It Doesn't Take Much

There's something about having kids, the way days and weeks and months meld into one long strip of routine—feeding and bathing and diapers and children's needs and children's feelings and children's safety, the continuous HVAC roar of lion protector sense always tuned into exhausting overdrive—that sometimes operating just a millimeter outside the whole child-oriented universe blows your mind.

A few years ago, my partner took our kids to Florida with her family, and I sat in a meeting, thrilled to be free for a couple days. I noticed a pay phone against a wall. Look at that pay phone, I thought. It's so metallic, and three dimensional, and tactile. It's got corners, some are rounded some are not, some corners are rounded more than others. There is a thick faux wood frame around it, and a rubber cord, and a plastic receiver with bits of food and spit stuck in the speaker holes. It's so there.

There was a bell on the table to call the meeting to order, also so very tactile and ding-y, dying plants and a coffee maker, papers in varying degrees of yellowedness tacked to a bulletin board, dust bunnies on the carpet, folding chairs with people sitting in them, breathing and sipping water from plastic bottles. It all seemed trippy, like I was noticing life for the first time in years.

On Friday my 6-year-old attended a birthday party that ended at 10pm. That's definitely a millimeter outside the child-oriented universe: a children's party that ends at 10pm! Quelle European. Driving our beloved mini-van through the oily late night humidity, the streets shiny with rain, blasting Viva La Vida through the open car windows as if I were going out for the evening rather than picking my daughter and her friend from the birthday party, everything felt so different.

We dropped her friend at her house on an empty and incredibly brightly lit street. Street lamp light reflected against the wet air, creating a diffuse glare under which cicadas raged, hurting my ears. We jumped over huge puddles to get to the friend's front porch, and there we turned her over to her mother in what seemed the middle of the night, but was only 10:15. Back in the car, my daughter and I both spaced out to Because The Night, and when we arrived home, she sang pull me close, try and understand as she climbed out of the car. Turn the clock back only two hours, to 8:15, and it would have been just another humdrum day in the life of small children. Instead, it was so trippy.

Happy Friday, Everyone

Dear Fellow Drivers,

At an intersection with no stop sign or stop light, you are not required to come to a complete stop before turning.

Love,

Mary

Dear Publishers,

When I buy a book that has been made into a movie, I don't want to see the movie actors on the book cover.

Best Regards,

Mary

Vacation!

I’d forgotten the joy of the Laundromat: watching your clothes spin around in the sudsy gray water, knowing unequivocally that all the pee your son soaked his PJs and blankets in during his very prolific overnight peeing activity is being enveloped in and disappeared by soapy suds that will be whisked away and replaced with clean, fresh water. It’s nice also to wash four loads at the same time. And, it reminds me of college when life was simpler and I was thinner.

Plus the Laundromat WI-FI is much better than our motel WI-FI, which seems to operate only for 2-minute intervals and at the speed of a fart. Not that I need to be on the Internet on vacation, but it is nice to have the choice. After pushing coin after coin into machines with heavy levers that take a good solid push to operate and make satisfying chunk-chunk sounds, I’m sitting in front of the Laundromat in a plastic mustard yellow chair while a woman next to me tells someone on the other end of her cell phone: “The only thing that stays the same is change.”

It’s pretty great.

Random Thoughts

I’ve been looking at women’s hair lately, and my unscientific estimation is over 85% of women have some coloring product in their hair, and less than 5% of men do. Who wins this war of the perfect colored hair? Men, of course. The women’s hair is largely frizzed, fried, two and three toned, roots growing in, sometimes the color and consistency of a brillo pad spray painted yellow. The men? Their hair looks great.

My aunt told me my gray needed covering up. She offered to do the deed herself, so necessary was the color. She used the terms brutal honesty and hair intervention. We autumns gray horribly, she told me. I like my gray. After a life of mouse brown, the gray finally provides character.

