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Smupdate

I am so very much in love with my writing class that I may want to make out with each person in there, even the Chatty McCathy and the Know It All. I had a glory moment this week when I interpreted a detail in a story that no one else had seen and when I commented on it, everyone including the professor went ‘ooooOOOOOOHHHHH!’ as fifteen little light bulbs went off over their heads and the author broke workshop rules of writer silence and shouted ‘THANK YOU! Very much!’ And then everyone laughed because suddenly the entire meaning of the story changed. That was a lovely moment.

Co Irkers

The woman who lives on the other side of my cubicle has verbal diarrhea. She also feels the need to narrate her entire day to no one in particular. She will also just stand up and lob non-sequiturs over our cursed three-quarter wall and because I am facing my computer to do a quaint little thing I like to call ‘work’, I cannot escape. She will keep talking at me while I work. My mama taught me to be a painfully polite person in most situations, so I feel compelled to distractedly say ‘Mmmhmm’ and grunt attentively when she pauses, but most of the time, I just want her to shut the hell up. Just work in silence. Please. Please. For the love of God please.

The worst is when she’s trapped someone else and starts babbling at them and then they make an excuse to walk away while she’s in the middle of her story. She’ll just turn and finish telling the story to me. The story I wasn’t even listening to in the first place. Perhaps she assumes that conversations involve everyone in earshot because when someone stops by my desk to talk to me, she’ll jump up and insert herself into the conversation or just blatantly change the subject all together about some insipid and inconsequential aspect about her own life.

I have taken to transcribing her inanity to make a type of prose poetry, blatantly typing it out while she is obliviously orating. What follows is an example:

My coworker would like you to know that
she’s sorry that she took so long
but she went to the bathroom
and she went to the stall down by the end
And the toilet wasn’t flushed
and so she flushed it
and then the water rose
all the way up to the top
but it didn’t go over
no it didn’t
and so she had to go tell someone
and that is why she took so long
and but luckily it didn’t overflow
because that would have taken even longer
and oh she forgot to go potty
and she’ll be right back
and isn’t that funny to go through
all of that and not
go potty?

And another, this a direct dictation, apropos of nothing:

When I make noodles
I just put butter on ’em
a little cheese…
butter and salt, ya
and salsa?

You should try it with salsa

And a little… ah, awesome
as a side dish

my salsa had zucchini
a bunch of peppers
brown sugar
and ah
just a really different tasting salsa
but so good

I remember
the second time I made it
I was cutting up the peppers?
ya, the peppers and…
and didn’t put no gloves on
ah
oh my hands?
were burnt up to here
I had to sleep with ice packs
oh
of course you don’t
feel it while you’re doing it

It’s like working next to Rainman, only not as interesting. Feel my pain. Seriously.

I’m going to hell for posting this.

Goodbye Canicule

It’s fall. It’s definitely fall. I don’t care that we’ve had the first warm stretch since 2003 and I don’t care that I had a blissful prolonged float in the pool today, it is definitely fall.

There’s something different at play here, something about how the angle of the light is softer, more diffused, creating shadows where before there were none, making stars out of objects that had been backstage all season. And there is almost always a thick slick of dew on my car in the morning, not to mention these weird long albino mosquito things hanging out on the sunroof, gossiping and having tea parties between the droplets. And there were bees at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, which means that fall is definitely here. The bees usually show up in late September, driven crazy by fermented fallen apples andare so incensed by NBC’s new Thursday lineup that they’re ready to sting at the slightest provocation.

On Thursday, when I drove down to Milwaukee to attend my first class of the semester, there was this lovely fog rolling in off Lake Michigan, as though the breath of the Lake itself were yawning up onto the shore. The sky was an unusually deep periwinkle and the landscape was a study in frosted greys and muted stained glass, and yet the sun was coming off the clouds, shooting rays over the tops in that stereotypical Hallmark card way that usually screams for a bible verse to be printed in italics just below and to the left, ’cause look at all the God going on there, man. Just gobs of God no matter where you look.

