at that tender age, I can remember thinking, “yes, sometimes they do,” but I kept that thought to myself). We were encouraged to take note of the fact, while reading, that Nabokov’s book, among other things, was a satirical take on that, providing readers with a truly impossible “love story,” one that was doomed from the get-go, a perverse story, given to us from inside the mind of a man in prison, who was trying to garner our sympathies. It was perverse, but it provided all the elements of a more standard love story. I loved the book for that, for its satire and irony, and for ultimately being the quintessential love story, as the genre is defined (I also loved myself for being clever enough to see that, for not dismissing it as “sick” the way, you know, all those people who read it on a superficial level and wanted it banned did. Forget the fact that this “cleverness” probably would not have been there without the course and our TA and that, without that, I very easily might have read it on such a superficial level and labeled it “sick”). And I came to realize that no, I was wrong. I’m just like everyone else: I don’t really want to read a love story in which there are no complications, in which everything is happy (first of all, because there’s no such thing, but second of all, because, as we all discussed, it would be very boring).

I wish someone would invent something I could take every time I watch a movie based on a beloved book, a magic pill that would prevent me from spending the entire length of the movie comparing it to the book. I am fully aware of the fact before I sit down to watch a film that this does nothing but make for a disappointing movie-watching experience, yet I can’t seem to help myself. I have been disappointed by movies based on books ever since I was a child. Nevertheless, I have over and over again found myself saying, “[Fill in the blank] has been made into a movie! I must go see it!” every time some fantastic book is translated on film.

I’ve been waiting years for What Makes Sammy Run? to be turned into a movie (seriously. I discovered and read the book, -- a terrific one. Read if, if you haven’t -- because of an article written in some magazine circa 1990 about how it was going to be made into a movie). As I read The Golden Compass, I found myself wondering how certain parts of it will be handled in the movie version. I’m thrilled to find The Time Traveler’s Wife is being made into a movie. Why? I will come away from these movies as disappointed as ever, I’m sure. I think it’s something called “hope.” I always hope that someone will make the movie version of the book as magical as the book was for me. Most of the time, nobody can, but every so often, a movie does manage to live up to the book. I loved The Remains of the Day (or, wait a minute, is it just Anthony Hopkins I love?), and I’d read that book twice before the movie was released. I actually thought the movie version of The Firm was better than the book (despite the fact I hate Tom Cruise). The Cider House Rules was a wonderful adaptation of the book (can't think of a parenthetical aside for this observation, but am adding one for the sake of parallelism).

This go around, I was glad to be watching the movie with someone else who’d read the book and was making the same comparisons I was. It was, really, an extraordinarily good movie: beautifully-filmed and well-acted. I was amazed to see an almost unrecognizable Melanie Griffith who was not her usual whiny, weak, baby-voiced self. Jeremy Irons was perfect for the role of Humbert Humbert. Dominique Swain did a wonderful job of portraying a sexually-knowing teenager. That was the problem, though. Lolita should not have been a sexually-knowing teenager. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Becky and I both looked at each other and said, “She’s too old to be Lolita.” We’re not told how old she is, but looking at her, we both agreed that she could be anywhere from fourteen to sixteen. At some point, her age is mentioned as fourteen, and All Movie Guide informs us she’s meant to be thirteen at the beginning. That’s too old. The whole point of the book is that by the time a girl begins to actually become an adolescent, Humbert begins to lose interest. His perversion is with undeveloped, pre-adolescent girls.

I don’t know why I was so disappointed by this. Becky and I discussed the fact that if the book-reading public was so shocked by a book about a man and his love affair with a pre-pubescent child, the movie-going public would have been in a complete uproar. It stands to reason that she had to be older, that to actually see a relationship between a middle-aged man and a child portrayed on screen would have been too disturbing. But then, I think it would be best not to try to make the book into a movie at all. Yet, we have two movie versions. Apparently, the first version is the same in this regard, with an even older Lolita.

