Resolutions & Premonitions

I'd planned for my New Year's resolution to clean the litter box everyday, but that one is right out. A sadness that is magnified by crumpled fleeces mistaken for slumbering forms and the little house sounds that were her subtle comings and goings has all but replaced the crippling grief of the first few days. M and I have little wakes before bed and over coffee and in the car, remembering what we loved best - everything but her every-door-must-be-an-open-door policy - and what we miss the most - everything else. I'm resolving instead to make the very best of what remains, the love and comfort of friends. I am often and regrettably guilty of shutting myself up in the house, what social outings I do indulge most often including dinners at home and knitting companionably while watching Doctor Who. Among about a hundred other things, I could be a better friend, and more, I would like to be. I should see someone besides workmates and my husband at least once a week - their unrivaled excellence not withstanding - and the laundry and my writing won't suffer for it.

Besides, if I'd like to start querying in the spring, I'll want at least twelve shoulders to cry on.

Cancer, More Than a Crab

When the vet lifted the hackles on my cat and we watched together as they retracted slowly back to her frame, I didn't need him to tell me that this was a sure sign of dehydration. I remember when my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, when she refused to eat and when in the hospital finally, too weak to feed herself, the nurses didn't seem too keen on the act, either. But what did I know. I was fifteen, and couldn't see much through my tears. He used words like 'critical' to describe her condition and when I finally cut through his clinical attempts to calm me with a request to have my cat back, the vet patted my shoulder like he might lay his large, soft hand on the head of an obedient dog. Good girl. Stay.

I remember the last proper summer I spent with my grandmother, lying on the floor of her air conditioned room in my aunt's house, reading 1984 while she napped in the middle of the day. She'd wake up and I'd have a Cup of Ramen and we'd watch a baseball game or Silk Stockings. I don't remember now if she ate meals with me, only that when she had a snack, it was something soft so she wouldn't have to put her teeth in: fig newtons or cheese doodles.

Maybe the holidays are to blame for my ignorance but it seems to me I've only in the last two weeks not had to fill my cat's food bowl as often, only in the last two weeks has she lost interest in chasing ponytail holders or yowling her demands while dinner is being cooked. I can feel the whole of her spine down to her backbone, two points like saddle horns. She was always skinny.

Grandma, too. I didn't think women in the thirties and the forties punished themselves enough to suffer from anorexia, nor would I ever have imagined that a woman in her sixties would continue to do so. I liked to look at photographs of her as a young woman, one in particular with high-waisted shorts and a gingham top tied just above her waist. Slim even as an older woman, I own some of her clothing, but I'd never be able to wear it.

I think I never knew her, really, and I don't know now what's wrong with my cat. I fed her bits of ham all the same, and I ate what she didn't.

Hipsters Shouldn't Be Allowed to Go to the Movies

I'm guilty of loads of things, and one of the many of which I am acutely aware is thinking about myself in terms of the things that I am attracted to.  There's no shame in finding friends or lovers who listen to the same bands as you do, or read the same books, or prefer their coffee made in a press versus the greasy sludge pumped from the Bunn commercial coffee maker at the corner Speedway, but there is something of the regrettable hipster in giving oneself gold stars over your vinyl collection. Not that hipsters give themselves - or each other, for that matter - gold stars. But if they did. My point is illustrated thusly: M and I, after much deliberation, saw a midnight showing of Tron last week, and while I'm far from regretting the opportunity to ogle Sam Flynn and covet a light cycle of my very own, we rarely leave such gatherings of geeks unscathed. This time, as I'm waiting for the show to start and checking Facebook on my snail of an Android, a young man leans over his date in the seat next to the empty one I've saved for M and asks, "Do you have Google on your phone?" I replied that yes, I did, but it was extremely slow.  If there was something he wanted me to look up before the film started, he should've asked an hour ago.

But as it turns out, it wasn't about actually needing the information. It was about making sure that I knew and everyone within hearing radius knew something truly special about him.

"I just want to show her," he gestures to the pitiable female in the seat beside him, "a picture of Daft Punk. I could care less about Tron, really. I'm here because of Daft Punk."

What I wanted to say was something along the lines of Like-I-Give-A-Fuck, but I was spared by a fella sitting in front of me who had an iPhone 4 and thus, a real connection to the World Wide Web.

He didn't stop there, of course, and when M settled down we both had a nice laugh about him when he went on to assume loudly to his girlfriend - for her sake, I hope not - that he didn't think anyone else in the theatre even knew who Daft Punk were. I kept waiting for him to use the word "plebians," but was sadly let down. The things is, we were both biting our tongues because we did and do like Daft Punk, but to say as much would be to align ourselves with this silly prick. To not say anything was, conversely, to let him number us among the drooling masses. Who isn't, though, for a kid like that? And why did I care?

