Monday, October 26, 2009

Victim of the Wire

Today the internet died - a saturation of the cable sunk in the back yard where a deluge of rain has soaked the lawn to the bone - and I found myself suddenly alone, utterly, completely isolated, without a voice to speak or ears to listen. Completely closed off from my world, abandoned.

I kept telling myself, ‘it’s okay, the conversations you have with friends can wait. It’s not like they hang in mid sentence, waiting with baited breath for your words of worldly wisdom. And it’s not like you stay plugged in all day, every day.’

Yet, the fact that the outside world was unreachable added a sense of urgency to my need to reach it! I tried to focus on something else but my mind kept drifting back to the empty screen. I wandered the house in a distracted fog, touching this, reaching for that. I picked up a magazine, shoved it aside. Tried the book I’d been reading but the words swam in front of my eyes, blurred and unreadable. I phoned a couple friends but only got their voice mail. How suddenly I’d become desperate for a voice, new words flashing across the screen, that little red icon in the lower right corner! But I was shut off from the world, a victim of the broken wire.

I tried to work on something local to my machine, Photoshop or the book I’m writing. But I kept getting distracted by the Internet Explorer icon sitting in the tray at the bottom of my laptop. It kept calling to my mouse, ‘click here, click here!’ And whenever my mouse wandered over of its own accord, not a thing would happen. It was then I decided how desperately I needed an intervention. My life had been hijacked by Facebook, Blogspot, Gmail, Youtube and MSNBC.com.

I tried positive self talk: ‘Ah, Linda, life is much larger than the seventeen inch screen, is it not?” And this helped to calm my angst. My gaze wandered out the window to the yard, still glistening from the morning rain. Where a cool, fall breeze ran its fingers through the fronds of the palm tree and then rippled the surface of the pool. Where a cardinal sat eyeing me from its place in the yaupon holly and where my two dogs romped around, playing keep-away with a small, pink Frizbee. But soon my eyes moved down, down to that strip of lawn where I knew the traitorous wire lie buried in its shallow trench. And I wondered how long it would take the cable guy to get here.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Custodians of the Totally Useless

We (husband, son, and self) have collectively collected enough useless stuff to last our three lifetimes. When I think about it, we’ve probably collected enough for you too. Take that ice cube with a spider suspended inside of it. Something my son made at a Cub scout camp out years back, made of resin and whatever critter the boy happened to locate while foraging in the forest that weekend. I think the goal was to let the resin harden then drop it into someone’s drink when they weren’t looking and wait for them to squirm. But that’s never happened and so the spider sits forever on the sill of my kitchen window where I can visit it on regular basis.

Buried somewhere under our collection of remotes (only three that we actually use), and sitting at the very bottom of the decorative bowl we keep our remote collection in, is my husband’s fart machine. There are two parts to it, the noisy part, that which emits the actual fart, and the remote that prompts its flatulence. I remember how my husband had to have it after seeing the neighbor kid playing with his. The neighbor kid is now in his mid twenties, graduated from college and on to bigger and more interesting gadgets. But we still have our fart machine. My husband and his brothers toyed with the idea of slipping it into their mom’s casket when she passed away years ago. But none of us wives would let them.

Up there in the attic, buried under a thick layer of insulation, cobwebs, cockroach carcasses and dust, hides my son’s baby furniture. There’s a crib, a playpen, a highchair, a basinet and I’ve forgotten what else. Oh and all of my “good” maternity clothes, trussed up tight in a big plastic bag. Now this might not seem such a bad idea to save this kind of stuff - hand me downs and all. But I am in my mid-fifties and not likely to need maternity clothes again unless I really let myself go. And my son is about to turn sixteen, somewhere between the age of needing his crib to sleep in and using it for his own infant child.

Under the desk in the office is every piece of software we’ve ever used on every computer we’ve ever owned. Some of this software was available only on floppy disk. Floppy disk! All of which we still possess. There seems no use for such relics other than to add them to our similar collections, things like the cassettes and eight track tapes that lurk somewhere in the hall closet. Or maybe the four foot stack of albums in the bottom of the china hutch. Note that there is no device in our possession that will play any of these types of media.

One closet in our office is dedicated solely to pictures and paintings we will never hang. They are preserved quite perfectly in sealed boxes and big round tubes, stacked against the back wall of the closet where they’ve begun their own collection of dust.

Following family tradition, I have dutifully saved all my old, chipped (but still usable) Corelware on the slim chance that my daughter might set up housekeeping some day; my daughter, who is twenty six and has been living on her own now for several years. I have to wonder what she’s been eating off of all this time.