All right, so she had to be older, and we do have two movies. She still could have, with the use of voice overs and cleverly-filmed scenes, been a figment of his imagination. The scenes of her trying to be too child-like with her bubblegum and gobstoppers, scenes she didn’t pull off very well, right after she’d just come onto him in a way I’d find nearly impossible to do even at my advanced age, could have been cut. She could have been an adolescent, truly gawky and awkward in her crush on the older man, an inexperienced teen, flirting (like a colt learning to walk) in the way teens will with men, a way that most men recognize for what it is, knowing not to act on it. Instead, we get the girl who would have been labeled the class slut by her peers. It’s a fine, interesting story (you might even call it a quintessential love story), and the movie does a lot to explore the power dynamics between women and men. It just isn’t the story I wanted it to be, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that it couldn't have been if someone had been a little more willing to take a risk.

Will this keep my from watching the original version? Of course not. It’s on our list of things to do next time Becky and I get together. It’s got to be good, right? After all, it's Stanley Kubrick, and Nabokov adapted it himself.

Google and My Blog

(Warning: if you have found this post through a Google search on “colonoscopies,” chances are this will not in any way provide you with the information you are seeking. Feel free to read it, though.)

Do you want to know which of my posts in 2007 has so far garnered the most traffic due to random Google searches? A brief, and by no means thorough, examination reveals that it seems to have been the one on my colonoscopy. I can’t decide if that’s extremely depressing, scary, or a good thing. It may be a good thing, because I still happen to think it was one of my better posts (maybe there’s something to be said for food deprivation and creativity), but it’s depressing, because I’m positive nobody stumbled upon it looking for a creative post on the subject, most especially since one person was looking for “pnemonia [sic] of the bowel.” I’d never heard of “pnemonia of the bowel” (which Spell-check is slapping me on the wrist for trying to misspell a second time when it already told me the first time was wrong). Don’t tell me there’s yet another hideous disease my inner hypochondriac is dying to race to Web MD to research. Anyway (stay focused, Inner Hypochondriac), I am sure these people coming to my blog through such searches were all desperately seeking solace, after having been informed this procedure was necessary, and that they spent half a second with me before becoming extremely pissed that someone could joke at a time like this.

And it’s scary to think that maybe people aren’t looking for solace before a procedure. Maybe there are just tons of hypochondriacs out there looking for information to confirm their “sure-I’m-going-to-die-tomorrow” diagnoses. Their stomachs hurt, which leads them to look up stomach pain online, which leads them to cancer, which leads them to the best way to diagnose the cancer: colonoscopy. Then I pop up when they type in “colonoscopy” to find out what it entails (if I’d accidentally typed “entrails” here, I bet Spellcheck wouldn’t have been slapping me on the wrist. You, however, might have been shutting off your computer in disgust). You’ll understand why I find the notion of the world being full of hypochondriacs somewhat depressing when I tell you I recently came across a diary I was keeping in 1985 and found this in one of the entries, “My legs hurt all the time. I hope I don’t have leukemia.” I really don’t wish this kind of morbid imagination on anyone. 1985 was around the same time I’d gone to the library to research some paper for school and had, instead, found my kiss of death: a book all about symptoms and what they may mean (although I have to admit I’ve obviously forgotten half of what that book contained since then. Nowadays, I wouldn’t dream of thinking “leukemia” when my legs ache. Aching legs are merely early-onset arthritis that’s obviously going to be crippling me by the time I’m 65 if it’s already making an appearance).

Still, I really must harp on how depressing this “Google and My Blog” news is. I want people to discover my blog because they’ve, say, been told they have to read The Lady and the Panda, and they’ve typed it in, read my exquisite review of the book, and placed an Amazon order in less time than it takes for the anesthesiologist to knock out a patient for a colonoscopy. I want people to discover my blog because they hate to clothes shop and are looking for someone who will say, “No, you darling person, you’re not crazy, or at least, if you are, you’re not the only crazy person in this world.” I want people to come across my blog, because they’ve typed in “blogs that will make you laugh out loud,” and have discovered that somewhere (in Sri Lanka or something), someone has included me on a list of 100 blogs guaranteed to make you laugh out loud. I certainly don’t want people discovering my blog because they’re searching for medical advice.