I feel like writing something (and by ‘something’ I mean something fictional or serious or, rather, not serious (in an experiment spurred by a discussion with one Ms. Finger) instead of updating my silly little web journal. Truthfully, I have no excuse not to, other than the fact that my head is filled with pink attic insulation and my eyelids are heavy and there is a pain in between my shoulders from laying on two coats of primer and then seven applications of Ralph Lauren Hunting Coat Red (yeah, seven, mutha fucka Ralph Lauren). I even have a song that is feeding my imagination (which seems to be the trend when I get in a writing groove. When I finished the Car Salesman story, it was ‘The Air That I Breathe’ by the Hollies, repeated about 54 times. With the Baby Story, it was a duet of the Etoys song and The Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’) except I have nothing in my head to take advantage of this song, but for a few tendrils of stories and an urge to smack Sofia Coppola for making fabulous films that leave me breathless while also being such a pratt.

This morning, it is raining for the first time in what seems like months and the giant house spider that lives in my hibiscus topiary outside is dancing around raindrops like a Las Vegas showgirl. And soon, she’ll wrestle with a misguided fly and if we’re lucky, Esteban and I will be sitting in the garage, drinking iced tea and we’ll get to watch her drag it up into the eaves, like some crazy Cirque du Soleil act, and then we’ll go to Starbucks and then Home Depot (for the eighth time this weekend) and then steady ourselves to spend Labor Day tackling the damned Rose Bush.

We’re speeding toward the equinox and all you can do is strap yourself in and get ready for impact.

Descant

It is August 1996.

I am involved in a summer independent poetry workshop along with two classmates who are also beginning their senior year in the English major, Nate and Larry. It will give us three credits for summer and also give us fodder for the Distinction in the Major honor.

Nate, with his tribal thicket of black hair looks as though he has just stepped whole off the third spot on the evolutionary charts, is a Faculty Kid who has made an art of taking the path of least resistance. He looks like a hirsute Gilbert Gottfried and, as you might imagine, has not made much impact with the ladies. Larry, with his dirty blonde crewcut and crooked teeth, seems like an anachronism, maybe dispatched from Walton Mountain to show Gen X how to be strong and not so concerned with material things. His disposition is more that of an 80-year-old shaman rather than a twenty-something college kid. He lives in the attic of a house on the Bay and drives a car with holes in the floor, or, as he described it, ‘Like a sunroof, only for your feet.’ To this day, Larry remains one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met.

Sometimes we can coax some of our fellow students who stayed in town over the summer to join us. Bob is the elder of the group–a sage 30-year-old who has made an art of living up to the Gen X principle of underachievement. He has a bachelor’s in Theatre and a Master’s in English, but he kept the easy hours of a delivery person for Pizza Hut so that he could act in community theatre and audit undergrad writing programs. He reminds me of John Corbett’s character Chris-In-The-Morning on ‘Northern Exposure’. His hair is a work in progress and throughout the summer he has shown up with a long brown shag, a badly peroxided strawberry-blonde hack job and most recently, a black crew cut. I never see him clean-shaven, but he must be shaving because he always had stubble. His facial hair, much like Bob himself, is a mystery.

laurie is the only girl in the program whom I like, and also the only girl in the program who seems to like me. I don’t know why this is, but her matter-of-fact explanation is that the rest are posers just passing time until they get pregnant or become secretaries. I’ve written about her before. The girl Steven always called ‘the chick with the shit in her face’ (and which Nate said was a perfect description because she did, indeed, have shit in her face). Every poem laurie has ever written only uses lower case, including her signature and I have come to think of her this way, not as Laurie, but rather as laurie. Beat grrl extraordinaire.

On this night, we are meeting at Nate’s. The previous week, our poetry guru (and my undergrad adviser) read a poem that mentioned humus, the dark rich soil and moss, except that she had written ‘hummus’. We then had a big discussion about how much more fun it would be to lay down in hummus and smell the chick peas and garlic. And then we all declared that we could really go for some hummus and laurie, being the resident vegan, declared that she would make some at our next meeting. However, cooking and laurie only were very distant acquaintances, but she felt up to the challenge, since hummus just involved blending (‘Vigorous blending!’ Nate had added. He works at the Hippy Mafia Deli, so he was well-versed in such things.) However, we all somehow knew to bring other food as a backup. I brought a tabouli salad and a cucumber/tomato/basil concoction. Larry brought peanut butter, homemade jelly from plums he procured off the tree in his landlord’s yard, and a giant boule of French bread (‘It was the only vegan bread they had!’) Bob brought three mistake pizzas from work. The mistake was that they had meat on them. laurie, however, is classy and doesn’t say anything, as I knew that she wouldn’t. Especially since I had eaten cheese sandwiches (which was the cheapest thing on the sandwich bar but could be bulked up with a bunch of free lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts and spinach) for lunch with her for three semesters and counting. Our poetry mentor, Denise Sweet, has yet to arrive.