On a related note, I’m trying to read Middlemarch, apparently everybody’s who’s intelligent favorite book. 800 pages! Luckily the introduction is 80 pages, so that pulls it down to 720. The first line of Book I. (of how many, I don’t dare count) did grab me:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

I like those types of observations, timeless, just as easily said yesterday.

Miss Brooke had that kind of hair which seems to be thrown into relief by bad color.

Ode to Light Fixtures

This was the light fixture in our dining room as of a week ago. We bought it on sale shortly after moving into our house. It was crazy cheap, marked down to $12 or so from about $60. There's a rule of shopping that if you like something at full price, you love it and must absolutely have it when it is marked down 75%. So we bought it. No aspersions on fixture, it is lovely, but as you can see, a bit too small for the large space, only a single bulb and the heavy black cord overwhelms the small lamp.

Still, this fixture would have remained in our dining room until time eternal had we not visited my partner's cousin's new house and spotted this bad boy hanging in her dining room.

"I love your light fixture," I said.
"I hate it," she said.
"How can you hate it?"
"It's ugly, and I've ordered a new one."
"What are you doing with this one?"
"Throwing it in the trash as soon as possible."
"Can we have it?"
"Why would you want that hideous thing?"
And that's how we wound up with this lovely fixture in our dining room. Four bulbs! We can see what we're eating for dinner!

In anticipation of our new light fixture, Sarah went on a Divine Design bender and decided to change our overall downstairs color palette from orange and brown...

...to blue and brown:

Fresh, no? The color transformation took place in throw pillows and afghans. Those curtains behind the couch were replaced with the curtain draped over the couch. Oh, and not shown, we switched the living room rug (reddish) and the play room rug (blue-ish). Cheap and easy.

As a side note, see how cute squirrels are in the abstract?



And another side note, the original fixture did not get thrown in the trash. It now illuminates a dark weird little hallway previously lit by a bare bulb:

Who Wore Them Best?

My son, or me?

Ode to Timelines

This entry I hope will help first timers like me wrest control of their novels-in-progress.

6 people (angels) agreed to review the first draft of my novel-in-progress. A chunk of the feedback had to do with the marking and passing of time, which was all too often, as I'd written it, a.) not possible b.) not likely or c.) unclear. The marked-up manuscript below illustrates:


My characters were using technology that didn't exist, talking about wars that had been fought 10 years earlier, and aging at different rates than the roman calendar. One reviewer gently suggested I create timelines of my novel on macro and micro levels: even sometimes, depending on the pace of the action, hour by hour. Here is the first one, the timeline of my character's sweet 19 year life. The timeline is six feet long:


She's in school throughout most of the story, so I had to know how old she was in each grade, and had been computing this (inaccurately) in my head. When l I created the timeline, I remembered how old you are in a certain grade depends on what month you are born. Almost always, you are two different ages per grade level. Additionally, because school starts in September, if you are born between September and December, you are older than most of your peers and if you are born June to August, you are younger than most of your peers.

For other time elements to work best, my character needed to be born in the spring, so I made her an Aries because astrologically that sign most suited her temperament. Here is a close-up of the timeline, with her birthday (April 2) and the start of school (September 7) marked for each year, and major events penciled in. Her age is in blue, her grade is in teal and the year is highlighted in yellow. It's not in any way pretty, but it works. The events are penciled because they can still move around:


Life gets pretty busy for my character between 2005 and 2007, so I made a timeline of just those two years:


Just putting in the events in the spring of 2006 makes the timeline smooshy, so I made another timeline of just those months. It's hard to see here, but I have the actual dates and days of the week marked in so no longer will the same action occur on both a Friday AND a Saturday:

There is much more timelining to do, but an unexpected payoff already is the timelines have not only helped organize the action, but the emotional arc of the story as well. For example, I kind of knew a lot happened to my character in a 2-day period; I wrote it that way after all, but when I saw all the events on a timeline, my thought was: this poor kid, she has to be freaking out! Now I have a choice: I can ratchet up her emotional state (also suggested by a reviewer) or parse the events out over a longer time span.

Such is the power of organization.