I sort of have to wonder about these people, though. I mean, if you were going to research your upcoming medical procedure, I wouldn’t think you’d click on a search result entitled “Telecommuter Talk: Lies, Lies, All Lies (and Irritability).” I know, with the impossibility these days of getting in touch with doctors, it may seem as though they’ve done away with such old-fashioned things as offices and hospitals, but really, I’m sure the chances of finding a gastroenterologist who telecommutes and performs colonoscopies from home must be infinitesimally small. (I would hope the chances would be zero, but you never know. After all, up in Massachusetts, there were people performing cosmetic surgery in apartment basements not too long ago.) Then there’s the “Lies” business. If you’re getting ready to have a colonoscopy next week, I wouldn’t think you’d want to read anything that seems to suggest skewed results, or worse, a procedure that your doctor may have lied about, making it sound completely painless, when it’s really about as painless as a visit to a Medieval torture chamber (which it isn’t! I feel the need to say that for all the people who are obviously going to Google search their way to this second post of mine on the subject).

Then again, I am definitely a beggar who is choosing. After all, I average about 25 visits per day to my blog. I am certainly not someone who should be complaining about how one of those visitors happens to stumble upon me. I should be grateful for every hit I get. It could be the person looking for “hours of fasting before colonoscopy” was just dying to read about someone who is driven nuts by said fasting. Maybe he or she found a kindred soul. Maybe that person is now permanently one of the 25. (As I’ve been known to say many times, please allow me my fantasy.)

I'm Not Here Today

Well, revision is coming along a little more slowly and a little less easily than I'd expected, but I'm making some headway and have posted over here today. Please visit me, if you'd like, and let me know what you think.

"If You'd Like to Live in the Nineteenth Century, Press 2"

I despise the 21st-century. I just wasn’t made to be living during this time period. Call me naïve or romantic, or whatever you want to call me, but, really, those of us with tiny frustration thresholds need to be living in the good old nineteenth century (preferably with extraordinarily strong constitutions, so as never to have to visit a doctor of the age, and with obscene amounts of money, so as to have lots of servants to run the household, never having a twenty-first-century clue that one should feel guilty about such things as having servants. I know. You don’t need to tell me: I’ve read too many books and seen too many movies in my life). The early part of the twentieth century might be pretty good, too, although by then, things like telephones were becoming prevalent, and everyone in the “civilized” world was beginning to expect everyone else in the “civilized” world to know how to use them. Hell, though, even the second part of the twentieth-century would have been fine up until about twenty-five years ago. Then, along came not only the telephone, but also voice mail, voice mail that replaces the human you’re hoping to find on the other end of the line when you need to do business.

I despise telephones. I mean, they’re good for keeping in touch with friends and family members in far away places, but other than that, they’re nothing but a nuisance, always ringing at the wrong time, calls usually coming from someone with whom I have no desire to speak. However, if I lived in the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t really have that many friends and family members in far away places, would I? Almost everyone I knew would probably live within a ten-mile radius of my home. Maybe we’d summer far away in Newport, RI (remember, I have obsecene amounts of money in my nineteenth-century world) or something, but probably half my acquaintances would do the same (or they’d come visit and stay in one of the twenty guest rooms in the house). We’d just sit out under parasols on the sand instead of by the fire in the parlor. Possibly, I’d have some crazy cousins who’d picked up and gone West to find gold or something (or, knowing my relatives just to be able to say they’d made it across the Rocky Mountains and had lost only one toe to frostbite), but for the most part, everyone would be close by, and instead of hearing annoying jangles and beeps and shrills, I’d get calling cards (don’t you just love the idea of calling cards?) from my friends and would actually get to see them when talking to them. Visiting Aunt Betty, who’d moved to her husband’s farm eight miles away, would be an all-day event and an excuse for a fancy afternoon picnic.

But no, I have to live in this Godforsaken age. I wonder if Alexander Graham Bell ever imagined that by the year 2007, most people would use his miraculous invention to interact with an actual human being on the other end of the line only about 10% of the time. The rest of the time would be spent listening to voicemail messages and options. Don’t you hate “options?” None of them is ever the one you really want, which of course, is to speak to a live human being. It used to be, in the early days of voice mail, that if you wanted to speak to a live human being, all you had to do was to pretend you didn’t have a touch-tone phone. Well, that’s not fooling anyone in this day and age. Stop a homeless person on the street, and I bet even he or she is likely to have a cell phone. Can you imagine a cell phone with a dial? Only Thumbelina would be able to use it.