Nate is inside his two room apartment with the big bright kitchen and lovely floor to ceiling bowed window which dwarfs the closet-like living room slash bedroom that has only one window three inches from a garage and has been covered ceiling to floor in dark cheap 70’s paneling so that it feels like a cave. The temperature inside his apartment is roughly 96 degrees. Larry has been enlisted to scrub and then chop raw potatoes which will be tossed in olive oil and rosemary needles and then roasted, undoubtedly heating the apartment to a nice round 100, while Nate is attempting to whisk together a vegan ceasar salad dressing (which will become the Best Ceasar I’ve Ever Had In My Life) from a recipe out of Vegetarian Times. Nate has endeavored to become Boyfriend Material, which, in his opinion, involves making girls laugh, cooking for them, and after a long discussion with me about what I found attractive in men, wearing argyle socks and smelling good. We were to be the focus group for Project Mate Nate.

Bob and I have moved out to sit on the stoop of Nate’s giant Victorian-turned-Tenement. Eventually, the bugs will drive us back inside, but for now, it is a welcome respite. Also, we’re worried that Denise isn’t sure exactly where Nate’s apartment is, so we hope that she will see us, sitting there in the shadow of a hundred-year-old maple.

I pick up my notebook and scribble a phrase into it, but I can’t read what I’ve written and will have to wait until I go back inside to see if it is legible.

Two girls wearing just swimming suits and their brown tanned skin, more tanned than anything but also covered in a sheen of washed on dirt, scurry across and into and out of and across the road. These might be feral children. It seems possible, probable even. Their giggles are thick with purple Slush Puppies and they whisper to each other in a language indigenous to this particular six feet of grass between the sidewalk and the curb of Webster Street. Their hair is thick and tangled as a raspberry bramble, their eyes bright as berries.

‘Do you even think she’s coming?’ I ask, certain that she has flaked.

‘Don’t know. Does it matter?’ Bob replied.

‘Well, I’d like an A for this. If I get anything less than an A, my GPA will go’.’ I made the noise of the Coyote trying to drop an anvil on the Road Runner.

‘Ah.’ Bob breathes.

This was the wrong answer. I am so not cool that I make a pledge to myself to not say anything else for five minutes.

‘You know…it’s weird.’ Bob trails off. I wait for a few beats for him to continue, but he doesn’t, so I am forced to break my pledge.

‘What’s weird?’

‘College. You and I are the non-traditionals of the group, you know?’

‘Yeah.’ I was twenty-six. Almost everyone else in the English program was a standard twenty or twenty-one.

‘And sometimes, when we’re workshopping stuff, and I check out your reactions and I can tell that you and I are like the only ones in the room who get each other’s stuff.’

‘You think?’ I ask, puzzled, because sometimes Bob’s poetry is so out there and brilliant that I can only get a sense of the undertones, while all of my stuff seems insipid and completely apparent.

‘Yeah.’ He turns his head and looks right at me, but his eyes are in shadow and I can’t tell what exactly is being said.

‘Huh.’ I say, because I know that I have to say something, but haven’t any idea what it should be. I am cursing myself for breaking the pledge.

Across the gloaming, as streetlights flicker and buzz, about to fire, there are other people on porches, sitting in their own version of stasis. Bob and I watch as the red cherries of their cigarettes glow bright and then dim, followed by slivers of conversation that thread between the passing cars over to our own porch stoop.

