I’m at Word Whores today. Guess what I’m talking about.
In Pursuit of Trivia
//Tag: Kev
//Got It for a Song
//
I did lower body weights at the gym this morning.
Usually when I weight-lift, I don’t listen to music. The treadmill absolutely requires my aerobic track to keep me distracted. For weight-lifting, though, I’m counting and not fighting the certain despair that I’ll never catch my breath again.
Today though, Air Force Guy had the TV up really loud with awful news about Libya. Since I have a strict policy about not depressing myself with news about events I can’t affect, I jumped up from the adductor machine and grabbed the headphones.
Since I was mid-count, rather than searching out my weights playlist (why do I have one if I never use it? Hmm) I just clicked play. This one song that my long-time friend, Kev, sent me came on.
Because I could, I played that one song over and over. I love to do this. I can listen to the same song probably 50 times in a row. Something, I’ve discovered, the people around me don’t enjoy so much.
Go figure.
Its an emotional song that strikes me on many levels. As some songs do, this one makes me want to write a story about it. I’ve never actually written a story from a song, but I think I might this time. As I kept clicking the back button to hear it just one more time (there’s a way to put it on repeat, right? one day I should learn to maximize my iPod use), the story played out in my head, snippets of conversation. I could see the opening line, the penultimate scene.
It could be a great book.
Yesterday, I worked on two projects. If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’ve been musing over whether I can move two writing projects forward at the same time. I’m a monogamous gal by nature, mainly because I’m simply not inclined to cheat. The thing I’m in love with is fine by me. It occurs to me now that this is the same aspect of my character that likes to listen to the same song over and over and over. Apple pie for the rest of my life? Sure! Still, with writing, I’d like to get more going.
So, yesterday, I clocked off the Internet for my usual two hours. (Yes, I’m weak and cannot stop myself from clicking if it’s there to be clicked.) I wrote my 1K on the new novel, The Middle Princess. For the remaining 45 minutes, I worked on Sapphire revisions, from the editorial notes that came in this weekend.
And it worked!
Normally I’m not allowed to deviate from a current project, but since that experiment worked, I might try writing up a little of this morning’s story – just enough to keep it alive and kicking.
La Kev
//
Okay, I know that I promised the whole exercise clothes to writing clothes to work clothes expose today, but it occurred to me that I need pics of each stage. So I’ll do it tomorrow.
That seems suitably frivolous for a Friday anyway.
Instead, today I think I’ll do a little ode. An essay of mine once appeared in a literary magazine dedicated to odes, which I always thought was kind of a cool idea. While the first definition of ode is “a poem written to be sung,” the modern use has it as a “lyric, rhymed or unrhymed, addressed to some person or thing and characterized by lofty feeling and elaborate form.”
Since this is about my friend, Kev, maybe that’s not what I mean at all.
Hee hee hee.
Today is Kev’s birthday and it’s made me reflective. We’ve know each other now since I was 15 and dropped as a bewildered sophomore into trigonometry class with a bunch of juniors. Kev helped me with problem sets and charmed me with his charisma and humor. I fell in love with his soaring tenor in our high school stage productions as much as his sweet brown eyes.
Oh yeah, I pined after him.
He flirted with me. Okay, he flirted with pretty much ALL the girls. But the other ones he dated. I crushed on him until spring of my junior year, when I finally broke down and left a love letter on the windshield of his car – a Baha VW Bug he’d dubbed the Baha Humbug – inviting him to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
What can I say? I’m a traditionalist.
Maybe I had a way with words even then, because he bit and we started a love affair that lasted two years. It was consuming and wonderful and perfect and everything first love should be. Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I broke up with him. I still remember the pain of that, how I’d asked him to love me, then asked him to stop.
The thing is, we still love each other. That’s the best part.
I don’t regret my choice, because we’ve both found really wonderful life partners and our lives have moved in very different directions. And yet, after all this time, we’re still friends. We talk on Yahoo IM and know each other’s old jokes. We trade music and he keeps me up to date on the musical theater scene. There’s a deep-running affection between us. Sometimes I think his is more for the girl I was, but he also keeps a library shelf of everything I’ve ever published. He was among the first to encourage me to write, which was a gift beyond compare.