Does anyone else remember the days when you could always “press zero to speak to a customer service representative?” Now if you press zero, after losing patience halfway through a list of 100 different not-anything-close-to-what-you-need-or-want options, you will either be cut off, having to call back and listen to those first 50 options all over again, or you will get a voice that says, “I’m sorry. That is not a valid option,” and will still have to listen to the 50 options all over again. By this point, you’re praying for the “if you’d like to blow up this company” option.

Last time I moved was a little over twelve years ago. Back in those, oh so good old days, I had to cancel my phone service and things like my utility services, just as anyone moving has to do today. I can remember calling the companies, explaining to a live human (I remember the woman at the phone company being especially excited when she found out I was getting married and would need a new name listing in the phone book) that I was moving, asking them to transfer accounts, and having everything in place by the time I moved. The post office used to send out change of address forms to send to magazines, etc. I guess they no longer do that, because I sent them a change of address form ages ago, and we haven’t received a thing. Luckily, my lovely husband volunteered to be the one to call the magazines to which we subscribe and give them our new address. He was not, however, able to call the company in which I was given some stock as a graduation present years ago, and from which I receive small dividend checks on a quarterly basis.

Let me tell you what happens when you try to change your address with this company. Nothing. That’s right. Nothing. Yes, you sit through that long laundry list of options, tell it you want to change your address, and then you are told you have to pick a pin number. This pin number has to be six (six. Who the hell, other than a Guinness Book of World Record’s best memory candidate is going to be able to remember a six-digit pin number unless she chooses something like her birth date, which we all know is a huge “no-no” when it comes to choosing security numbers?). So, you go through this process; choosing a pin number you can’t possibly remember when the system cuts you off, and you have to call back; the voice on the other end verifies your current address; and then it asks for your new zip code. You punch in your zip code. That’s when nothing happens. You call back and go through the whole damn process again. Get nothing. I don’t know; maybe the new zip code is the pin number for the “blowing up the company” option. Perhaps the company no longer exists. Perhaps through all the smoke and debris, all anyone can hear is the monotone voice instructing you to “Say ‘customer service’ now.” God knows where my dividend checks are going to end up. If you get one, would you please forward it to me?

And coming soon: “Fun with Voice Mail Setup”

When You Don't Have Time to Write a Proper Post...

All right. Memes and silly quizzes. You can tell I'm really back, huh? (I would quibble with the "Expert" part. I bet Mandarine, a.ka. my personal "Idiot's Guide to Blogging" would, too.) Oh yes, and I found this (where else?) over at Charlotte's.

Bloggers Unite for the Environment

I found out from Charlotte that today is bloggers unite for the environment day. So, my post on how much I love my new house will just have to wait, because, well, how can I turn that down? I mean, if it were bloggers unite for the right to carry assault weapons, I just might be able to pass. But the environment?

And here you go: not only is it going to be about the environment, but it’s also going to be about telecommuting. Because, you see, I don’t happen to understand why more and more companies, most especially green companies, aren’t requiring their employees who don’t need to be on site to telecommute. I really can’t think of a much better way to cut down on the horrors of what automobiles do to the environment than getting rid of unnecessary drivers every morning and every evening. In more civilized countries, like those in Europe, people could probably be convinced to take public transportation, but in this country, where everyone wants to be independent, and no one seems to want to have to adhere to someone else’s timetable, public transportation is not very popular. Thus, if you live somewhere, like the Middle of Nowhere, PA, you can’t walk down to your local train station or bus stop and hop a train or bus to get to the office located 15 miles from your home, because of course, the train and bus companies would make absolutely no money off the ten people willing to do so.

I know there are some positions that absolutely require employees to be on site (for instance dental hygienists – and their dentists, for that matter). However, no one can argue with me anymore that even customer service representatives need to be anywhere but in their own living rooms, with the kinds of technology we have these days. It isn’t as if most customer service representatives are actually stationed in warehouses. After all, we are all perfectly aware of the fact that when we call almost any company for tech support, that we will most likely be speaking to someone in Prague or Bombay, not someone in, oh, Seattle, say. If companies are so hell bent on outsourcing to other countries, why can’t they also outsource to the next town over (I hope you understand that I’m taking complete advantage of the notion of poetic license here. I don’t want corporations outsourcing to the next town, hiring nothing but freelancers, and skirting their obligations to pay for benefits)? In all honesty, I’d love to know how many CEOs have a clue as to who 80% of their employees are and whether or not these employees are in the office at any given time.