In the garage, packed away for that “just in case” moment you’ll find my husband’s leather working kit from high school. Once, about three years back, he actually pulled it down, dusted it off and made a leather money clip. Then he packed it all back up and it’s been there ever since.

I have my ski boots from twenty seven years ago although I’ve only skied once in that much time. They cower in the highest part of my walk-in closet next to my moon boots, ski gloves and mask. Keeping them company are my racket gloves and racket because once, when I was young and lithe, I was quite good at the sport and now I like to wax nostalgic on how it felt to be that way. I have every tee shirt I ever earned running the many 5 and 10 K’s I used to run. This in spite of the fact that I never (ever) wear tee shirts. I have jeans that fit me when I had a body like Twiggie, I have leg warmers. Leg warmers!

But I have to admit that sometimes this rat-packedness comes in handy. We got a new puppy a few months back. She came to us pretty small, weighing in at 4 lbs something. And utterly naked. So I rummaged through the collection of collars we’d saved from seventeen years of previous pets, collars that had outlived their owners, collars that had been outgrown. Imagine how happy I was to find a perfect fit in the later part of the collection! By keeping all those collars, I’d managed to save a whopping three bucks. It was a shining moment, indeed! One that validated the possession of all this other stuff. Because after all, you never know. You just never know.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I Got Nothing

Sometimes words pour forth from this head of mine. Like a mountain stream, they tumble and tumble over one another faster than the rest of me can keep up. They come to me in my sleep, haunt me in the shower, and interrupt me mid-speech. They wait for me to position myself such that I can bring them to life, to spring from my fingertips, joyful and alive! Other times they still come, a tad more laboriously, but they still come. There for the taking, they are, like ripe cherries hanging from a tree in front of my face, waiting to be plucked.

But today, I got nothing. It’s as if the very stillness I seek as I sit on my meditation cushion has found me instead. It’s seeped in through my ear holes, snuck in through my eye sockets and crept through the nasal passages up, up, up straight into the old noggin, settling there like some flaccid idea. It waited until I was focused elsewhere (or rather nowhere which is the goal of meditation) then crept in to replace the synapses that used to find a playground in these folds of dark grey matter. Today my mountain stream has dried up. It’s more like an arid wasteland in there with nary a breath of wind to stir up a thing worth sharing.

So that’s all I got to say today. Nothing. I got nothing.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

"Women's" Work

There I was, pushing the vacuum around and thinking how oddly familiar it felt. ‘Didn’t I just do this?’ I thought. And then I looked up at the bathroom mirrors, the smudged surfaces begging to be cleaned. ‘Didn’t I just do that too?’

What is it about housework anyway? It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, no sooner do you get to one end then you have to start all over again. I remembered a theory I used to have, back when I’d been immersed in Corporate America. It went something like this: if both spouses work then the domestic side of the equation should be shared equally. But if one stays home, then its only natural that he or she should become the domestic god or goddess - respectively. It seemed fair to me at the time in a simplistic, naive sort of way. And I must admit, on a physical level, the division of duties did seem right – he brings home the bacon, I cook it. Easy enough, right? But oh my god, it’s the same bacon day in and day out, week after week, year after year without a smidgen of mental stimulation in the pan, just a coagulated glob of leftover grease and the unfulfilling job of trying to dispose of it without clogging the drain. I pushed the vacuum back and forth over the same area I’d pushed it over a week earlier, listening to the sound of “un words” creeping into my head, words like unrewarding, unfulfilling, under stimulating, unappreciated (more on that later).

After the “unwords” came that Jagger song: “she goes running for the shelter of mother’s little helper.” It’s about how women of the past felt the need to self medicate just to get through the day. Any thinking person who’s done this sort of job for any length of time might be able to appreciate that. It’s why, whenever I get serious and want to really clean, I have to start at my laptop, downloading something educational or inspirational into my MP3 player so I won’t go brain dead pushing the dust rag around.

Thank God it wasn’t always like this for me. I’d begun my life in the workforce, never assuming I’d do anything but. I started as a receptionist in a medical lab, moved into the oil industry and eventually into office technology where I got a job in Information Technology supporting global applications. It was a good run of twenty seven years spent in an extremely rewarding, well paid career. It was only when I saw the opportunity to “retire” early that I said goodbye to the corporate world and decided to stay home with my son (then nine years old and needing me). I was glad to have the two comparisons. I’d worn the shoe on both feet and felt bad for women who’d never had that opportunity. I couldn’t even imagine a life so limited in scope that it included only domestic duties.