So, Happy Birthday Kevin! It will be interesting to see what the next 30 years brings.
P.S. If I forget who you are, will you remind me?
The Morning After
//
Stormy day yesterday. Now our rain catchments are all full and the birds singing crazy symphonies.
Last night Marcella IM’d me quite late to report that she’d gone from 87K to 91.6K that day and her new book is almost done, except for a few connecting scenes.
Her first book, Enemy Within, is coming out in November and she’s supposed to deliver the sequel, Enemy Games, to her agent today. So, I dutifully told her how terribly hot she is and what a triumphant blaze of glory this is to get her book done and how she can send it off to her agent and relax and party all weekend.
Marcella replied that she was far more likely to collapse in a cold, stinking pile of exhaustion.
Which is always the way of it, isn’t it?
I remember when my first lover, my high school boyfriend, Kev, and I first contrived to spend a night together.
(This is the time to stop reading if you have a low TMI threshold. And Mom – I’m not sure you know this story, but it’s been about 25 years so I figure the statute of limitations is up on this.)
My folks were out of town, so Kev came over to spend the night. I had many things I wanted to try at that tender age of exploration, most of them romantic. So we spread blankets in front of the fireplace in the living room (which required shifting furniture). I’d read somewhere that safflower oil made the best massage oil. Kev had never had alcohol, so we drank a bottle of champagne. (Why, yes, I am an evil corrupting influence.)
We had a lovely, giddy, very hot and sexy time with each other.
We romantically fell asleep in each other’s arms. And awoke somewhere around two in the morning, cold, sticky and miserable with pounding headaches.
It was a good welcome-to-adulthood lesson. For every blaze of glory, there’s an ashy pile of debris to clean up afterwards. It became a running joke with me and Kev, especially if anyone mentioned romantic fireplace settings or massage oil. Our cautionary tale.
It’s the way of the world, that for every sexy evening, there’s a morning after. For every great artistic push, there’s a time of whimpering recovery.
At least now we know to plan for it.
Home Is Where They Have to Take You In — If They Notice You’re There
//When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
Reaching a goal, realizing a dream is like marking the edge of a circle. When you reach that moment where you check off the goal, it takes you back to the moment when you first conceived of it.
Yesterday I read and signed at Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. And it took me back. Back to visiting the Tattered Cover when it was one room at the bottom of the stairs in Cherry Creek. I went as a young girl with my mother. She loved it because she could describe a book without knowing the exact author or title and they could figure out which one she meant. I gazed around at the forest green carpets, wooden shelves and all the radiant books. Framed and signed photographs on the walls showed the authors who had visited. I wanted to be one of them.
As a college student visiting home, I bought a copy of Tao Te Ching there, a copy I still have. When they moved into the Neusteters building, the bookstore replaced the racks of dresses where I’d picked out my prom dress and my mom and aunt had shopped for most of their lives. Now Tattered Cover filled three stories, plus a bargain basement and a fourth floor restaurant. No trip to Denver was completed without a visit and I frequently left with armloads of books. Now the green carpets circled up the stairs and the author photos trailed alongside.
When my first book came out, what I wanted most was an event at Tattered Cover. But no one would ever answer me or my events coordinator. I even sent a list of 200 people who were likely to come to my hometown gig. But no. Wordsworth Books in Boston hosted me; Elliot Bay Books in Seattle offered me a gig. The bookstore of my youth did not. I knew them, but they did not know me.
Now the Cherry Creek location, too, is gone, and our reading yesterday was at one of the newer locations, in Lo Do (lower downtown). They have a great event space and the green carpets and wood railings on the stairs look the same. Our event for Going Green was sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Land Library, who runs a monthly reading event at the store. Jeff Lee, the director of the library, was a gracious and charming host. Laura Pritchett, the editor, was lively and a terrific master of ceremonies. My co-contributors were fascinating and good company.
It was a fun afternoon.