And here’s the thing: once you get more and more used to the notion of not having to get up and drive to and from work every morning (at least based on this highly significant scientific sample of one telecommuter), you become very reluctant to have to get in the car to go anywhere. You really plan to go to the grocery store today, but then, as the day goes on, and you still haven’t bothered to change out of the sweats you’ve been wearing all day, you decide that maybe you can make some sort of casserole out of the 5 stalks of celery, the potato that’s growing roots, a little cheese, and the last few drops of milk in the carton. You’ve got that bottle of hot sauce that bar tender in New York gave you last summer that you’ve never opened. Hot sauce added to anything will make it taste good.

Now that Bob’s office is right across the parking lot, I’m imagining automobile costs that are going to plummet. I do still have to drive to places like airports for my job, and next week, I’m actually driving up to work at the office for a week, sandwiching my work week in between two weekends in CT to tie up some loose ends with our house up there (and to visit friends). I can walk to both the post office and bank, now, though, so those establishments that used to require car trips are no longer an issue. And really, besides food (and now cat food, litter, toys, and treats), what else do I need?

I think corporations are still afraid to let people telecommute. Corporate America has never trusted its employees. The average worker in America is treated no better than the average child of the early twentieth-century, with all kinds of strict and pointless rules and the threat of harsh punishment as a means of control. And what did those children do (especially the most creative of them)? They figured out ways to rebel and to fight the adults in their lives. They knew how to sneak around and have fun, without getting caught, despite all the rules (come on, tell me you don’t believe for a minute that all those people out there with all those extraordinarily clever and creative web sites aren’t sitting in cubicles at Mega Corporation desperate for some outlet to keep them from going insane, because they get their work done in three hours, but have been told they have to be sitting at those desks from 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., even if their time would be better spent out talking to customers or doing research somewhere, and have nothing to do for most of the work day). Their parents thought their children were models of good behavior, when they really weren’t.

If you treat your employees like children, sure, they’re going to act like children the minute they’re given a little freedom. They may lie on the couch, eat too much candy, and watch T.V. all day. But if you treat your employees like adults, whom you trust, and whom you expect will get their work done, you just may find that they are actually more productive when they work from home, don’t have hour-long commutes, and are more relaxed, not having fought any rush hour traffic when they sit down at their computers to work in the morning. And even if you don’t believe they possibly can be productive without some manager there hovering over their shoulders every minute of the day, you should at least consider the fact that future generations at your company, if it is going to survive, will need a planet on which to do so. Allowing them to telecommute is one step towards insuring that planet survives.

2 Reading/Book Memes

So how about two book/reading memes together that have been making the rounds out there? I can't think of much that goes together better than books and memes. And I'm sorry, but I can’t remember where I first saw each of these, and no one has specifically tagged me for either one, so I can’t give credit via links.

BOOK/READING MEME #1

Hardcover or paperback, and why?
I couldn’t care less as long as what’s inside is grabbing my attention. This question actually showed up in another book meme, and I think at that time I expressed an interest in the perfect electronic book reader, if someone (preferably Apple) would hurry up and make one.

If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Heaven on Earth. It would be in a big old Victorian home, with lots of different rooms for different subject areas (horror and ghost stories would be in the walk-up attic, of course) and a wrap-around front porch with rocking chairs and a porch swing. I’d sell board games, too. Once a month, probably on Friday nights, some lucky customer would have the chance to “beat the owner at Cribbage” (a very easy thing to do, despite the owner’s love of the game) for a free paperback of his or her choice. (You can’t tell I’ve thought much about this, can you?)

My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
I don’t have one. With the exception of things that were memorized against my will when I was in school and can’t possibly be considered favorites, quotes seem to go in one side of the brain and out the other, no matter how badly I want to remember them.

The author (alive or dead) I would love to have lunch with would be…
Surprise, surprise, everyone: Rose Macaulay. Does anyone else fear, when asked such questions, though, that the person you choose might turn out to be completely obnoxious/an utter bore/a dimwit, or something else you never could have imagined the object of your admiration could possibly be, thus forever tainting what were once some of your favorite books?