It took about fourteen minutes to realize the downside of the deal I’d traded myself into. Not only were my new tasks mentally numbing but they were hardly even recognized. Gone were the high profile assignments, the challenging roles, the exciting projects, traded in for work that was about as exciting as lint. I remember a while back when I decided I was just good and tired of it. I let the house go for two, maybe three weeks. Sure we had food to eat and clean clothes to wear but I didn’t bother with anything but dishes and laundry. I began to wonder how long it would take my guys (one son, one husband) to notice. After a while, it turned into sort of a game. I waited and waited until the furniture groaned under the weight of dust, until floors began to crunch and toilets started turning green. Finally I gave in and cleaned the pig sty that had become my home. And yet, it still received the same attention as the house that was not clean and I couldn’t help but wonder whether they’d noticed anything at all! But then I thought, maybe they did noticed . . . maybe they were afraid that if they said anything, they’d be invited to join in the domestic fun. And then I was troubled by another possibility. And a very disturbing one at that: if they had acknowledged the fact that housework had not been done, they’d be unwittingly acknowledging the fact that it needed to be done. And by doing so, they’d be giving housework some sort of value. And therein lies the rub: housework is not considered a value added job, not even by me (hence this rant). It’s truly a domestic dilemma, is it not?

But there’s another part of this whole thing that I’m not addressing – that’s the raising of the children. Now there's a noteworthy job that has lasting and global value! It requires more creativity than any career in engineering, it’s more taxing than an accounting job and more stressful than anything a postal worker has to face. It’s a job that comes with no training whatsoever and yet is the single most important role any adult could ask for. However, having said that, even that job becomes part time once the kids are at a certain age. So what’s a mom to do while the kids are off to school? Out on a date? At the mall with friends?

Why, she should vacuum, of course. Oh groan . . . where the hell is my MP3 player?

Friday, October 2, 2009

First Draft Writing

I listened to a talk once given by a successful novel writer. There was a key phrase he used, went something like this: "Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written." The gist of the discussion was to just sit down and do it: pound out the story and get it all down on paper. Then, after you’ve done that, go back through it again and again and again . . . And again if necessary.

I have done exactly that, but only with short story where the beginning and ending can be belted out in a single sitting. But never have I done it with a longer piece. In fact with my longer pieces, I tend to write a chapter or two that lead in a preconceived direction. Then I go back and edit, edit, edit until I feel good about that chunk of work. Only then do I go forward, following that process chapter by chapter until I am done. It seemed to work perfectly for the first book I wrote and so I began using the same process to write my second.

And yet, there’s something I just discovered about my writing. The book I’m writing now has a few complicated themes running along simultaneously, some subliminal and some conspicuous. And it plays around with time and space while mingling dissimilar cultures. In order to pull it all off, I’ll need to tie up any dangling ends and solve any problems I create for myself along the way. Because of that, just sitting down and writing willy-nilly seemed problematic. I kept wondering whether I’d end up writing myself into a corner, one I couldn’t back out of. So I took a day and wrote a complete, lengthy synopsis of the plot, the characters’ agendas, the complexity of the setting, etc., etc. “There,” I thought, “now I know all that I need to know. All I have to do is fill the characters with life and crack open the scenes.”

But the minute I started to do it, I felt stymied, as if the story no longer held any interest for me. I realized that, by blowing it all out like that, I’d spoiled the surprises for myself. As ridiculous as it sounds, I realized that in writing, I want to be both writer and reader, waiting in anticipation to see what the characters will do next. I want to be amazed and shocked as I turn the blank page and watch the words come stumbling or leaping onto the paper. I want the protagonist to find his or her own way without the writer holding a lantern at the end of the path. And I want the writer to let loose of the reins and allow the characters to have their heads.

It was somewhat of an epiphany and I realized that there are a number of “stops and starts” living here in my laptop, stories that had suffered a similar fate. I’d gotten excited about something and started in on it, all the while having a clear sight to the ending. But time after time, I’d lost interest, abandoning my poor protagonists to their unfinished fates. The more I thought about it, the more I recalled that author’s words: “Don’t get it Right, get it Written” and I wondered whether the process I’ve employed in the past simply doesn’t work the way I thought it would. Maybe I need to take that detailed synopsis I wrote and do what a friend suggested – “Print it out, Linda. And then rip it into tiny shreds and burn it. This will give your subconscious permission to run willy-nilly over the pages again.”

Well, she didn’t put it exactly that way, but I got her meaning. And I think tonight I'll have a little ritualistic bon fire.