Life, lately

Last night my brother told me that one of his friends is dead. An overdose. I remember the disbelief, then the warring grief and anger; it's difficult to grieve and to mourn when those are so inextricable from blame. I ache for his family.

Oftentimes at night I hear helicopters hovering, flying low, close by. I used to think that maybe it was police surveillance, or practice, but then one day I was at the nearby hospital and watched as a helicopter came and landed on the roof. Someone was near dying, that meant, or someone had already died and his or her organs were en route to someone else who was dying. I hear those helicopters all the time now, and I imagine it always means the same thing.

I've been doing literature and writing projects with fourth graders in the East Bay. This week, we wrote "I am" poems. (I am Kelly./I dream of [blank]./I pretend that [blank.] Et cetera.) They loved it; I did, too, as much as I complain to everyone who'll listen about how primary education isn't for me. (It isn't. But what's more important than fostering a love for literature at a young age?) Their poems were heartbreaking: "I dream that someday my mom will think I'm special." "I dream that we could have our house again." "I dream of not being an only child." "I dream of my mother and father getting along."

The really sad part is that compared to most kids in the world, these are the lucky ones.

Also, one of the lines was "I believe:". A good seven or eight of them put, "I believe I can fly," and all through the lesson three or four kids were humming the song from Space Jam, which was a surprise--who knew that was one of the movies that would endure? (Although I do remember it being a pretty awesome movie.)

It's been too long since I've published, I think--I have stories kind of just sitting around, lazy. Actually I'm the lazy one, because they definitely need revisions before they're ready to make their rounds and I just haven't done it. It's strange writing a novel and short stories at the same time. J told me there's a term for that in computer programming, when the hard drive has to stop, encode all the information, and set it aside and move onto completely different information. It cuts performance speed in half, proportionately, he said. That makes sense. So that's my excuse. Anyway, though, I'm going to start submitting again. I wish it were an easier process. (Although then I suppose it wouldn't mean as much when you finally got something in.)

There's something in my throat--a lump? An awareness?--that for the past four days has refused to go away. It's hard to swallow and to breathe, and to convince myself nothing's wrong.

Finally.

It's been a terribly long time (nearly two years now) since I've been immersed in writing a novel (and it was the same novel, in 2007), but I think that I can officially say I'm back in it. Driving last night I was thinking about a choice I'd made with two of the characters; last night I stayed up late to write, my husband knocked out next to me, which has always been when I've done my best writing. (Rather inconvenient, that.) As I was falling asleep (too late; it was nearly three in the morning and it felt like college all over again) I was thinking still about an attraction between two of my teenagers, trying with great difficulty to define it. The longer it takes me to write this, the longer it's been since I was seventeen myself.

(I spent a decent amount of time with high schoolers, actually, and in fact I lived with one last year, but they're so entirely not who I was in high school, nor are they, by any stretch, the people I went to high school with. Perhaps it's a race thing; I'm not sure.)

I'm also listening to two songs by The Fray on repeat. It seems appropriately angst-ridden for a story about high school, I think. And I have an enormous capacity to hear the same song over and over and over, especially when I'm writing.

Yesterday I made myself cry watching YouTube videos of election day, and Obama's speech. That made the things I was writing about seem pettier, which is always unfortunate.

Inauguration is so close now.

And all this week they've been relandscaping outside our apartment; it means we're woken up early while they demolish chunks of asphalt; that all the embarrassing piles of junk from our 'backyard' were at one point sitting in a pile in the middle of the courtyard, for all to see and judge; that it's constantly noisy because, no joke, Bobcats and dump trucks literally keep RAMMING INTO THE SIDE OF OUR HOME; that I have allergies from all the dust.

Less than ideal writing conditions. (Plus in our new home I don't even have a desk!) But I'll manage. By June, I intend to begin my agent search.

From '20 lines a day' assignment

At Youth Group you find yourself in a conversation with Ryan, one of your favorite kids, perhaps because he is so needy, so uncertain. He is scrawny, with a large, angular face––something he will grow into, but that for now is too much for him.

He tells you how his life will go. He will get out of his s-hole of a school (he actually says that, s-hole, and you consider him, wonder if he would so censor himself were you not in a church, and realize he would; and for a moment that gives you pause, that utterly un-self-conscious clinging to some sort of innocence) and go to a Christian college, near home so he can still go to his same church, and meet a girl at the beginning of college and get married and have four children, and get a job as a youth pastor. He speaks easily for the first time since you’ve met him: this is something he’s long considered, planned carefully, come to know as truth in his life.

But you know––you know––that he will be wrong, that life will, of course, inevitably tamper with his plans, toy with him, smirking, and send him off on other paths, test and refine him and one day remind him of those plans he made, by then so different than reality that he’ll laugh. Parts (hopefully his faith, the way he doesn’t quite sense himself as he speaks) will hold, but many won’t. But, too, you know this: it will be more than okay, in the end.

He fades out and you’re looking, from a distance, at yourself: jeans a size too big bought before you understood how they stretch, glasses you wore because you’re told they make you look older and each week you’re mistaken for a high schooler, hands that always, even in your wedding photos when the photographer directed them, look awkward and misplaced, betraying your nervousness.

How on earth, you think––how on earth would any wisdom for Ryan be imparted from you?