If I were going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be…
(This is another one I've answered in the past.) Either the Bible or Don Quixote and lots and lots of notebooks and pens, so I could write my own stories and books while there.

I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
would hang books from the ceiling in front of my face while I’m propped up in bed, so I could read without having to hold up the book, thus keeping both hands free for holding things like mugs of tea and coffee. It would be nice if it would turn the pages for me, too.

The smell of an old book reminds me of…
My grandmother’s house when I was a kid, and now my parents’ house.

If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. Imagine having such a wonderful “wordy” adventure just show up on your doorstep.

The most overestimated book of all time is…
The Horse Whisperer. How could people have been so enamored of something so trite and so predictable?

I hate it when a book…
tries to be too clever. Very few authors can pull it off (Italo Calvino being one of these very few), and writers are much better when they stick to telling a good story that is seamlessly written, than when they experiment with writing styles, voices, too many plot twists, etc. I most especially hate it when in-between every line an author (Kingsley Amis springs to mind) is screaming “I am so much more clever than you are.” Makes you wonder why they’ve written the book if they think so lowly of their audience.

BOOK/READING MEME #2

How many books do you own?
I’m too afraid to count. Then I’d have to admit that there’s absolutely no way I could possibly read them all in one lifetime. Bob and I went to visit the library in our new little town the other day, a tiny little one-room building (it used to be a one-room schoolhouse) that’s adorable, and my guess is that he and I probably have more books than that library does.

Last book you bought?
Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. After our visit to the library, we had to go check out the Borders in Lancaster City proper (in case you’re interested, it’s not as good as the Borders we just left in Danbury, CT). Hobs (who, by the way, says I'm awesome, so it must be true) and Dorr turned me onto The Golden Compass. I pretty much realized I was doomed to read all three books in the series when, about a third of the way through it, I experienced an extreme panic, thinking the packers had packed it up somewhere. The last time I saw Hobs and Dorr, they confirmed my suspicions were true. The library didn’t have The Subtle Knife (I’m sure they do have it, and it was just checked out, the only thing by Pullman on the shelves being Lyra’s Oxford), so I had to buy it.

Last book someone bought you?
Well, technically, Bob bought The Subtle Knife for me, but that’s a boring answer, so let’s find another one. My brother-in-law works for a company that exhibits books for publishers at trade shows and often gives me books he gets free, so technically, he didn’t buy this one, but he got for me a fascinating book on the Amish called The Gentle People. It’s by Joe Wittmer who was born and raised Amish but left to pursue his education, so I’ve finally got a book about the Amish that wasn’t written by a complete outsider. And what's neat about it is that he obviously still highly respects his roots and these people.

Last book read?
For me, this question really has to be "last book finished," since I read so many books at one time, which would be Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. It was a fascinating, but also somewhat disappointing read. And the “shocking, surprise ending” neither shocked nor surprised me, but rather didn't make sense to me. I felt as though Picoult had started out knowing how she wanted the book to end and then never wavered from that ending, although she should have by the time it was done, as the book was telling her where it wanted to go and would have been much better if she’d just let it go there.

Five books that mean a lot to me
Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary, the first “chapter book” I read all by myself, all the way through, as a child and one to which I returned over and over all throughout my childhood.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, the first book that literally made buckets of tears roll down my face when I read it at age thirteen. I still remember where I was: sitting on the couch in the den of the family for whom I used to babysit at the time.

The World According to Garp by John Irving, the book that got me into the whole world of contemporary adult literature when I was fifteen and worried adult books were never going to be as interesting or good as children’s and young adult books were. It was also the book that taught me an awful lot about men, probably much more than a fifteen-year-old girl should have known.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. You can read why here.

The Bible. I started out one year deciding to read this book with the help of one of those “read the Bible in a year” diaries, and encouraged Bob to do the same, because I was beginning to feel no one could truly claim to be literate without having read it cover-to-cover. (I'd attempted to do so on several occasions, but had never managed to make it much past Exodus.) After all, so much in literature stems from it. Little did I know that reading it was going to be the catalyst that would change our lives and is why we are where we are today, Bob as pastor and me as pastor’s wife.

