Let's try this again

I like the idea of a blog. As someone who aspires to be a novelist, I should be writing all the time. In a way, I am. But the kind of writing I do in my teaching (lesson plans, explanations, classroom website, etc.) doesn't touch the same parts of my brain as my creative writing.

I like that part of my brain. I'd like to be in contact with it more often. It's a nice place, where unexpected connections pop up and fill me with a glow of epiphany. Like when I realized that Kirk and Sherry (protagonists in my novel--working title: His Other Mother) were dealing with many of the same issues that ended my first marriage. I had no idea, until I read a scene aloud to a group of writings I was spending a weekend with and was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness for Kirk and Sherry, the kind of sadness that is more personal than fictional. See, I don't need therapy--just some writing time!

Obviously, I have not, thus far, written much here. I'm hoping to change that. It's nearly Rosh Hashanah. A new school year has begun. This is the time of year that I feel the urge for new resolutions and self-improvement. So, here's the goal this year: write once a week. Here. About anything.

It's not like I've lacked ideas. I just haven't blocked out the time to do anything with them. I have always believed that the key to success in any endeavor is time invested: practice. So, if I want to get more out of my novel-writing time (a few hours every couple of weeks, assuming everyone in the house is healthy), I need to exercise that "creative writing" part of my brain, keep it strong and functioning.

I like me better when I've been writing. I bet other people do too.

So, let's try this again.

Family Life as Germ Warfare

I got strep.

This doesn't usually happen. Usually my children get sick, I nurse them, and then I get sick.

But this time, I started it. I picked it up randomly, at the grocery or the swimming pool or something. No one I know is sick, but I was the first to fall. Then, my older daughter got it. Now my husband has it. We're fighting to try and make sure the baby (age 3) doesn't get it.

I'd never realized before how germy family life is. Once I was recovered enough to think about it (which was right as my older daughter fell ill), I put on my combat gear and set to work.

I wiped every handle, knob, switch and button in the house with clorox wipes. Boy! There are a lot of those. I lysoled the couch. I washed all the bedding and towels on the sanitary cycle. I threw away anything in the fridge that had been eaten from (half finished chicken breast, leftover French fries, unfinished yogurt, etc.). I quarantined big sister in her bedroom, a floor away from the little one.

So, we've been trying to protect ourselves from each other. It's NUTS how many things that entails. We can't buy a smoothie and share it. We can't put the cucumbers in a communal bowl on the dinner table. We can't share a bowl of popcorn (hands in bowl, hands in mouth, hands in bowl, ewwww!) We can't kiss. A hundred times a day, someone starts to do something that would spread contagion and has to stop him or herself.

When we're all healthy, it's amazing what we all share unthinkingly. We all get loco-pops and Little Sister asks to taste mine. I let her. The girls take a bath together. They kiss Daddy in the same spot on his cheek. We pour Little Sister's unfinished stew back in the pot, which Mom and Dad eat as leftovers for lunch the next day. It's a little disgusting when I think about it too much. Maybe in this case, the unexamined life is better. Family life is gross. And that's not even bringing poop and snot into the discussion. EEEEWWWWW!

On Second Chances

When the universe is kind enough to grant you a second chance, you need to grasp it with both hands and squeeze. You need to appreciate it while it's there in front of you and never never never take it for granted.

This time of year, six years ago (amazing that it's already been that long), I thought my life had fallen apart. I was divorcing, moving, changing jobs, everything that comes with starting over. I was 32. Until about a month before this, I thought my long-suffering marriage was on an upswing. There was talk of a second child, a vacation, renovations to the house. But, in one clear moment of lucid honesty, it was over, as it should have been many times before.

For a few months, I lamented. Even at the time, I realized it wasn't the marriage I was grieving for. It was the other things I would be losing: a house I loved, a life in a wonderful small community, a job with great people, my opportunity for a second child, a VW Bug, my independence (temporarily), the ability to do anything at all without my oldest child in tow, my community theater group. There were a lot of things I loved about my life at that point, but none of them were my husband. Him, I really wasn't going to miss. About his absence, I felt relief.

So, since I don't do actual spring-cleaning, I'll do some soul spring-cleaning. I'll remind myself how very lucky I am, after hitting that bottom six years ago, to again have a home I love, in a lovely small town, a good job in a pleasant place with good colleagues, a second child, a sweet if kind of stupid dog, and the very best husband there is.

That last part, that's the balance. That's what I missing before. It's one of those things that, once you have, you can't understand how you lived without it so long. So, I'm keeping him, and encouraging him to keep me in return.

It's both wonderful and terrifying, having what you want. And I'm holding on tightly. And telling them all every day how lucky I feel to have them.

Point of View and Reading like a Writer

My writing group met this past Sunday. It's always so invigorating to go--to talk about wordsmithing with others struggling to make words do what they want, too.

This week, we got mired in Point of View. It turned out we have some pretty diverse opinions about what is and isn't "allowed" in point of view in a novel.

My novel, for example, is in multiple 3rd person point of view, changing which character we are close to chapter by chapter. However, in workshopping, I've found that there are times when I let that lapse and went into the wrong head during the wrong chapter. Some are okay with this; others are not.