It's one thing to pat yourself on the back, I guess. It's another to verbally grope yourself in public.

Get Lost

My husband and I , well behind the curve of your average primetime television viewer, only recently watched the conclusion of Lost, and while I have a great deal more to say about it than this, all I want to write about is my abruptly realized fear of dying. The thing most likely to get the tears flowing from me is fictional lovers parted, by death or otherwise. I missed a question on a test in college for having thrown Cold Mountain across the room but a few pages from the end, and I never watch the ending of Titanic or Moulin Rouge. Once is enough. Just knowing that they end the way they do is enough to set me sulking for the rest of whatever prospective day I've decided to torture myself.

It isn't that I don't believe in something after death, it's that I can't name it or describe it and I don't have the faith to follow those who claim that they can. Fragile, human doubt about what comes after is as real to me as the notion that these feelings must mean there's something more. I want to live with as much heart as possible because even if there's nothing once it stops beating, I won't know until it's too late to have done or said or dreamed. I don't want to make excuses - even though I do - because I know I have more to fear in regretting what I haven't done than anything I have or would.

It's just a television show, but what I wanted they couldn't show me. Life seems hard and little and mean, but at least I know what to expect.

Home is Where the Heart Is, Unless You Haven't Got One

I work near one of the more affluent shopping districts in Cincinnati - in my budgeted opinion - and while I very rarely entertain the thought of actually spending money there - I usually end up in tears sitting in my car outside of Anthropologie, feeling chubby and poor - I do pass through on my way to the credit union. Today I'm stopped at a light with ten crisp twenties in my purse intended to pay off Christmas purchases on my credit card, and through the slop of flurries I see a young woman holding a sign outside of the gas station on the corner.

Single mother. Homeless. Hungry.

I so rarely have cash, and my credit card bill is so very due, that considering giving her a twenty is out of the cold-hearted question. But I have to go the bank inside of the grocery store so I think, I'll buy her some warm soup and bread and fruit. Before I reach the grocery, however, I see another woman with another sign, visibly shivering with her salmon pink fleece pulled up to her nose. I want to buy her lunch, too, and I do, filling sixteen ounce containers with beef vegetable soup and placing them in my basket along with two-for-three sourdough bread loaves, two big fuji apples and navel oranges. I want to tell the gentleman ringing The Salvation Army bell in the lobby of the grocery that he can't make me feel guilty for having deposited my cash in the bank, but of course, I feel guilty anyway.

My hysteria began when I find that the woman outside of the grocery store has been joined by a gentleman, and I don't have enough lunch for him because I have to return to the woman a mile away. I apologize and she blesses me all of the same when she takes the bag, and I hope they shared. I hope they liked beef vegetable and I wasn't sure if they would like apples or oranges or if they really wouldn't have rather had the twenty.

Around the corner from the first homeless woman I am stopped at yet another light to witness a man unfolding a sign of his own, and him I have to pass. I've slipped uncertainly into a place where I can't even be sure what I'm doing is doing anything at all, and when the first woman thanks me before depositing the plastic sack of hot lunch at her feet and faces the street once more, all I can think is, her soup is going to get cold.

When I return to the parking lot at work and call my husband in tears, I remember going on a picnic with my family when I was a kid and my mom insisting that my dad pull over the car when we passed a father and son begging on the side of a rural street. She gave the boy a bag of Doritos and some of our picnic lunch besides, and she was crying even after we'd driven away. I didn't understand. At eight, I felt good about what we'd done. At twenty-eight, I know that tomorrow is just another day to be a single mother, homeless, and hungry.

The Prince and the Snail

How about a fairy story? Excerpted from the novel I'm revising, whose protagonist is a storyteller. Massoud was the son of the king and a prince, but he could not have been less the sort of son his family wanted. While he was as happy fighting and riding as other boys his age, he did not go anywhere without a little snail that had been his companion since he toddled on two legs. When he took meals, the creature squatted beside his plate. During his lessons, the snail perched on his shoulder. When sparring, Massoud put the snail inside a little case he had made to protect her and keep her close, hanging around his neck.

What neither Massoud nor his parents knew was that the snail was not a snail at all but the goddess Alyona, who is known to prefer an animal shape to any other and is found more often in the company of mortals than others of her kind. Alyona delighted in mortals, and so thoroughly in Massoud that in his eighteenth year she decided that she would marry him.