But, aside from asking the harried woman at the counter — who first informed me her register was closed — where I should go for the reading, I never talked to anyone from the store. I’d brought a few copies of my book, so I could ask if they carried it, wanted stock signed, needed my copies. I never got the chance. Okay, I didn’t try any harder than that.
I suppose the circle is closed now. I gave that little girl I was something of what she wanted. Never mind that the bookstore never knew it.
Cuspers!
//I knew there was a word for us!
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I thought I belonged in a group that was post-Boomer and pre-Xer. (I also left out the WWII generation –oops. Apparently not the greatest to me…) I IM’d Kev, who’s always online when I’m composing my blog, but he quoted Wikipedia (“it could be true”) with the standard saw that Boomers were born 1946-1964 and Generation X is 1964-1984. Kev was my high school sweetheart and loyal cohort all these years. But I was sure I’d read something else that gave more insight.
And here it is. This article, written by Jocelyn Noveck, was picked up extensively by papers on the AP service. I randomly picked this posting of it. Besides, how often do YOU read the Texarkana Gazette? Not often, I’m thinking.
Cuspers. I feel like this is so us. Me and President Obama. He was born in ’61 and I was born in ’66. They call us practical idealists — something that resonates with me. In an essay I wrote ten years ago I said:
We grew up in a world already poisoned, species irrevocably lost. To us, to work for the environment means knowing how to keep things from getting worse, and trying to clean up what’s been sullied. We’ve been accused of being a cynical generation, and perhaps that’s accurate. People like Sean and me, we’re not the impassioned knights of the environment. This is our job — one we can believe in, invest in — not a crusade.
I feel so validated now.
I popped this article off to my Boomer mother as soon as I read it. Of course, she was frivolously off touring Egypt at the time, so I had to wait for her indignation. She picked Obama way back when Hillary was still queen of the campaign. In my practical idealist way, I thought Obama couldn’t win. I’m thrilled I was wrong. But if one of us gets to claim Obama as “her president,” it’s my mom, by right of precedence.
All of this parsing means little. How do you draw timelines on generations of people, after all? If we all had babies at the same time, that would be one thing. By the Gen X definition, I’m in the same generation as my stepson and stepdaughter — granted I mucked things up by not actually giving birth to them. Though I could have, if I’d been a teenage mom. Blended families, though, blur these lines as well.
I recognize myself as a Cusper though. My website description, written back in 2002 says this:
My stats make me a fence-sitter: Post-Baby-Boomer, Pre-Generation-X. I saw the first episode of Sesame Street when I was four, but live in a house without television. I grew up in a city in the West that is no longer considered part of the real West.
In college I participated in a pysch experiment where we had to take a personality test: I came out exactly betwen Type A and Type B. I was born on the Leo/Virgo cusp. My friend, who’s a brilliant writer and exactly my age, shy of a few weeks, complained that she received a rejection from and editor who suggested that she uses too many qualifiers. (Here’s a great example list: very, quite, rather, somewhat, more, most, less, least, too, so, just, enough, indeed, still, almost, fairly, really, pretty, even, a bit, a little, a (whole) lot, a good deal, a great deal, kind of, sort of.)
Do you see what I see? That’s right. Cusper words. Indeed, we’re all about the qualified grey area.
Cool Girls
//This girl I knew in high school sent out a Facebook message asking for inspiration. I don’t know why. I’m not sure I need to. We’ve added each other as “friends,” but haven’t taken the time to really reconnect. I gather from her posts and open conversations that she has two young children who take up a lot of her time. She’s out in DC now, far from our Colorado home. I thought about what kind of inspiration to offer, which of my favorite quotes to send her, but all that came to mind were memories of her, back in the day.
Kathy was a friend of a friend, really. Much more Kristy’s friend than mine. But Kathy was so funky and cool that I glommed on, tagging along with them like a third wheel little sister. I was content that they let me. Kathy had this way of being unconsciously artsy. She danced this kind of modified Charleston I’m sure she made up, that involved kicking up her legs and swinging her arms to meet them. Doing this, she would spin in a wild wheel around the dance floor to the tail end of British punk we still milked in the early 80s. It was a dance of full-on joy in the music, a dance I ruthlessly ripped off when I went to college, where no one would know I had stolen it. It served me well for years. And I always remembered Kathy, her flame-red hair, her full immersion in life, when I danced.