Another writer in the group has a complete novel in first person. Another, in third person omniscient. Another is trying to alternate between first person and third person, wanting the best of both worlds.

As we discussed, we talked about examples and I realized that I don't read like a writer. When I read a novel I like, I should be able to article what I like about it, what it is that makes it work for me--techniques used, characters, sparkling dialogue, narrative humor . . .

So, now in February, I've found my new year's resolution: Read like a writer.

The Pleasures of Old Movies

This morning, my husband kindly took the Tater Tot with him on some errands and left me to watch something I picked on the TV (at least until the Tween wakes). So, I am watching The 39 Steps, an Alfred Hitchcock, on Netflix's Watch Instantly through our XBox 360. I'm rather enjoying that idea that I am using such up and coming technology to enjoy something from another era.

I'm pondering what it is that I so enjoy about movies that are so much older than I am. My favorite movies of all time are found under "classics" on Netflix: The Quiet Man, Bringing Up Baby, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Key Largo, Pillow Talk, The Thin Man, The Egg and I, Roman Holiday. (As soon as I click "Publish" I'll think of 10 more I should have listed).

It's not that I don't like more contemporary movies. I do. But, if you leave me alone for some "me time" I will undoubtedly choose a movie that is more contemporary for my grandmother than for myself. I do have cut-offs though. I don't generally like silent movies, or movies that were made when sound was too new and the soundtrack is hard to listen to, garbled or just badly recorded. I don't find much to revisit that's from the 70's.

But what is it about these films?

The storytelling was different then. The effects were less special, but the relationships were stronger. There's something striking about black and white, something that stays in mind's eye longer. The influence of radio was still there, making voice and sound into different instruments than they are now. I don't get attached to contemporary actors particularly, but have often watched an older movie just because it featured a "face" I admire: Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Cary Grant.

Maybe it's my resistance to things that are popular--probably beginning way back when I was a less than popular girl at my high school. Generally, if "everyone" likes it, I probably don't. I like my clothes to be different than everyone else's, my meals to be inventive and interesting, and my entertainment to be quirky and "different" too. I'm not a "follow the crowd" girl. I take a geek's pleasure in knowing about more obscure things.

Or maybe it's a golden age myth--a belief that things were better "back then," a nostalgia for times before my birth, a desire for a different vision of glamour or beauty. I like the beliefs that are evident in many of these films: that the good guys will win out in the end, that smart is better than born with advantages, that honest people will be believed and rewarded, that there is true love and the world cannot keep deserving lovers apart.

I guess I don't really know what exactly the appeal is for me. Just that there is "something" in these older movies that draws me and keeps me coming back. Something as indefinable as the star quality that made these faces great when they were living.

Buried in paper

"And the schoolyear starts, and she disappears." I hear this from my friends all the time.

Unfortunately, it's true. Once school starts, I have my two children to get to their various things and 150 of other people's children to take care of.

It's overwhelming and by this time of year, I am always exhausted and wondering why I thought teaching would be a good career choice.

So, the lack of digital me comes from the overabundance of the non-digital parts of my life. I get a break Wednesday-Friday--I'll try to write something interesting.

Love,
-S

Doctors Make You Sicker

I started my school year this year in the hospital. I wasn't broken. In fact, I wasn't even sick until the doctors got a hold of me.

It all started 5 years ago. I was having gallstones. I was new to the community where I was living and didn't have an established GP or anything, so I went to an Urgent Care and from there ended up with a referral for surgery. My laparoscopy removal of the gall bladder was a bomb. The doctor had to cut me open fully. My recovery was horrendous. I lost more than 30 pounds and was more than nine weeks before I could operate at any level that might be called normal. I had more pain and illness in the weeks following the surgery than I had from the gallstones.

So, there's the first doctors to cause me problems--quite literally, he left me sicker than he found me and it took additional doctors to cure me from his cure.

Flash ahead to about a year ago. I had to get an immunization. I don't even remember what. Just whatever was out of date. The nurse stuck herself with my needle, trying to stuff it into a sharps box that was already quite full. So, we both had to have blood work to make sure I hadn't given her AIDS or hepatitis or anything. No worries on those counts, but they did find that certain levels in my liver were weird. So, more testing, and eventual referral to a specialist who did, yep, you guessed it, more testing. This would be because the GP and the specialist didn't talk enough to get the right tests run before I got there. So, there's my second set of doctors to hate. Just flipping talk to each other and run *one* set of tests--I need my time and my blood more than you do.

Finally, nearly a year these blood tests, I am sent for additional testing--this time a liver biopsy (no, they don't think I have cancer, it's other less awful stuff). That night, I get *very* sick. In fact, I have a bacterial infection in my blood. I go to the emergency room, am kept all day with no real diagnosis, sent home, then called back, then incarcerated for four days while they fix an illness I wouldn't have had if they hadn't been trying to find out "what was wrong with me" when I was feeling perfectly healthy.

So, from here on out, I'm eating more apples. Doctors make me sick!