Alyona knew the hearts of mortals well, however, and did not think that Massoud would take well to the ruse that had been her shape as long as she had known him. One night, while he was asleep, she slithered near his ear and whispered that he must take her as a snail for his bride. When he had done so, she would be transformed to a beautiful woman.

Massoud met with great resistance from his family, who claimed they would forsake him if he insisted upon such a marriage. His brothers would not speak to him and everyone in the court began to whisper that their prince had been driven mad. Still, Massoud would marry his companion and had two rings fashioned from fine metals, one for himself and one for his snail bride.

No one in the kingdom would perform the ceremony, so Massoud placed Alyona in the little case around his neck and traveled to the next kingdom, and when denied there, the next and the next until he came to a land so far away that no one had before heard his name or would even have known to worship the creature he carried. Married at last, Massoud slipped the ring around Alyona's shell, though once he had done so she was unable to transform to a shape that would please him, bound by the ceremony and his love.

Alyona had not known her man as well as she imagined, for he did not want her to change. Massoud settled quietly in the village where they were married, making a small and honest living and whispering his secrets to her as he had always done. For thirty years they lived this way; the whole of Massoud’s life they shared. As he lay upon his deathbed Alyona slithered to his ear and whispered the truth of what she was. Massoud replied that he had always known, but he could love her as an equal only when she occupied such a form, and so he had done and did not regret it.

When he died, Alyona was freed from her snail form and brought his body to her sister, Dsimah, whose province is sowing and harvesting and who is known to bring life to any soil, no matter how infertile. Alyona begged Dsimah to bring life to Massoud again, for if any god could do so, it would be she.

Dsimah could not, however, do what Alyona asked. From Massoud’s body she grew a great, flowering tree, and when Alyona swallowed a fruit from the tree, she bore a child that was cradled in its roots and raised dancing beneath its heavy boughs. So Alyona and her daughter, Massoud’s daughter, can be found still, sheltered beneath her husband’s arms.

Black & Blue Friday

The day after Thanksgiving is the one day each year when my usual temper is all but absent for the thrill of people-watching, deal-grabbing, and account-draining activities. The woman who loosed her cart upon me in Walmart? I'm sure it was full of toys for orphans. The patrons who scoffed at the lines in Target? Starry-eyed amateurs. Tomorrow they'll be bitches all, but today I've acquired Dutch ovens and all three seasons of The Big Bang Theory on DVD and stories, besides. I have a theory for why, when I rarely wish to bust down any doors - or, as aforementioned, faces - I love to shop on Black Friday. When I was a kid my parents used to cart my brother and I to the flea market on Sundays in the summertime to buy and sell, though the latter required early and absurd hours to get a whole family together and into my dad's work truck. Mom would bundle us into shorts and t-shirts and then sweats and jackets, and there was something absolutely magical about the drive and the market in the wee hours, the prospect of spending my allowance on pogs or selling enough of my unwanted plastic costume jewelry to buy someone else's unwanted plastic costume jewelry. I spotted a rabbit once in the early morning mist and descending into the Ferguson flea market - which used to be a drive-in and is now, ironically, the site of a Walmart - was a bit like tumbling down some sort of second-hand rabbit hole.

My brother and I would sit behind the table with our stuff, eating chocolate donuts out of little packages and drinking milk from paper cartons and fairly bouncing out of our plastic lawn chairs for the opportunity to look and poke and covet everything. Shopping was disorderly and it was social. Contemporary flea markets, like department stores, are just too damn clean and there's too much mass-produced junk instead of what somebody raked out of their basement or attic and just wants gone for a dollar or best offer. Digging through a bin of half-nude Barbie dolls or Guess jeans and coolats was the closest I had ever come to treasure hunting, and I'm still of a mind that finding that one perfect, dirt-cheap thing is a purchase pre-ordained. First-world problem? For sure and trust me, I'll be ashamed tomorrow.

Maybe I'm nursing a coffee instead of whole milk, but it feels the same now as it did then. I love getting up early and getting lost in it. There's nothing classy about shopping on Black Friday, and I don't want there to be. I mean, I was raised in a sophisticated kind of style, and celebrating that once a year is not such a sorry thing.

I'm a Player (Character)

When it comes to nerd cred, I've got it in boffer spades. I do live action role-playing, or LARP, and have for years. I make my own costumes or thrift them, spend hours watching Farscape and making spell packets, and when I can afford it, travel as many as four hours away for a weekend of pretending to be someone who does magic, or sword fights, or creates alchemical poisons, or writes songs about heroic battles between good and evil. Or, as we like to call them, PCs, or player characters, and NPCs, non-player characters.