‘Follow the bouncing ball,’ Bob says, apropos of nothing, but his voice is soft and intimate, as though he were whispering this to me in bed. I don’t know what it is about his voice. It’s a great voice and I want to believe anything it says. He’s an actor and knows how to use it well, I guess. It makes him seem strong and competent and if I did not know the details that belied that, I could believe this facade. However, I know that just the week before, he broke up with his girlfriend because she kept talking him while he was watching television, a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation he had seen several times already. He realized that he wanted to watch the rerun more than he wanted to talk to his girlfriend and ended it right then. This is how Bob makes decisions. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Star Trek reruns. ‘So you broke up with her? Just like that?’ I had asked, incredulous. Bob had an awestruck look on his face, as though he had been transfixed by his own logical process. ‘Yeah’ well, I waited until the commercial.’ He had perked his eyebrows and cocked his head, as though to say ‘Imagine that.’

‘I don’t really think my poetry is about anything, actually. I mean, anything more than what it is about, you know?’

In the dark, I think I hear his eyebrow rise. ‘Does it have to be?’

His battered Converse shoe sneaks out and kicks at a weed creeping up between the cracks of the sidewalk.

‘No.’ I slap a mosquito on my arm.

‘Exactly. See? Exactly.’ He pulls his foot back up onto the step.

A slender figure steps into the puddle of streetlight. It is our adviser. She is carrying several folders. I recognize that they are our manuscripts, a summer’s worth of poetry. As she steps off the curb and makes a run to beat a speeding El Camino, she drops my pink folder. The papers slip out from between the manila and flutter in the hot wind from the traffic like moths in the streetlight .

From the darkness of a neighboring stoop, applause.

Let it be resolved

I will write at least fourteen books which will have spectacular author photos on the back covers, at least one of which will be me, in which I will be laughing while looking downward, as though to say ‘Oh goodness, that is very droll.’

I will not pout for three holes when my favorite pink ball Pinky Lee goes ploonk into a water hazard.

I will no longer name my golf balls.

I will not tell my friends about the dream I had where I was a contestant on Survivor and it came down to me and a guy and instead of having the losers vote on which of us should win the million dollars, they had us do a final challenge, which was to “artfully eat these Popsicles” and when I steamed up my Popsicle so much that it broke into pieces and I asked for a fresh Popsicle, the judges unanimously awarded me a million dollar check and also a Jeep Cherokee, and then I won’t look at my friends and say “Do you think that symbolizes anything?”

When I pick up a book like Mystic River and find that I hate the writing style and it is annoying the shit out of me and I already can hear the swelling orchestra of impending lifelong sorrow warming up in the background and then put it down and let it sit on my nightstand for two years until the pages start to swell from the time I left the window open and some rain came in, I will not waste two (hundred) hours of my life watching a movie adaptation of said book like Mystic River because when the bad part comes (and I’ll know that it’s going to come because somewhere in the tenets of nature itself lies the rule ‘Tim Robbins is never evil’ and to go against that rule would cause complete and utter world annihilation, except when Nick Hornby is involved which makes irrelevant said rule because Nick Hornby is the devil) I will not be able to rely upon making my eyes go blurry or looking at the wall opposite the television screen or even just hitting the first button for forward. No. I will have to hit the button for forward like fourteen times or something and then when I start to play at normal speed again, I will just wonder why, why, why god why and also hate Clint Eastwood a little bit.

I will simply admit that I am powerless to keep the “Schoolhouse Rock” songs from getting stuck in my head.

I will figure out which is right, leaving the punctuation in front of or behind the quotation marks. I think it’s right to keep them inside the quotes, but it looks totally stupid that way.

Instead of looking at the Kate Spade purse longingly over the internet and hoping that it sends me a note saying \”Do you like me? Check box [ ] YES [ ] NO\”, I’m just going to break down and buy the damn thing.

When I have a perfectly wonderful Boca fake chicken patty sitting in the freezer at work and a lovely wheat bun ready at the hand, I will not opt for what is behind Door #3 in the vending machine because the only thing that seems even remotely edible (‘Chuckwagon Sandwich’ is just vending people code for ‘whatever weird lunch meat we had lying around that didn’t smell too disgusting’ right?) will be a bacon cheeseburger, which would never even be in contention on a normal day. And at this point, I will remember that I do in fact have a choice and not put my $1.50 into the machine like some mindless drone because what I will end up with is a disturbingly grease-sodden gristle puck that still tastes of industrial grade limp bacon even after I peel it off. Because I am not stupid, contrary to my behavior this afternoon.