You guessed it: if you’re reading this and haven’t done either one of these memes, consider yourself tagged (for either one or both). And now I think I've only got Becky's near-sightedness meme to go. This week of (mostly) memes has been fun, but I'm dying to move onto other stuff. Does that mean I'm going to have to abdicate my throne to someone else?

My Five Writing Strengths Meme

Everyone's doing this one, and Charlotte tagged me for it, so here we go.


1. I have no choice: I have to write. It brings me peace. It calms me. It keeps me sane. Some of you have heard me talk before about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and how her first husband had her committed to an asylum and who, in cohorts with her “therapist,” took away all writing utensils and paper, because, as they said, “writing wasn’t good for her.” (This was the catalyst for her wonderful work The Yellow Wallpaper.) I wept when I read that, thinking how extraordinarily cruel it was, and that if I weren’t crazy before I went into such a place, I certainly would be once I emerged from it (if I ever did). If I go a week without writing, I become morbidly depressed and negative. All this is to say that when you are someone who has to write, you, just by matter of all that effort and output (as with just about anything else in life), become pretty strong.

2. I read, all the time, everywhere. I know someone else out there is using the term for a blog, but I began referring to myself as a “book slut” years ago. I’m the sort of person who will read Crime and Punishment and think, “That’s it. No more trash. I’m not reading anything that isn’t as meaningful and as substantial and as brilliantly composed as that again,” and then I’ll walk into Border’s, see some eye candy like a new book by Katie Fforde, and there I’ll be up all night, bleary-eyed and unable to find my clothes the next morning, swearing I’m never doing this again. Anyway, everything I read either falls into one of two camps: “That was absolutely brilliant; the author is a genius; and I am in complete awe. I wonder if I can ever produce something even half as good” or “That could have been so much better, if only the author had…” I’m not kidding. I seem to read everything with an eye toward whether or not it is something I could do. Maybe being a strong writer means being incredibly narcissistic.

3. I’ve been encouraged to write all my life, by my parents, by my siblings, by my teachers, by my classmates, by my friends, by my husband. Being the sort who likes to please, I’ve done as I was told.

4. I’m empathetic to the point of its being a disease. I even empathize with inanimate objects. I’m sure this disease helps my writing, though, because I'm constantly writing stories in my head about all these poor humans, animals, and inanimate objects when I see them in trouble, wanting to help them in some way or to make sense of their troubling situations. I also think it may make my writing believable, because others can see themselves in it.

5. I believe I'm a writer. For a long time I didn’t call myself a writer, because that meant something very specific to me, mostly that I would earn a living writing. Finally, I came to the realization that: a. I do earn a living writing, even if a good chunk of it is really re-writing and even if it involves writing emails and letters more than anything else. Besides, people call themselves many things that they do, even if they don’t earn a living doing them (“skier,” for instance, or “stamp collector”) and b. someone who has been writing all her life and who has to write in order to remain sane must certainly be a writer, no? Once I began believing I was a writer, my writing got stronger, which makes absolute sense to me, since I know belief in being something is more than half the battle.

I'm tagging all those of you out there who don't believe you are strong writers. This is like my old compliments meme: it will make you feel better about yourself and help you believe.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

(I just had to post on this. Back to memes tomorrow.)

You may have come to think of me as the Queen o’ Memes. Well, let me set the record straight. Long before I was the Queen o’ Memes, I was something else. I’m really the Queen of Making Life as Complicated as Possible. And Bob is the King of Same. This means we’re the sorts of people who get engaged, buy a house, move, and get married all in seven months. Did I mention we got married 400 miles from our home? Oh, and did I tell you that one of us had a job at the time that required him to be away from home for multiple days at a time at least once a month?

We’re also the sorts who accept a new job, move across multiple states, and plan an ordination service with 110 guests that takes place the day before one of us is supposed to start his new job four states away. This service also happens to fall three days before the first team of packers and movers arrives with the first truck (because, of course, we've chosen to live on one of those streets that does not accommodate semis, so the move has to be complicated by a need for two trucks) and a mere ten days before the second wave of packers and movers arrives. In the midst of all this, we decide we absolutely have to go see the King Tut exhibit in Philadelphia, because it didn’t come to New York, we’re not likely to make it to Egypt anytime soon, and we may be dead by the time it comes back to this country, if past history of U.S. tours of these artifacts is any indication.