Some of the most creative, intelligent, and generous people I know I've befriended through LARP, and some of the people who make me want to shove a latex dagger in my ear I've met there, too. I've never questioned more than I did this past weekend why it is we do what we do when, in full makeup myself and my friends in makeup and prosthetic ears and noses - not to mention extensive costumes, armor, and weapons - I looked around and knew that we weren't fox-people or rabbit-people or dog-people, but moms and dads, successful professionals, people with degrees and jobs and a whole lot more laundry to do on Sunday than we would have if we'd stayed home watching television like normal people. So, why do we do it? What is it about us that makes us want to play pretend, despite it being generally socially perceived as unacceptable past the age of nine or ten?

I'm happy. In fact, I think my life is pretty bitchin'. So I don't play because I'm unhappy, or because I'm trying to escape, but because what I want out of fantasy I just can't have in real life. For the many staggering, poignant, gorgeous moments in my real adult life there are ten times over as many days where I do the laundry, pay the bills, clean the litter box. There are no litter boxes in LARP. I take thirty-six hours of my life and live it as fast and as epic as possible, and it doesn't matter what's happening on Monday at the office. There's a ruined temple in the forest where dark rituals are bringing the dead back to life, and a murderous horde massing in the Orcan lowlands, songs to be sung whose words contain the power to mend flesh and inspire courage, laws of physics to break. Why watch or read or daydream when I can play instead?

Stitches are Bitches

I feel like  someone took a file to my thumbs, which is I guess what it feels like to have jammed twenty grommets into holes in fabric that are necessarily smaller than they are. After my third sewing marathon this week - it's like a 5K, only you don't actually go anywhere, you just totally kill on a presser foot - I still haven't finished the costume whose pieces I cut out months ago. I don't actually enjoy sewing, I just like to say that I've sewn things and to wear them, and if I haven't shed tears or blood or both it's possible I've been kidnapped by body snatchers and am actually a shear-toting, zipper-setting pod-person. Friends take projects away from me when I start to look murderous, and pin boxes are carefully and discreetly closed. They help me to finish the things I start, though, which is undeserved but nice. I learned how to sew and forgot and learned how again in a years-long fit of recovering lost domestic arts, and outfitting on a budget the fictional characters I sometimes like to play on weekends. When I was in junior high we had to take home economics and shop - which I'm sure had a real name, but I can't remember now what it was. I hated both classes, though my partner and I in home economics were lauded for our clean, dry sinks after making pizza crackers and biscuits and whatever the hell else only took forty minutes to prep, cook, and clean up. The half of the term that we didn't spend cooking we spent sewing, making gym bags and pillows. I'm sure there's still a lumpy square, emblazoned with a glittery silver cat and my name in puffy paint, shoved in a box in my basement. I suppose I felt the same way about that pillow that I do now about the skirts and bodices and dresses I've wrestled from my Singer: they sure are bitchin', but they sure were a bitch.

Zombies Eat Babies Eat Baby Trees

I got a little drunk last night and admitted to my husband that what I really want to do with my life is work on my writing and spend my days playing and teaching and being terrorized by the children we don't have yet. I remember his smile now with relief, and hope that I didn't through a film of inebriation channel terror into tolerance. I don't know when I became the sort of person who wants to serve baby trees instead of broccoli, and while I'm not sure I have the patience to bake bread with a preschooler, I don't think that will stop me from trying. I imagined myself as any number of things when I was growing up, but a mother was never one of them. I liked to play college with my Barbies - admittedly, they spent most of their time hanging out in the dormitories I built for them, and not so much in class - and while the collegiate adventures of Courtney and Skipper were not even in the smallest way realized when I was an undergraduate, it was still a sort of inevitable dream for me, acquiring a degree. That I'd claw the eyes out of anyone who tried to keep me from getting my education, including my own when laziness or poorly distributed schedules threatened, didn't make it any less of a dream. It was what I'd always wanted.

When I graduated, though, I remember one of the things I thought was that at least then if I were to become accidentally pregnant, my life wouldn't be over. I feared more having a child and having to give up the pursuit of my degree more than anything, including the zombie apocalypse. That I'm not afraid anymore, or at least not as afraid,  would've seemed to me as unlikely as needing to take out the stairs in Collins Hall and defend myself with my acoustic guitar (I hadn't read Max Brooks yet). But I was, and now I'm not (as much).

My husband's response to me was, following the smile, that I'd start writing childrens' books if we had children, to which I informed him that I can't indulge in page upon page of sexual tension in childrens' books or carve out hearts or curse, so.