My adventures as a housewife

Things that I have learned are cheaper and more delicious to make myself than to buy:
-Crackers (today I made rosemary, and basil/black pepper/parmesan)
-Bread
-Pesto
-Sun-dried tomatoes
-Flavored or infused salts
-Mozzarella cheese
-Granola
-Chicken stock
-Tomato sauce
-Jam
-Fresh egg noodles
-Marshmallows
-Ice cream

Things I have stopped buying and always have on hand since now I make them myself, all the while thinking pleasantly how I will stock the jars in my pantry and my freezer, congratulating myself on how talented and wholesome and thrifty yet also, simultaneously, gourmet I am:
-Granola
-Tomato sauce
-Pesto
-Flavored or infused salts
-Sun-dried tomatoes
-Jam

Things I have stopped buying and only have on hand if I make them, which is rarely, because there are always--always--dishes to wash, papers to write or novel chapters to frown over, long and sapping commutes to drive, people to see:
-Crackers
-Bread

Things I make even more rarely because, let's face it, they're a pain in the ass:
-Fresh egg pasta
-Chicken stock
-Ice cream. Please.

Things I will still buy if they look beautiful, if they come in an attractive jar, or if I am in a foreign country or different state:
-Jam
-Flavored or infused salts

Things I will still, occasionally and with something of a feeling of guilt, buy because sometimes the thought of spending one more hour cooking makes me want to never have to children, to burn my aprons and dishtowels, to eschew any role in the home:
-Mozzarella cheese
-Marshmallows

Things I've since realized, after two hours of much work and little reward and an ensuing argument in which my mother won but I refused at the time to admit, are actually better to get storebought:
-Pumpkin puree.

From '20 lines a day' assignment

Your father, who is a worrier, does not understand or wholly trust technology. An accountant, he types his letters on Microsoft Excel, in one giant cell. He is not appalled that John McCain cannot use a computer. During the Y2K scare, he stocked the garage with giant barrels full of water; it seemed wholly reasonable that something as unstable and unknowable as a computer might indeed cause the world to collapse.

He writes short emails in response to your long ones. My trip back was pretty good, you write, Even though my plane was delayed four hours and I got in after all the school shuttles stopped running and I had to pay a ridiculous amount for a taxi. And the flight was really bumpy and turbulent and scary, which was terrible, but you’ll never guess––on my same flight was a girl I went to high school with! And her little sister knows Brett from school! He writes back: Name?

Tonight you have your weekly family softball game/dinner and you’ve volunteered to bake bread. You remember your grandmother has some rosemary plants and you send an email to your mother’s family listserv, asking if anyone knows whether that plant is the edible kind of rosemary or the toxic kind. Ten minutes later, your father, who is at work and generally doesn’t reply to personal emails at the office, who has never once replied to an email thread to your mother’s family (and who you didn’t even think was on that list, in fact), has responded, to the whole family: If you don’t know, I think you need to assume IT IS THE TOXIC KIND. Daddad. And you can very precisely picture his panic, imagine him frantically typing, adding the caps lock for extra emphasis. Six years ago when you told him you wanted a tattoo he presented you with a half-inch stack of printed papers: a list of diseases one can contract through needles.

You know that, later, you and Brett will text it to each other back and forth, something that reminds you of all you find funny about your father, something you’ll repeat when you’re driving together and the conversation lulls, or your father comes up: I think you need to assume IT IS THE TOXIC KIND. A joke that, likely, will outlive your father himself.

On protection

I am working on something at which I've never been particularly skilled: protecting my days. Three days a week belong a little bit to cooking, a little (okay, tiny, if I'm being honest) bit to running, a little bit to reading, but mostly to writing.

It's been so long since I've actually felt like a writer.

But on Monday it was cool enough out that at noon I could dig around in my still-unpacked boxes for some workout gear and set out. I like to run in new neighborhoods, and I like even more when they prove worthy of a good run. This one isn't, so much--there is too much sunshine and no hills and I'm bordered by two of the city's biggest streets; grassy parks turn out to be office complexes and signs promising real parks turn out to offer space no bigger than a track--but the neighborhood is charming, both crafts-style two stories that probably cost more than I can imagine and many, many small duplexes and multi-units shoved onto a single lot. I miss Saratoga, and I miss San Mateo, and even San Diego, too. Still, though, Tuesday that telltale ache crept into my hamstrings and I was glad I'd gone out; today I did, too.

As for the writing, it's becoming, slowly, again a part of my days. The running helps with that, because when I run I find myself narrating every heroic step, and by the time I've gone home and showered and cooled off it's as though I've already started a draft. (But then, where it's difficult is that there are a million things that help with writing: it helps if my home is clean and the dirty dishes aren't gossiping downstairs; it helps if I've answered all my emails; it helps if I read trashy celebrity blogs and get my imagination running, etc etc etc. The point of protection is that, really, only my health and my writing matter, and I need to attend to them.)

I want to have finished my novel by March. That's six months; it should be doable.

But then I keep reading these brilliant, brilliant authors, lately Curtis Sittenfeld (who knew), Christopher Isherwood and Grace Paley (oh God, Grace Paley, whose lines have been haunting me for days now) and then I see so, so many ways in my writing in which I'm not them. And then I want to start over and throw everything away and hope that everyone's forgotten every sentence they've ever written so I can appropriate all their words and try to pass them off as mine.

Waiting, a different kind

I dream now in shades of celadon and yellow; I see armies of tissue-paper cherry blossoms marching onto branches I've collected. I am on Google Images all the time. To my normal collections of nightmares--the teeth falling out, the inability to run--I have added: food poisoning the night before.

Tonight when I walked into the kitchen, my aunt and mother turned to me and said, "Guess what you'll be doing three months from now?"

And sometimes, like right now, the planning and the checklist and my 200-row Excel spreadsheet fade away and I'm suffused with a glow of anticipation, with an excited feeling and if I could just get through the next few months. And I know good things are ahead.