Likewise, I will never again make anything out of a box which is labeled anything Helper. Believe me, it doesn’t help. If anything, it beats your food up and takes its wallet. People who eat Anything Helper should look for help elsewhere.

I will read more classics this summer, including at least one Austen and one Vonnegut.

I will not lose my new journal, as it has been five months and I don’t think I’ve stopped grieving for my last one.

Making hard decisions about graduate school

So graduate school.

As I briefly mentioned in a previous entry, I have been accepted to a graduate program. This was both a blessing and a curse. There were several logistical nightmares surrounding the plan (no fellowship, private school with very expensive tuition, no financial aid, no security deposit or first and last months rent, no income, etc). I told only four people. I had a hard time even being excited about it. My mind was scrambling in a dozen different directions I decided that the best of my choices were either to quit my job and move to San Francisco, leaving Esteban and Tilly for two and a half years, or keep my job, stay here, and take more classes as a part time graduate student at Milwaukee (which had actually said ‘No Thank You’ to my application, but by virtue of paying taxes in the State of Wisconsin, I have the right to take up to 12 credits as a special student anyway) with the hopes that I would get accepted at some point in the future.

Esteban, who by all rights should have been against this from the very start, has been telling me that it is ok, just go, get it done, do it, do it now. When I looked down, it was my own feet dragging in the sand. I was the one with the messed up stomach and the pains where my sample-size pre-ulcer likes to live. It was me. I was standing at the cross-roads and to one direction was most assuredly the biggest mistake I’ll ever make in my life, but which one, right or left, right or left? I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which one it was.

Right?

Left? Right?

Thus, I decided to do the Milwaukee thing. It seemed as though the only way to have everything I wanted. I sent off an email to the chair of the writing program at Milwaukee, explaining that I am a former student in the creative writing program (I was admitted and attended six years ago) and took an 800 level writing class under the former chair and had received an A, and asking if it would be possible for me to take a class (or three) and get admitted into the program and if necessary I could provide more letters of recommendation or more writing samples.

Then, with heavy heart, I sent off my decline to the school in San Francisco, also with the pathetic throw away line ‘Is there anyway that I could defer my admission for a year?’ because honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that accepting admission to this program would mean that I literally would have to pick up my life and move half of it to California in seven weeks, just forty-nine days and change, I would probably have no problem with it. I would probably dive in, head first, and whine about having very little money and a desolate and random sex life until 2006. Here’s the hard truth about being a grown up: sometimes it’s not about being the architect of your life. Sometimes it just comes down to numbers and reality. Apparently, if I wanted to make this happen, I really should have planned to have about $20K lying around for security deposits and plane fares and summer tuition and furniture and whatnot until I found a job or some way to defer tuition.

Right? Was it right? Or left?

I received a reply from the chair at Milwaukee. In total, it said ‘There was a strong sense that your creative work was not a good match at all with our program. I’m sorry I don’t have the resources to give detailed feedback on particular mss. Since you have failed to convince current fiction faculty here for two years in a row, my recommendation is that you seriously consider applying and studying elsewhere. Of course, we are sorry to disappoint you, but I think it’s important that I be frank.

Which was pretty much the most traumatic thing I’ve seen throughout this languorous road to get my MFA.

Left. Obviously. It was left.

I was totally confused. I mean, I have gotten into the program once before. I got an A in a PhD level workshop. One would think that this time, I had a much stronger writing submission. Then I got mad. I find it hard to believe that he had looked up anything or talked to anyone in the admissions group, because I had sent the e-mail in the evening and he responded at 9:30 am the next day (incidentally, I believe his office hours begin at 9:30).

Then (and THEN!) I got a response back from the San Francisco school. They were happily willing to defer my admission until 2005.

What is right and what is left.
Thus, the new plan: This fall, I’m attending Milwaukee as a special student anyway and am going to specifically take mister I-Think-It’s-Important-To-Be-Frank’s writing workshop. And then rock his damned literary ass off.