Thus, we’ve moved. The worst part of that is over. We’re nowhere near being what anyone would call "unpacked." As a matter of fact, anyone walking into our house today would be perfectly within his or her rights to ask, “You mean you’ve been unpacking for the past five days? What do you do, unpack a shoebox per day?” However, we’re beginning to have an inkling of what it might feel like to be settled. We can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m having thoughts like, “Just ten boxes a day, and I should be done by Thanksgiving.” (I’m also having thoughts like “Where the hell did those %$#! packers bury that shower curtain, anyway?” But pastors’ wives aren’t supposed to think such things, so these thoughts are just whispering amongst themselves at the back of the class.)

Enter Francis. Francis arrived yesterday evening just in time for dinner. Actually, it was the second time Francis had arrived for dinner, and this was Act IV of this new version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Act I was set at the home of some church parishioners. I wasn’t there to witness its scenes, but from what I’ve been told, it involved a new pastor, here all by himself, his angelic wife left back up in Connecticut to weed junk from the old house, who’d been invited for dinner. After dinner, the grandchildren were outside playing, when they suddenly all burst in excitedly announcing “cat!” The exact lines are a mystery to me, but I gather the adults weren’t buying, the children were persistent, and finally everyone went out to find, not a cat, exactly, but rather, an extremely starved, half-dead, little marmalade kitten, whereupon all the adults started asking the pastor, “Didn’t you just say you were going to get a kitten?” The pastor (from what I can tell, very unconvincingly) replied, “Yes, but not right now.” After more urging, he seems to have resorted to (the old standby), “I’ll have to see what my wife says,” at which point, they immediately began urging him to pick up his cell phone and call said wife. Thank God she wasn’t around to receive the call.

Act II involved an answered phone call to the wife later that night. The pastor (who didn’t even like cats until he met his wife and the cat she had when they got married) was almost convincing about how sweet this little kitten was. He tried to break his wife’s soft heart by telling her the sad story of how the little thing had been abandoned and was nearly dead, so skinny and so tiny it was. The wife, who had seemed so angelic in those first few scenes, happily preparing the old home for the movers with nary a complaint, suddenly became mean and uncaring, repeatedly saying, “We can’t get a kitten now.”

Act III took place in a church, a parishioner rushing up to wife two days after the wife had moved down and was feeling headachy and not herself, inviting her to “come see the kitten, because I hear it’s all up to you as to whether or not you take him” and the wife feeling she couldn’t possibly say no. She did tell the woman that they couldn’t take the kitten now, that they had no place for him, that the house was completely chaotic. The next morning she went to visit the kitten. And then we come to Act IV, and well, we all know what happened in Act IV, kitten arriving in grand style, with bed and litter box and toys and food dishes, and, of course, food for dinner.

This is not how it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a completely different play, a children’s play entitled “Puppy and Kitten Come Home to the Pastor’s House.” It was supposed to happen about three months from now. The pastor and his wife were going to be happily settled into their new home and feeling in want of the sound of paws and claws prancing around on hard wood floors. They were both going to come to the conclusion at the exact same time that it was finally time to get a puppy and a kitten. They were going to find one of each who needed homes and bring them to a home that had been completely prepared (read “kitten-and-puppy-proofed”) for their arrival. These two were going to grow up together and be great friends, the puppy thinking it was a cat and the kitten thinking it was a dog. The playbill was supposed to be accompanied by lots of cute photos of the new friends together taken by the pastor’s wife, who would finally have learned how to take and download digital photos by the time these furry residents arrived. The kitten was not supposed to arrive now, in the midst of unpacked boxes, possible poisons, and two frazzled humans, one of whom keeps going around saying, “Where the hell did the %$#! packers bury the camera and its directions?” (Must be the pastor, because pastors’ wives aren’t supposed to say such things.)

You’ll just have to take my word for it: he’s cute as a button. How could a five-week-old marmalade kitten not be? Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name: St. Francis, of course, Patron Saint of Animals. When the dog finally comes along, she will be Clare: St. Clare, for whom Francis was a great mentor. Maybe it’s appropriate, after all, that Francis came along first?