Kathy lived in a funky house, too, off Parker Road in the Denver suburbs. The city was still spreading out to our area back then. The highway leading out to the town of Parker was becoming a road, with stoplights and intersections linking to housing developments. But Kathy lived in a house that had been built according to no five-model plan, but sat among fields in a curve of the road where it passed the Highline Canal. I went to a Halloween party at her house and went walking in the frosty stubbled fields with my first love. In my mind, I always gave Kathy credit for that, too, that she held the party that let me be with him, that let me dress up in a romantic costume, all the better to catch his eye.
I remember another of Kathy’s parties. Maybe I went on a trip back from college and her family had moved. All I really recall is Kathy’s certainty that a hot band that was playing locally would come to the party at some point. We hung out for hours, Kathy so certain that they would arrive, as they’d promised. Kristy was her emotional counterpoint, sure that the evening would end in disappointment. I remember Kathy crying, the way the heart-broken do. The way that only those who completely give their hearts and hopes can.
Her picture tells me she hasn’t changed. This is probably illusion. Just because she has the same wild red hair, and the funky cat’s eye glasses that proclaim her a suicide-girl under the skin, doesn’t mean that she has the same joy in life that she did at 17. But she holds a camera in her hands, and the sly smile is the same. She’s also posted some amazing art on the ‘net. Perhaps with a darker edge than I might have seen in high school. It’s an edge I like. I’m really not supposed to be buying art right now, but I might have to.
Then I’d get to tell people the artist is my friend and I can still be a little cool, by association.
Muse-Baiting
//That’s what Kev calls it. I noted it down in my list of ideas to write about just like that, so now I forget the specific context. But his meaning is clear: instead of angelically waiting for the muse to descend and inspire — perhaps via a delightful bit of meditation or self-flagellating fasting — you set out bait, to lure it in. In this scenario the muse is a grizzly bear and the bait something suitably rank, perhaps a rotting old emotional wound or a pungent idea best not aired in polite company. It works to extend the analogy. Grizzly bears are magnificent animals, glorious and terrifying. You’d like to get close enough to see one, but drawing that near can leave you ravaged or dead.
I like this idea of the muse. More of an avenging angel or tricky demon, than the sprightly Olivia Newton-John roller girl. The artist who calls in the muse should be on her guard, ready for the swipe to the gut she didn’t see coming. The artist who baits the muse… well, be careful what you wish for.
Swiftly Flow the Days
//Nineteen years ago yesterday, my high school sweetheart got married. No, not to me, though I was there. It seems like all of us were there – a million years ago and just yesterday. We came together from our post-high school mini-diaspora, convening on a cruise ship leaving Miami. Three of us delayed by snow in Denver — a blizzard much like today’s — barely made it. We were so relieved that we beelined for the bar on the top deck and hit the frou-frou drinks, wondering where everyone else was. Turns out everyone else was getting the safety demonstration. We three were forever after designated the unicorns, destined for extinction, should the boat go down.
Kevin and Linda were the first among our group to marry. The first to have a baby — who’s now a senior in high school herself, planning to launch out to the east coast come fall, ivy league schools willing.
Nothing about this is new. The world turns, times change. Turn around and you’re four, turn around and you’re grown. Sunrise, sunset, seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers. So many songs about it. The last from Fiddler on the Roof, which we staged in high school, Kev playing Tevye. Now Gwen Stefani sings “If I Were a Rich Girl,” in a ragga remix.
There are rumors of a reunion tour for us: a cruise next January to celebrate 20 years. Unless the ivy league schools come through with acceptances only and no scholarships. And who knows who would make it? Our diaspora is entrenched now, our lives have traveled so far down the diverging pathways that we haven’t communicated in years.
But, hey, the unicorns made it.
(Happy anniversary, Kev & Linda)