Either that or bite him until he cries. I haven’t yet decided.

The importance of punk hair for writers

I am much less stressed now than I was last week. This is partially due to the fact that I took off Friday and have tomorrow off as well. The stress reduction I’m sure is also due in no small part that on Friday morning, I took five of my ten grad school applications to the post office. I still haven’t heard from my adviser and tomorrow will leave another frantic message with her office, but I have decided that it is all out of my hands. I have done the best that I can and if one missing letter of recommendation is going to keep me out of a program, then really, I must not have been that strong of a candidate in the first place. Also, my class is done so I must just wait for my grade to appear on the school’s electronic system.

I suspect that my professor had a crush on me by the end (but then, who doesn’t?), which is fine because there is just something about brilliant artistic men that always makes me tingle, absolutely tingle. Especially when they write words like “dazzling” on my work. He walked into class last week, which was already mostly full of students, singled me out and said ‘Well, hello!’ and then said ‘You changed your hair.’ I nodded and said rather matter-of-factly ‘Yes, every two months I get sick of it and change it. It’s not hair, it’s performance art.’ Which made him laugh and laugh, except that I wasn’t kidding.

In case you’re curious, the old hair was a rich brown with toffee and firecracker red streaks. The new hair is a deep espresso with deep reddish burgundy and champagne (read: bleached) streaks. It’s much more out there than the last one, sort of like a goth in the process of molting but it has the added bonus of being darker than my eyebrows, making my already pale winter skin seem absolutely alabaster. I usually go pretty Republican during the Christmas months, since we see so many older relatives. It’s the good little girl side of me that prevents me from piercing my nose or eyebrow.

The other one

I’m so very tired. I’ve been seriously screwed in the sleep department for the last two weeks. I actually slept until noon on Sunday, until Esteban woke me up. I rarely sleep past 8 on weekends. He was starting to think something was wrong with me. But I’ve been staying up late, revising my manuscript for grad school applications. I still haven’t heard back from my undergrad advisor about writing recommendations and most of the applications are due on Monday. I’m just going to have to send them in and hope that she’ll get them done and faxed this weekend. I can’t think of anything else to do. But hopefully by this weekend, I’ll be able to get some sleep. And sleep. And sleep. And put up the Christmas tree and lights and write cards and wrap presents and drink Tom & Jerry’s until I start doing my Marilyn Monroe impression for Esteban. Something about hot brandy nog drinks always make me want to live in the 50’s and wear red lipstick and bullet bras and shag with wild Cold War abandon. But maybe that’s just me.

The Artistes much suffering domestic partner

I’ve just spent five minutes yelling at my husband.

It didn’t really start out that way. Of course, it never is supposed to end up that way. On my drive home from school, through rain that is supposed to turn into sleet which will then turn into forty two inches of snow, I thought about how I’m struggling with this life concept of being a writer and how some close friends have mentioned that I might be afraid of success (or whatever fruity new age psychobabble is on Dr. Phil this week) or how I think I just might be lazy. And I came up with a plan which involved getting Computer Room #2 finished, complete with a floor, and then setting up a desk, and demanding that Esteban either fix my printer or I will just buy myself a new one. And then I will go to the warehouse store and buy five hundred manila envelopes (preferably self-stick because I loathe licking envelope glue ever since I found out that it wasn’t vegan. Not that I’m vegan or even vegetarian, for that matter, but for some reason, knowing that the envelope stickum is, you know, meaty really bothers me.) and then print out a million labels containing my address and the address of no fewer than fifty carefully researched short story markets. And then I’d start sending out submissions, like a mail order business. And I’d have a bunch of postage all there and waiting. And maybe I’d get a postage scale. Yeah! I’d get a postage scale and presumably also learn how to use said postage scale. And it would be a lovely office and then there would be nothing stopping me from being the next Douglas Coupland or Jincy Willett or WHOMEVER.

But then, I decided that the real problem is that sometimes I just don’t have time to write. And when I do have time to write, I’m having guilt or distracted because there are other things I should be doing instead. The real problem is that I’m the wife. I’m the wife. That means that I have to remember which prescriptions need to be filled and I have to know which bills have been paid and which bills need to be paid and I have to call the lawn service to make sure that they aerate the lawn and I have to decide who is getting what for Christmas and send back the RSVPs for wedding invitations and keep the Netflix queue up to date and pick up the dry cleaning and bring in more dry cleaning and take the cat to the groomer (note to self: make appointment with groomer for the cat) and carry around a grocery store savings card and send in the renewal for our auto registrations so that we don’t get pulled by the police and then arrested and have to go to prison.

Because that would be my luck, as I am apparently catnip to lesbians but also stinkweed for cops.

So I decided that all of this mental baggage was bogging down my creativity. And isn’t it the way in every artistic relationship in the history of EVER that there is always the Artiste and The Other One? And the Other One pays the cable bill and makes sure that there is clean underwear and that the children don’t run off to become Cirque de Soleil acrobats so that the Artiste can go and do whatever it is that they do? And maybe that’s my problem. I’m the Artiste and also the grease that keeps both my and Esteban’s lives rolling along smoothly. No wonder I do not have a Pulitzer by now! I was too busy fishing one of Esteban’s discarded seltzer bottles from beneath the couch.

Excuse me for a second while I finish climbing up on this cross. Could you hand me that railroad spike and hammer? Thanks.

So I walked into the house, my brain busy with a million and twelve stories and novels that I could write if I didn’t have to be the perfect everything on top of being a writer. And then Esteban, bright and smiley and very supportive, greeted me with a huge smile and questions about how my day went. Then, sensing trouble in my furrowed brow, he asked me what was the matter. And then I said some words. They weren’t supposed to be bad words, but in essence, there was something about passports and how many rolls of toilet paper we had (‘But why would I care how many rolls of toilet paper we have? I’m not the one who uses it all the time.’ ‘That’s my point! I don’t wear your underwear’ ‘I should hope not!’ ‘Arrrgh!‘) and there was pointing out the window at the garbage sitting neatly at the curb (courtesy of moi, as Esteban is blissfully unaware of the circle of garbage, much like the circle of life, only without being an annoying Elton John song).

And while I wasn’t specifically trying to be an offensive tool, I now realize that in essence I said, ‘I need you to stop sucking, ok?’

Understandably, things escalated. Esteban took offense, I took further offense. Offense was passed back and forth like a hacky sack at a Phish concert. The more I tried to explain my points, the worse it got. At one point, I was actually bent over at the waist as though trying to blow my side of the argument through a large Alpine horn (Ricola!).

And honestly, I just want to stop being the only one who cares if we’re going to have a hotel room when we go to England or not. I want to stop being the planner. I want to be the person who just shows up. Then there was an aria of Doest Thou Not Know For What The Need Of Clean Laundry, followed by Esteban’s accusation that the Wendy Method of House Cleaning does not work (the method being that I do not enjoy spending an entire Saturday cleaning the house for ten hours straight and would rather clean in several shorter spurts throughout the week) and wanted to go back to having the ten hour PineSol Death March each and every weekend. To which we then culminated with a rousing chorus of ‘Fine.’ ‘Fine!’ ‘FINE!’ (which is really the best way to end any argument ever. I like the ying and yang. Is it a passive aggressive acquiescence? Is it the Italian word for ‘finished’? It’s two, two, two dysfunctions in one. Very succinct. I highly recommend it). Then I stomped into the computer room to work on my manuscript and he stomped off into the bedroom to go to bed.

Five minutes later, he wandered into the computer room, wearing only his boxer shorts, and said ‘Make a list of what you don’t want to do anymore and I’ll do it.’

Rule Number One for The Other One: Expect the Artiste to be an unmitigated asshole.

Later, I got over myself and decided to go to bed and apologize for being an ass. I wandered into the bedroom, expecting him to be either asleep or watching CSI on the Tivo, and when I got in there, the television was indeed on.

Martha Stewart was showing Esteban how to make holly leaves and berries out of felt.

I took one look and started laughing.

‘What?’ He said defensively.

‘Martha STEWART? You’re watching Martha STEWART?’ I said through hiccups of laughter.

‘Well’ if I’m going to be all artist-supporting, I’ve got to learn this stuff, right?’

That’s why Esteban’s got his own fan club. Right there.

The one before my head explodes

I, in case you cannot tell from the above sentence, am cranky. Crabby McGrouchypants, that’s me. It, of course, doesn’t help that I am all female and yucky feeling and losing what is arguably the very fluid of life at a rate that might just be, oh, forty gallons a minute. Last night, I felt like I needed to eat an entire cow. I went to the organic butcher at lunch today and bought $40 of beef. Including a roast. Except I wouldn’t want to actually make a roast because I certainly can’t eat a whole roast myself and I wouldn’t want to share it with anyone because everyone in the world sucks.

Oh, not you, of course. Never you.

I’m struggling right now through a ton of graduate school stuff. Right after I wrote this entry, I tried to order official copies of my GRE scores.

GRE only saves scores for five years. I took the test in January of 1998.

Insert frantic appeal to the heavens here.

First of all, the GRE system is complete and utter crap. CRAP I say. It’s a $115 test, and if you take it on computer and get one of your first questions wrong, the next questions will be easier and not worth as many points and you’re just outright screwed. And while you’re taking it, you can see the questions get easier so you KNOW that you just fucked something up and are watching your ability to get into graduate school flutter away with each mouse click. So, right there, that sucks. This is not to say that I did poorly. I did better than I thought I did, but certainly didn’t get the 800s I was going for.

But after all of that, you’d think they would keep the scores for longer than five years. I mean’ five years? I pay $115 to take a test and you’re only going to keep the scores for five years? And it’s not like my test scores went inactive, since I had just ordered official copies in November of last year and they apparently purged my scores two months later. It’s craptastic. That is all. More autocratic bullshit in higher education.

Have I mentioned the thing about people sucking? This includes the ass lords in the collegiate system.

And let me just say this right now. If you are in college and even considering going to graduate school at some time in the future, do NOT transfer to another college before you graduate. Or go to, say, three different schools as an undergrad and then take classes at two OTHER schools as a graduate student. Because you are screwing yourself with the transcripts, my friend. I am applying to six new schools. Each of these schools requires two official copies of my transcripts. I took one three-credit graduate writing workshop at UW- Milwaukee, but I got an A, so I’d like them to include it in my applications. Each official transcript costs $7. Thus, it will cost me $84 to get that just that one grade out to those schools. And then multiply that by four other schools I’ve attended (whose official transcript fees vary between $4-6 a copy).

So trust me. The application fees (which range between $45-$90) are bad enough. Save yourself the trouble and stick with one school.

Anyway, NYU and Mizzou require GRE scores, but I convinced the people at Mizzou to allow for a certified copy from one of the schools that do have official copies of my scores. I’m not even running this by NYU, figuring that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. And then I had to track down a school that would send my scores out to a competing school, which, as it turns out, was UW- Milwaukee, so now I don’t feel as bad about taking it up the ass for copies of my transcripts. They saved me the $50 that GRE would have cost me, had they bothered to save any record of my mediocre test-taking ability.

Then I went over my applications on Sunday. I had thought I was being proactive in getting this stuff done, but last time, most of my deadlines were in January. This time, it seems, almost all of the schools have a deadline of December 15th. Thus, a panicked email to one of my undergraduate mentors, who is now in Arkansas, and then I had to overnight him a package containing all of the cover sheets for the various programs. Then I called my former adviser, figuring that since she still works for the University of Wisconsin, she would be the easiest to contact. But no. No. The Universe wants me to bleed for graduate school. The Universe wants me to be humbled and crying before it allows me even a tiny morsel of hope. My adviser is on medical leave for the entire semester. And her voice mail recording obliterates her cell phone number. But that I will think about tomorrow. Because right now, I’m still recovering from the great GRE debacle.

GAH!

And then! I spent the evening trying to refine my manuscript. And I am deciding to include the Baby Story. But first, I spent hours rewriting it, manipulating the phrasing, toying with the word order, adding paragraphs here and there. Then later, couldn’t find it. The version I made does not exist on my computer. Apparently, I never hit save.

The Universe. I swear. If my drunken mama hadn’t raised me better, I’d totally pop a cap in its ass.